Media Watchdog: ‘Teen Vogue’ Treats Young Readers to ‘Shoddy Commentary, One-Sided Account’ of Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
by Ruthie Blum
Conde Nast’s Teen Vogue fashion magazine has presented its young readers with a long and factually incorrect piece about Israel, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) reported on Friday.
According to CAMERA, the “one-sided account” and “shoddy commentary” relayed in the February 27 article — “The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: What You Need to Know” – “omits many things that teens trying to learn about current events ought to know and instead reads like a fact sheet from the Palestinian side of the issue.”
CAMERA claimed that the author of the piece, Emma Sarran Webster,
has no apparent knowledge or background on the complex issues involved, billing herself as an expert on health and beauty with a “deep love for social media and cat videos.” She relies heavily in the article on a single “expert,” University of Wisconsin professor Nadav Shelef. Shelef’s writing, which has been praised by far-left professors, focuses heavily on settlements, and as a result, Webster’s article also focuses overwhelmingly on “controversial” settlements as the central issue. This, while completely ignoring Palestinian incitement and incentivizing of violence, as well as Palestinian intransigence.
However, CAMERA said, Webster does not discuss issues such as the Palestinian Authority’s cash payments to terrorists and their families of the glorification of violence in the PA government and society — and omits mention of historical Jewish ties to Israel and the repeated rejection by the Palestinians of Israeli peace offers.
In addition, CAMERA noted, the article contains several misrepresentations, among them a reference to Palestinians who lived a century ago, and says that in 1948 Arab nations “began fighting on behalf of Palestine.”
Teen Vogue, whose focus is usually on fashion and shopping, has a circulation of more than one million.