The CNN footage from the Gaza Hospital is still hotly contested. Follow the multiple postings at LGF and an update at Powerline. Here below, I deal with CNN’s defense of the footage in detail because it so resembles the kinds of arguments that Charles Enderlin made about his own monumental gaffe with Talal abu Rahmeh and his “Al Durah” story.

January 9, 2009 — Updated 0034 GMT (0834 HKT)

Gaza video genuine, journalists say

You wouldn’t know it from the title, but there’s only one “journalist” whose opinion is cited in the article (unless Mashharawi the cameraman under suspicion is also considered a journalist).

(CNN) — There’s no truth to accusations by bloggers that a Palestinian camera crew staged a video showing the death of the videographer’s brother after an Israeli rocket attack, said the team’s employer.

In the video, camerman Ashraf Mashharawi is seen holding his brother.

“It’s absolute nonsense,” Paul Martin, co-owner of World News and Features, said of accusations leveled by bloggers at videographer Ashraf Mashharawi.

“He’s a man of enormous integrity and would never get involved with any sort of manipulation of images, let alone when the person dying is his own brother,” Martin said. “I know the whole family. I know them very well. … [Mashharawi] is upset and angry that anyone would think of him having done anything like this. … This is ridiculous. He’s independent.”

I don’t know much about Paul Martin, but it’s clear he spends lots of time in Gaza, and manages to have considerable access to Hamas “militants” whose narrative he seems to feel the world needs to understand. In any case this remark is nothing short of breathtaking. Mashharawi’s about as “independent” as Diana Buttu. The idea that a cameraman working in Gaza is not a militant for the Palestinian cause (perhaps not Hamas, but even that’s unlikely in the last years), is close to preposterous. No genuine independent could survive there for any period of time.

But the rhetoric is crucial here. Just like Charles Enderlin defending Talal, the ploy here is to present Palestinian cameramen as living up to the highest Western standards of journalism. And of course, this is only for public consumption. As Charles told me off the record when I pointed out that Talal’s rushes were full of staged scenes, “Oh sure, they do this all the time.” But on the record, “Talal is a top journalist.”

As for the “I know the whole family…” that’s just what Charles told me that Talal would never lie to him because their families had shared meals together. The credulity of these Western journalists who think that because they’ve sat down with their Palestinian colleagues and broken bread that means that their newfound friends would break ranks with their people’s struggle, is somewhat breathtaking.

Raafat Hamdouna, administrative director at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, said Friday that “Mahmoud Khalil Mashharawi, a 12-year-old, was brought to the hospital, and he was breathing, but he was hit in the head and all over his body by shrapnel. He died later in the hospital. He was treated by the Norwegian team. When he was brought in, he was breathing. The team did their best to save him. I am not really sure if they even tried to rush him to the surgery room, because he was badly hurt.”

Mashharawi’s video footage originally appeared on British television’s Channel 4 and later on CNN. It showed futile attempts by doctors to resuscitate Mashharawi’s 12-year-old brother, Mahmoud, after he and his 14-year-old cousin, Ahmed, had been wounded in what the family said was a rocket attack from a remote-controlled drone Sunday.

Ahmed also was taken to the hospital, but he had been fatally struck in the head and chest by shrapnel and had lost a foot, Hamdouna said. Hamdouna said the hospital records reported Ahmed’s age as 16, not 14, as the family said.

At the time of the attack, the family said, the two boys were playing on the rooftop of the family’s three-story house. The video showed a blood-splattered area where an explosion had taken place and where shrapnel had pierced the roof.

Mashharawi has regularly worked with World News and Features since 2004, Martin said. His multimedia company serves television, radio and newspapers.

Martin said accusations that Mashharawi owns a company that hosts Hamas Web sites were falsely based on Mashharawi having worked at a company that created the PS suffix to allow anyone of any political persuasion to create Palestinian Web sites.

The video footage appeared on CNN television networks and on CNN.com for 24 hours before CNN removed the material in the belief that it had no further right to use it. CNN, standing by the video, has since reposted it. Some bloggers had cited its removal as evidence that CNN did not stand by its reporting.

Responding to accusations that the resuscitation efforts of Mashharawi’s brother appeared inauthentic, Martin said that, based on his years of reporting from Gaza, doctors often go through such efforts even with little hope that a patient can be saved.

This is rich. Note that CNN did not consult a doctor on this one, but Martin’s experience in Gaza. I’ve consulted a doctor and a number of people with experience in CPR have commented both at my article at PJMedia and at LGF. But here it’s Martin’s long experience in Gaza that comes into play. There are two ways to explain this remark, neither of them working in the way Martin would like.

• 1) Doctors in Gaza are so incompetent that what appears to Western experts as a joke, really is their best effort. The incompetence is doubled by Martin’s qualifying remark: as commenters have noted, if the patient is dying, the CPR should be more vigorous.
• 2) Doctors “often go through such efforts even with little hope that a patient can be saved” as long as the cameras are rolling. Maybe Martin wasn’t paying attention to that detail.

In the video of the incident, the boy appears lifeless when brought to into the hospital.

In a brief conversation with CNN, Mashharawi said that doctors tried everything they could to save his brother and that he rejected suggestions that any of his work was inauthentic.

Before bloggers made their accusations, Mashharawi told CNN, “I believed at that moment if I didn’t record that nobody will believe what’s happened to my brother. Because it is unbelievable. Until now, I can’t believe what’s happened.”

It’s not clear what’s “unbelievable. That a child would be hit by rockets in a war zone and die in a hospital is hardly unbelievable. That one needed to film it for the sake of “proof” strikes me as pretty unconvincing. That he filmed it to arouse anger against Israel with the pathos of the scene, strikes me as more likely; and as I argued in the Gaza Beach tragedy documentary I made, this is “exploiting grief.”

To get a sense of the difference in cultures here, no Israeli cameraman would film the death of a family member (or anyone else) and then give it to Western media to show the world the plight of the Israelis. None.

What’s most appalling about this article — but will eventually, I suspect, redound to CNN’s discredit — is that they ran this article based on the denial of two already committed sources. CNN made no effort to corroborate any of this. It’s just “he said, she said.”

What we need is the rushes that Ahraf Mashharawi shot that day, that we see in edited form. Like the rushes of Talal, we’ll be able to judge better what was going on that day if we could see them. And unlike Talal’s rushes, let’s see them uncensored. I suspect we won’t, because when it comes to the clash between Palestinian journalism, channeled through advocacy journalists, the clash between narrative and evidence is so great, they cannot afford to let us see.

I may be wrong. This may be genuine footage. I am open to being convinced so. But let us see the evidence.