Double Standards

German public broadcasting's coverage of the Hariri assassination and the related UN commission of inquiry report is simply outrageous. In yesterday's heute journal (watch it here), one of the main news broadcasts, once again the topic was buried somewhere in the middle of the show. If the investigation would have found the Mossad and family members of Ariel Sharon to be involved in the murder, the story would undoubtedly have been front-page news for weeks on end. And I bet the German prosecutor, Detlev Mehlis, would have been a pop star by now, being passed on from talk show to talk show.

I keep on trying to hope that this kind of botched reporting is "just" a result of journalists' skewed evaluation which was once explained by an Editor-in-Chief of "The Times": "When we write about Israel, we automatically presume an identity of our standards and their standards and judge the Israelis along the same criteria we use to measure ourselves. We do not do that in the case of the enemies of Israel." (quoted in my book) But I more and more fear that there is much, much more to it.