In an excellent fisking on his Augean Stables blog of a deeply flawed piece about the al Durah libel scandal, Richard Landes rightly fastens upon a remarkable throwaway comment by Clement Weill Raynal, a senior journalist with the France 3 channel (France 2 stands accused by media watchdog Philippe Karsenty and others of transmitting a false and theatrically staged account of the ‘killing’ of Mohammed al Durah).

“You know, I think this whole affair is dead in the water,” said a senior journalist at France 3 TV, Clement Weill Raynal, who is also a well-known contributor to Jewish media. “Karsenty is so shocked that fake images were used and edited in Gaza, but this happens all the time everywhere on television and no TV journalist in the field or a film editor would be shocked. This has become more about him than anything else.”

Let’s dwell on this remark for a few seconds. Raynal says that the staging of ‘news’ events to convey a false impression

happens all the time everywhere on television

Indeed, it happens so frequently, and is such a routine occurrence, that

no TV journalist in the field or a film editor would be shocked.

This bears out what others have admitted at France 2 itself. As Landes observes:

According to what Charles Enderlin said to me, and other people at France2 said to Rosenzweig, Leconte and Jeambar, “Of course, they do it all the time.” Everyone knows they stage stuff. Karsenty thus becomes a spoof of the Claude Rains character from Casablanca: “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”

This is the real story behind the Karsenty libel case – that bad enough as the al Durah staged falsehood was, with the murderous attacks that it directly caused, such media falsifications are routine, according to the senior journalists involved. How many people round the world have died as a result of this media practice of institutionalised lying? How many have been incited to hate Israel as a result of searing TV pictures and associated commentary depicting it as a monster – and which are implicitly believed and take up residence in the brain as iconic images because people assume that what is on film cannot be anything other then the truth, but which are in fact wicked and cynical fabrications? And if ‘everyone’ is doing it, does that include other western broadcasting organisations? Are the BBC, ITN, CNN, ABC and the rest all aware that

this happens all the time

– because they too are making it happen?

Worse still, of course, is the off-hand way in which Raynal therefore dismisses Karsenty as some kind of naïf who has been idiotic enough to be shocked at what everyone knows is standard journalistic practice. How frightfully unsophisticated of Karsenty to be exercised over a lie which fuelled hatred violence and mass murder, when such lies are perfectly and acceptably normal!

What a revealing insight into the world of the French (and doubtless other) media. What a devastating revelation that the media routinely transmit staged fabrications as news — and in theatres of conflict where such images are weapons of war. It becomes plainer by the day that in Philippe Karsenty’s appeal against the legal travesty by which he was indicted, it is the western media itself which is actually on trial.