Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Zionist accuses Huffington Post, Salon, Daily Kos of anti-Semitism; lobbies for "monitoring" (censorship) practiced by traditional media gatekeepers

From:
Anti-Israelism and Anti-Semitism in Progressive U.S. Blogs/News Websites:
Influential and Poorly Monitored


(Institute For Global Jewish Affairs) -- by Adam Levick* --

•Sixty-seven percent of the worldwide internet population visit social networking sites and blogs (web 2.0). These are now outpacing email in popularity. According to Nielsen Online they have become the fourth most popular online category. The popularity of political blogs is increasing as traditional media struggle to stay afloat.
•The three most popular progressive political blogs in the United States are Huffington Post, Salon, and Daily Kos. These three together have over thirteen million unique visitors per month.
•Within these three blogs a number of historical anti-Semitic staples appear frequently: excessive Jewish power and control over society/government; Jewish citizens are more loyal to Israel than to their own country; Israel resembles Nazi Germany; Israel is demonized.
•In part because of the huge size of the blogosphere - there are thousands of bloggers at Daily Kos alone - such hateful commentary often escapes the kind of scrutiny that the traditional media faces. A major challenge is that anonymity provides bloggers with moral impunity.

Progressive Political Blogs, Jews, and Israel
Progressive blogs and news sites in the United States are a new field where Jew-hatred, in both its classic and anti-Israeli forms, manifests itself. This incitement is hardly monitored, as many of the most popular blogs are only a few years old and it seems counterintuitive that such anti-Semitic expressions would be found in this political milieu. Monitoring the media for anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli bigotry has so far almost exclusively consisted of reading the major American newspapers, magazines, and journals and attending to the three major news networks, as well as radio broadcasts. However, the huge amount of content in the political blogosphere makes such monitoring - which is increasingly necessary - much more difficult to achieve with any degree of thoroughness.

The phenomenon of proliferating anti-Semitism in blogs should be seen in a much broader framework. Sixty-seven percent of the worldwide internet population visit social networking sites and blogs (web 2.0), and these are now outpacing email in popularity. According to Nielsen Online[1] they have become the fourth most popular online category. They trail only web searches, general interest portals and communities, and manufacturers.

The political blogosphere encompasses a number of important sites both on the conservative and progressive side. As ranked by a combination of Inbound Links, Alexa Rank, and U.S. traffic data from Compete and Quantcast, the most popular progressive political news sites in the United States are Huffington Post, Salon, and Daily Kos.

These three together have roughly thirteen million unique visitors per month. Huffington Post, launched in 2005, has about ten million; Salon, launched in 1995, over two million; and Daily Kos, launched in 2002, about a million.[2] For comparison, Nytimes.com has over seventeen million monthly visitors,[3] while the New York Times's daily print circulation is close to a million.[4] The three top conservative news websites are Drudge Report with nearly seven million unique monthly visitors, NewsMax with over 2.5 million, and Free Republic with 1.5 million.

The popularity of political blogs is constantly increasing as traditional media, with falling advertising revenue and much greater costs associated with publication, struggle to stay afloat. For instance, the most popular news website on the internet, Huffington Post, has around fifty full-time employees;[5] the New York Times employs more than nine thousand.[6] Bloggers at Huffington Post are not paid for their work.[7] That model, along with the absence of costs associated with putting out a print edition, allows such blogs to maintain a remarkably large amount of continually updated, new content. Daily Kos has eight paid staffers[8] and does not even have an actual main office. According to its founder Markos Moulitsas Zúñiga, business is conducted in a "virtual" office.


The Challenge of Monitoring
In part because of the huge size of the blogosphere, such hateful commentary often escapes the kind of scrutiny that the traditional media faces. The amount of material on the websites of the major blogs makes monitoring them very difficult. The Daily Kos alone, for instance, has thousands of bloggers who contribute to the site, many of whom provide new content daily. In addition, each new blog post often produces hundreds of reader comments - threads that often are poorly monitored by the site if at all...MORE...LINK

*Before moving to Israel in 2009, Adam Levick worked in the Civil Rights Division at the National Office of the Anti-Defamation League, where he was responsible for monitoring progressive journals and political blogs in the United States. He has published in the Philadelphia Bulletin and the Jewish Exponent.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

seems like a pretty silly anaylsis. There is nowhere near the amount of anti-jewish sentiment (almost none) displayed as there is anti muslim sentiment
If you take the israel palestine conflict as the key example: how many posters can you find saying we should be giving weapons to the palestinians in their fight against the israelis? almost none

But how many can you find saying the exact opposite, that we should be giving weapons to isrel in their fight against the palestinians? Lots. Infact that is officialy US policy