Sunday, December 4, 2011

Waltz with Bashir


It is not often when I am reading a chapter in our Journalism 120 textbook that I am also given a better insight into one of my favorite films of all time--Waltz withBashir.

This film is described on IMDB as “an Israeli film director interviews fellow veterans of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon to reconstruct his own memories of his term of service in that conflict.”

Our book, News Writing and Reporting for Today's Media talks about the very incident/controversy/massacre that the movie mentioned above does, but adds an interesting wrinkle that I did not know. I did not know that the incident that occurred in Lebanon was reported on by Time Magazine and ended up becoming a precedent setting libel case in the US.



At the time, Ariel Sharon was the Israeli minister of defense, and the article in Time insinuated that Sharon had prior knowledge of the planned massacre of Palestinians in Lebanon. The magazine had printed the story, even though they had no way to fully confirm the information on the secret-government report they based their story on, but were able to infer the names of those involved through cross-referencing with other reports.

The jury found in favor of Time, but did say that they had indeed defamed Sharon and that what they had printed was false.

Anyway, you should watch the movie.

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