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Being a French Journalist Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry

[Weekly Standard ] Anne-Elisabeth Moutet - It was not really to be expected that Charles Enderlin, the France 2 TV journalist who released the one-minute news report on Muhammad al-Dura, would immediately admit having hastily slapped together sensational footage supplied by the channel's regular Palestinian stringer, and not checked whose bullets had, in fact, killed, or perhaps even not killed, the boy. In the ensuing eight years, al-Dura, the "child martyr" cowering beside his father, became the defining image of the second Intifada. After former Le Monde journalist Luc Rosenzweig viewed the entire 27 minutes of the original film, he described the tape's scenes of staging just before the fatal shooting. You could see Palestinians being carried on stretchers into ambulances, then coming out again unharmed, all in a kind of carnival atmosphere, with kids throwing stones and making faces at the camera, despite what was supposed to be a tense situation. The tape showed occasional gunshots, not continuous firing. From the general horsing around captured on film, it appeared that the whole scene must have been staged.
2008-07-01 01:00:00
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