A book due to be published here soon accuses army and defense Ministry officials of leaning on military correspondents in an effort to get them to write reports according to the “desirable line.” The author of the book, “Blinds at the Top,” is Shimshon Offer, who, as Davar’s military correspondent for 10 years, covered the Six-Day War, the war of attrition and the Yom Kippur War.
Offer claims that in order to assure the “desirable line,” the military establishment used pressure and threats, both explicit and implicit, and imposed its “line” on the press and other communications media. He tells of one senior official who requested military correspondents slant their reports on Israel Defense Forces activities along the preconceived views of the IDF. The officer, Offer reveals, told the correspondents that he has a “personal file” on all of them and that he assumed they wanted to maintain their contacts and relations with the army in the future.
The book, which covers the relationship between the military authorities and the correspondents prior to the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, devotes its last chapter to describing the methods taken to undermine widespread protests by the correspondents right after the war.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
