Israel Matzav

Donald Bostrom wins Dishonest Reporting Award for 2009

Aftonbladet's Donald Bostrom has won the 2009 Dishonest Reporting Award given out by HonestReporting.com for his unsupported blood libel that Israeli kills 'Palestinians' to harvest their organs.

The media watchdog organization Honest Reporting has awarded a Swedish journalist its 2009 Dishonest Reporter Award for the most skewed and biased coverage of the Middle East conflict.

Donald Bostrom “touched a nerve in readers in ways that few journalists ever do,” declared the organization. Writing in the Aftonbladet, the largest daily newspaper in Sweden, Bostrom headlined his two-page spread in the cultural section, “They Plunder the Organs of Our Sons.” The article quoted Palestinian Authority Arabs who claimed that IDF soldiers kidnapped young men from Judea, Samaria and Gaza and later returned their bodies, minus their organs.

Bostrom admitted to having failed to independently verify the claims of his sources, specifically of the family of Bilal Ahmed Ghanem, who died in 1992. “I was [present] during the interview that night, I was a witness. It concerns me to the extent that I want it to be investigated… But whether it’s true or not – I have no idea, I have no clue,” he said.

Arabic-speaking Jerusalem Post reporter Khaled Abu Toameh tracked down the family himself, said Honest Reporting – and the family denied ever having told Bostrom their son was missing organs. “The mother denied that she had told any foreign journalist that her son’s organs had been stolen. However, she said that now she does not rule out the possibility that Israel was harvesting organs of Palestinians…” Toameh wrote.

The editor of the Aftonbladet, Jan Helin, backed his reporter and accused Israel of a cover-up, even though it is medically impossible to harvest organs from a body that sustained gunshot wounds in the abdomen and chest, as Bostrom reported that Ghanem did.

The Swedish government refused to condemn the article, insisting that journalists had the right to “free speech.”

There were other awards too.

Read the whole thing.

Maybe someone can make Aftonbladet a banner to put on their web site? You know, like we bloggers do on our sites.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:11 PM