When officials of a government, or any organization. Exceeds and abuses their position of authority for the intent of personal gain. Eg. I’m a government official in charge of highway repair. I award a repair contractor with a $2 million dollar road repair contract. Providing he builds me a mile long driveway to one of my houses for free. By concealing the cost of my driveway into the highway repair contract.
When officials of a government, or any organization. Exceeds and abuses their position of authority for the intent of personal gain. Eg. I’m a government official in charge of highway repair. I award a repair contractor with a $2 million dollar road repair contract. Providing he builds me a mile long driveway to one of my houses for free. By concealing the cost of my driveway into the highway repair contract.
Someone who gives opinions and does not go out and cover the news is a “commentator” rather than a journalist or a reporter. Actually, the terms “journalist” and “reporter” can be used interchangeably, although “journalist” tends to be the name of someone who is in the profession of journalism, whether as a reporter or a correspondent. It is often used for folks who work in print (newspapers and magazines)— you might see someone called a “print journalist.” Reporters, on the other hand, are often folks who work in TV news or radio news. But whether you use the more formal term (journalist) or not, journalists and/or reporters are trained professionals. They go out and gathers the facts, interview the relevant news-makers, often write the story, and then deliver it. Journalists and reporters are not folks who guess or speculate, nor are they overtly partisan. They are people who devote their energies to finding out what the story actually is and then informing the public in an accurate and fair manner.
There is a saying that “journalism is the first draft of history.” This means that while journalists are not trained historians, what they are reporting today becomes part of the record that future researchers will use as they try to learn more about past times (and past perceptions of events). I’m a media historian, and I’ve found old newspapers and magazines a fascinating resource—a repository of which stories were considered important, and which people were considered newsworthy. They also show me what people believed about “the other,” what the common slang expressions were, how new technologies were received at that time, which celebrities were in the public eye, and which social issues were considered controversial.
Of course, reporters are usually not seeking or researching historical information: they are usually focused on reporting about current events— informing the public about what just happened, when it happened, why it happened, etc. But there are some stories where it can be useful to seek out historical information, especially when trying to put a current event into some context— such as finding out if X ever happened before and what the reaction to it was back then. So, there is actually some truth in the assertion that reporters are creating history. That may not be their intention at the time, but years later, historians and researchers will look at those reports and learn from them.
Palestine is a small region of land that has played a prominent role in the ancient and modern history of the Middle East. The history of Palestine has been marked by frequent political conflict and violent land seizures because of its importance to several major world religions, and because Palestine sits at a valuable geographic crossroads between Africa and Asia. Today, Arab people who call this territory home are known as Palestinians, and the people of Palestine have a strong desire to create a free and independent state in this contested region of the world. The word Palestine derives from the Greek word, Philistia, which dates to Ancient Greek writers’ descriptions of the region in the 12th century B.C. Since the fall of the Ottoman Empire in World War I to 1948, Palestine typically referred to the geographic region located between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Arab people who call this territory home have been known as Palestinians since the early 20th century. Much of this land is now considered present-day Israel. Today, Palestine theoretically includes the West Bank (a territory that sits between modern-day Israel and Jordan) and the Gaza Strip (which borders modern-day Israel and Egypt). However, control over this region is a complex and evolving situation. There is no international consensus concerning the borders, and many areas claimed by Palestinians have been occupied by Israelis for years. Scholars believe the name “Palestine” originally comes from the word “Philistia,” which refers to the Philistines who occupied part of the region in the 12th century B.C. Throughout history, Palestine has been ruled by numerous groups, including the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Fatimids, Seljuk Turks, Crusaders, Egyptians and Mamelukes. From about 1517 to 1917, the Ottoman Empire ruled much of the region. When World War I ended in 1918, the British took control of Palestine. The League of Nations issued a British mandate for Palestine—a document that gave Britain administrative control over the region, and included provisions for establishing a Jewish national homeland in Palestine—which went into effect in 1923. The Partition of Palestine In 1947, after more than two decades of British rule, the United Nations proposed a plan to partition Palestine into two sections: an independent Jewish state and an independent Arab state. The city of Jerusalem, which was claimed as a capital by both Jews and Palestinian Arabs, was to be an international territory with a special status. Jewish leaders accepted the plan, but many Palestinian Arabs—some of whom had been actively fighting British and Jewish interests in the region since the 1920s—vehemently opposed it. Arab groups argued that they represented the majority of the population in certain regions and should be granted more territory. They began to form volunteer armies throughout Palestine. In May 1948, less than a year after the Partition Plan for Palestine was introduced, Britain withdrew from Palestine and Israel declared itself an independent state, implying a willingness to implement the Partition Plan. Almost immediately, neighboring Arab armies moved in to prevent the establishment of the Israeli state. The 1948 Arab-Israeli War that ensued involved Israel and five Arab nations—Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Lebanon. By the war’s end in July 1949, Israel controlled more than two-thirds of the former British Mandate, while Jordan took control of the West Bank, Egypt and the Gaza Strip. In the wake of the April air battle, the Soviet Union provided Egypt with intelligence that Israel was moving troops to its northern border with Syria in preparation for a full-scale invasion. The information was inaccurate, but it nevertheless stirred Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser to advance forces into the Sinai Peninsula, where they expelled a United Nations peacekeeping force that had been guarding the border with Israel for over a decade. Israel Defense Forces then launched a preemptive aerial attack against Egypt on June 5, 1967. Both nations claimed that they were acting in self-defense in the ensuing conflict, which ended on June 10 and also drew in Jordan and Syria, who sided with Egypt. The Six-Day War, as it came to be called, resulted in major land gains for Israel.
About the author: Researcher, writer, columist, graduate from media and communication department University of Sindh Jamshoro.
mbcworld