29 March - 4 April 2001
Issue No.527
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 29 March - 4 April 2001 Issue No.527 |
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'They killed Al-Dorra again'
The Internet war continues between Palestinians and Israelis, but is the virtual world fairer? Amira Howeidy seeks an answer
What does a popular news Web site do when it suddenly becomes a venue for the 53-year-old Arab-Israeli conflict? "Stay out of it," was MSNBC.com's response after its contest for best photo of the year 2000 turned into a battleground between Palestinians and their supporters, on the one hand, and Israelis and their supporters, on the other. The photo in question could not have been more evocative: a 12-year-old Palestinian boy clutching his father, terrified by the Israeli gunfire showering them from all directions. The boy, Mohamed Al-Dorra, was killed and the entire world witnessed his death thanks to a Palestinian cameraman who just happened to be filming at the scene.
The footage fuelled the Intifada in its early days and triggered demonstrations in almost every Arab capital (if not the sympathy of the international community), rendering it iconic of the Palestinian cause and the Israeli army's brutality. It was no surprise, then, when the Microsoft-NBC Web site, MSNBC.com, listed it amongst 49 other photos in its contest which began in mid-December 2000.
According to MSNBC press spokesman Peter Dorogoff, the Al-Dorra photo was the clear leader before it slipped to sixth position after an Israeli diplomat in Los Angeles began an e-mail campaign in early March, urging Israelis and their supporters to vote for other photos. A story posted on the MSNBC Web site quoted Meirav Eilon Shahar's e-mail as follows: "To us, this photograph epitomises everything tragic about the present violence: Children led into the crossfire by their own parents for publicity purposes." Pro-Israel Internet users responded by the thousands to Shahar's appeal, intentionally voting for photos of animals to claim that Al-Dorra's plight was of no significance to international public opinion.
This, of course, prompted Palestinians to urge their supporters to vote for the Al-Dorra photo. By late March, over 5.5 million votes had flooded in, many of them in an effort to return the boy's image to first place. It became quickly obvious that people from both sides were voting for the same picture more than once, MSNBC said.
Finally, on Wednesday 21 March, MSNBC announced that it had stopped the voting. "While individuals are invited to vote once for their favourite picture, our internal logs indicate that electronic ballot stuffing was occurring," MSNBC said. "It became clear that individuals, through technical means, were voting for the same image hundreds, if not thousands, of times. As this violated our intent in creating the reader's choice vote, asking for individual opinions, we decided to end the voting option," the company added.
While the competition was still under way, the picture was given the title "Death in Gaza." And until last Tuesday, MSNBC Web site visitors could see that it received the largest number of votes, a staggering 1,567,000. But after MSNBC decided to halt voting, offering its visitors a photo gallery of the best 25 pictures of the year 2000, Al-Dorra's picture was given a rather indifferent name, "The shot seen around the world," and was placed in 20th position -- "in chronological order," Dorogoff told Al-Ahram Weekly. A widely circulated Palestinian e-mail responded to MSNBC's decision by claiming that "they killed Al-Dorra again."
According to Dorogoff, in the last three weeks, when the "rigging" is said to have started, about five million votes were cast in the competition, compared with 500,000 in the previous 11 weeks. It was not possible to determine who was responsible, he said, but it was clear to MSNBC that both sides were trying to make political statements. Although neither side won "officially," millions joined the "virtual" battle, indicating a phenomenal generation of public debate.
Brian Storm, the site's director of multimedia, conceded that by Tuesday 20 March, the picture was back in the lead with more than 1.5 million votes. "It was by far the leading image," Storm said. So why did MSNBC suspend the contest? "We never contended that this was some kind of scientific polling," replied Storm. "It was not a contest. It was a readers' choice," he added.
Palestinians and supporters of their cause felt cheated. But Dorogoff insists that suspending the contest amounted to no more than a technical decision. "It's not a matter of diplomacy," Dorogoff told Al-Ahram Weekly, "nor did we take sides." Many supporters of the Palestinian cause, however, are convinced that the American Web site was keen not to upset Israelis.
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