Thursday's Wall Street Journal (subs. req'd) takes note of the coincidence of the widespread campaigning by journalists on behalf of kidnapped BBC Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston and a National Union of Journalists (NUJ) call for a boycott of Israeli goods.
Anyone reading the Journal editorial would get the impression that the latter boycott is the NUJ's only direct response to the kidnapping, whereas nothing in this Guardian story, which seems to have kicked the row off, made that link, and a later NUJ statement (helpfully reprinted at Harry's Place) clarified that the boycott call emerged from just one aspect of the NUJ's relations with Palestinian journalists and was in fact intended as a protest against the war in Lebanon last year.
But leave aside the Dave Spart style buffoonery of the NUJ boycott and the WSJ's hackish repackaging of it. The phrasing of the WSJ criticism of the boycott fairly clearly implies that the Journal thinks that the NUJ and the BBC are the same thing, most notably the concluding paragraph --
Meanwhile, Mr. Johnston's condition and whereabouts remain unknown, a grim reminder of what goes on in the Palestinian territory that Israel abandoned in 2005. Maybe if Mr. Dear [NUJ general secretary] and his fellow-travelers had paid more attention, they would have thought twice about stationing their colleague in harm's way.
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