NewsLab

I’m having trouble with the blog or the connexion. Anyway I’m rewriting this post for the second time I think this is NewsLab’s way of getting its revenge.

A couple of weeks ago, we covered an information in a way that did not please everyone here. The story was about a lebanese army helicopter that had been shot by Hezbollah armed men in a region called Sojoud, south Lebanon. The area is full of bushes and is a Hezbollah stronghold.

The armed man shot at the helicopter and the pilote, Samer Hanna, 27, died right away. His copilote was then captured, beaten and interrogated for hours before being released.

Two days later, ministers got together in order to examine the results of the preliminary investigations in the case. As journalist, we then called two or three ministers to have some info about the report’s content.

It appeared, according to the ministerial sources, that the helicopter was not flying when the incident occurred. The helicopter was clearly a lebanese army one and could not be mistaken for an israeli helicopter (since in this region israeli violation of lebanese airspace happen all the time)

Having learned this, we wrote the info in the paper, only to learn next day that the “official” public version was that the hezbollah man was “nervous because of an imminent israeli attack and got scared when he heard the helicopter so he just started to shoot at it”.

Then someone called our boss to tell him to be careful about the info we publish in our paper. Pressures were important and it was a quite stressful time.

To give you a small idea of what’s going on, you can check this link