JTA: All Schnorring, All the Time - You give us your email, we bombard you with donation requests

We're being bombarded with donation requests from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. We did not even know that the JTA was a charity.

We just went to the JTA site to read an article titled, "Six percent of Israelis say Obama is ‘pro-Israel’" and found at the end of the post this urgent notice: "This article was made possible by the support of readers like you. Donate to JTA now."

Now we are critical of JTA here on several grounds. First off there is no value add to picking up an already published report from the Jerusalem Post and repeating it. Why would we donate for that? Every blogger on earth can do that for free with no schnorring. Google, Yahoo and every other aggregating service can pick the news up from other papers without begging for donations.

We are critical of JTA for this particular type of posting also because they regurgitate it with no links to the original source of the poll - which BTW you can find here.

And yes, we do want to know why there are no JTA polls? More to the point, we want to know why JTA just recycles the JPost poll without adding a single critical look at it by any known authority.

Back in April there was a dust up on account of a perceived slight to bloggers in a JTA fund raising newsletter.

Seems to us like the balabatim (owners) over there at JTA did not get the message. Instead they have intensified their electronic panhandling to the point that it seems to us to be truly tasteless.

We are sorry if the financial crisis has hit JTA hard, We will be sad to see it go away if that is the result. Reading the intensity and desperation of the current begging that JTA is engaged in, we think that will be the outcome.

Times change. The vacuum JTA leaves when it does go away will quickly be filled by other perhaps more tasteful and more value-laden Jewish news efforts.