The Guided Tour

ONE OF THE nice things about civilised vacations is the way tour buses pick you up from the hotel, whisk you to Pompei or the next notable pagoda, allow time to take the same pictures as everyone else and then have you back at lodgings in time for drinks, a nap and shower, drinks, dinner, with any luck a tasty one, and then a drop or two to seal the night. Guided tours aren’t cool, of course, and the tourist who aims to be reckoned a seasoned explorer will always be aware that listeners expect anecdotes that speak of an intrepid spontaneity. That your minutely scheduled schlep down the autostrada was the very essence of packaging and predictability is not to be mentioned, not if you wish to be taken for a serious traveller.

Fairfax’s Middle East correspondent Ruth Pollard would seem to be well aware of this convention and determined to honour it. Late last week, the Palestinian Authority sent tame reporters a notice that a further insight into Zionist perfidy would be available on Monday, October 15. All they need do was report to the front steps of Jerusalem’s Ambassador Hotel at 9am, where the Hebrew Horror tour bus would be waiting.

Pollard appears to have done little more than present herself in order to produce her dispatch from the front lines of the West Bank’s olive wars, “Israeli settlers launch assault on Palestinian agriculture”. It was not, as you might say, that her story wrote itself, rather that very little original writing was involved at all. Consider:

From the press release announcing the tour: … 39% of Aboud lands were seized by Israeli settlements, the illegal wall and bypass roads. In addition, at least 8000 olive trees were either isolated or uprooted by the settlement regime.

Pollard: In the West Bank village of Aboud, where the Palestinian Authority's agriculture ministry said 8000 olive trees were either isolated or uprooted by Israel's security wall or the settler bypass roads and 39 per cent of its lands seized by the settlements….

Then there is this from the Guardian, whose reporter evidently caught the same bus:

Guardian (directly quoting a PLO official): In the past month alone, Israeli settlers uprooted 300 trees in al-Mughir and Turmusaya villages, cut down 120 trees in Nablus, destroyed 100 olive saplings and 60 vine trees in al-Khader village, uprooted 40 trees in Ras Karkar, and assaulted and hospitalised three Palestinian farmer and injured one other

Pollard (indirectly quoting): Settlers uprooted 300 trees in al-Mughir and Turmusaya villages, cut down 120 trees in Nablus, destroyed 100 olive saplings and 60 vine trees in al-Khader village, uprooted 40 trees in Ras Karkar and assaulted at least four Palestinian farmers, three of whom had to be taken to hospital, the Palestinian Authority reported

The Guardian and Pollard both feature the same interview with the same unhappy olive farmer, and an identical quote about his picking season no longer lasting until Christmas.

Is this the way journalism works? You get on the bus, allow yourself to be taken for a ride and then produce exactly what is expected?

Fairfax Media stock closed at 37.5 cents today, which must be very close to what savvy investors rate as the company’s break-up value. As to its journalism, mostly it is not worth two cents.