Media Censors "Tough Love for Israel" comment by head of Israel for Obama

This is the quote that appeared in numerous articles sourced from the original AP story about Obama's trip to Israel by the head of an organization calling itself "Israel for Obama".

``In general, I think tough love is better than a free hand,'' said Samson Altman-Schevitz, head of the Israel for Obama campaign. He moved to Israel two years ago from Chicago, where Obama's wife, Michelle, was his adviser at the University of Chicago.

This quote originally appeared in the AP story at outlets such as USA Today and the Miami Herald, as can be seen via a Google search. However it now only appears at the Guardian and various blogs. Instead the outlets have run a greatly foreshortened version of the piece that censors all such negative references to Obama pressuring Israel.



Other outlets have more neatly sliced out only the "Tough Love" section from the story as can be seen at the Gulf Live.

Here is the original AP story that Gulf Live originally ran as can be established by Google.



Here is the Gulf Live version now with crucial paragraphs missing.



The LA Times wrote its own story, which as you can see above, included Samson Altman Schevitz. Now he's gone. He appears in the search link to the story on the LA Times' own site but not in the story itself.



The same story is repeated at outlet after outlet. Even the Yahoo News version of the AP story has been similarly censored.



Nor is this a matter of one story being replaced by another, because it's the same story and Samson's quote only appears at the Guardian and the original AP story at Google News.

Outlets to the right and the left of the Democratic party, such as Fox News, NPR and the New York Sun appear to still carry the story with Samson's quote inside.

If what I'm seeing is correct, then this is a disturbing example of the willingness of the media to censor itself in order to get out only the spin that the Obama campaign wants to appear on a given story.

The AP story's quote by Schevitz-Altman, formerly tied to Michelle Obama, who inconveniently began promoting Obama's "Tough Love for Israel" was emblematic of the sort of "Tough Love" the media would like to see applied to Israel. However it would seem that cooler heads, whether in the Obama campaign or in the outlets themselves, chose to slash everything but a purely pro-Israel take from the AP story. This is of course not for Israel's benefit, but in order to present Obama as Pro-Israel to a gullible American Jewish audience.

But in moments like this what we really see is the sausage being made, the large scale propaganda campaign undertaken by the media to insure that Obama becomes the next President.