At war with the media: Both sides claim bias in coverage of Mideast
In Los Angeles, almost 1,000 subscribers to the Los Angeles Times suspended home delivery of the paper for one day to protest what they called inaccurate, pro-Palestinian coverage. In New York, many in the Jewish community are calling for a reader boycott of The New York Times.
In Minneapolis, an organization called Minnesotans Against Terrorism bought a full-page ad in the Star Tribune to accuse that paper of refusing to call Palestinian suicide bombers "terrorists."
Michael Getler, ombudsman for The Washington Post, says he's been receiving more than 100 e-mail messages and calls a day, "the overwhelming majority saying our coverage is pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel."
Ned Warwick, foreign editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, says his paper has been subjected to "an intense barrage of criticism" from the local Jewish community — "100, 120 e-mails a day, a very sophisticated, ongoing campaign."
Arab Americans and other supporters of the Palestinians take just the opposite view: They have long accused U.S. news organizations of slanting their coverage in favor of Israel.
"It's misleading, sloppy coverage that does not relate the true suffering of the Palestinian people," says Ahmed Bouzid, president of the Philadelphia-based Palestine Media Watch.
Some Palestinian supporters blame Mideast coverage on "Jewish domination and control" of many of the major news organizations — and on what they see as a desire of those news organizations to align themselves with U.S. foreign policy, which traditionally has backed Israel.
Meeting with communities
Editors deny charges of bias in their papers, and several have met with members of the Jewish and Arab communities to discuss the issue. The editors say their staff members realize how sensitive the Mideast situation is, and they insist their papers make every effort to be evenhanded.
"Coverage of the current conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is drawing more intense and conflicting criticism than any story in memory," said Michael Fancher, executive editor of The Seattle Times. "Some people on both sides hold such strong opinions that they are unable to see balanced and neutral reporting for what it is.
"Unfortunately, those people look for evidence to support their conviction of bias and ignore anything to the contrary, so their criticism doesn't help the press be more sensitive to their concerns."
"We are fallible but we're not biased," says Timothy J. McNulty, associate managing editor for foreign news at the Chicago Tribune. "A newspaper, as a human institution, can make mistakes. ... But the mistakes are honest mistakes, not a product of bias in any fashion."
Several papers have made mistakes — of either omission or commission — in recent weeks.
Both the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle, for example, failed to cover major Jewish rallies in their respective cities, and Jewish leaders excoriated them for it. Executives at the Minneapolis Star Tribune say the decision to excise and replace the words "terrorism" and "terrorists" in a New York Times News Service story early this month was made by an editor who "misinterpreted" the paper's policy to "take extra care" in using those words.
"We were very embarrassed," says Ben Taylor, vice president for communications at the paper. "The wire editor didn't fully understand the policy, and he didn't follow it."
Other papers also have been criticized for their policies on the use of such language.
The Chicago Tribune policy says, "Exercise caution when using the words 'terrorist' and 'terrorism' to describe an act or an incident. Do not use 'terrorist' to describe an individual or a group."
McNulty says the policy is born of a desire to "be specific and avoid labels," but Jewish leaders say suicide bombings are acts of terrorism, and members of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hazbollah and al-Qaida are terrorists.
Comparable to abortion debate
Louis Gelfand, reader representative at the Star Tribune, says much of the criticism that newspapers have received for their Mideast coverage in recent weeks reminds him of criticism he has heard over coverage of abortion.
"A lot of it has to do with language," he says. "People on each side got upset if we used 'right to life' or 'pro-choice.' "
Now, supporters of Israel complain that newspapers sometimes refer to Palestinians as "militants" or "freedom fighters" or "guerrillas" instead of calling them "terrorists" and that they describe the West Bank as "occupied territory" rather than "disputed land." Pro-Palestinian groups, on the other hand, sometimes characterize Israel's military actions as terrorist.
A seminar earlier this month in New York City examined that question from a host of positions — those of journalists, media critics, Israelis, Palestinians — and there was not easy agreement or even affirmation that it is possible.
Journalists defended their craft but acknowledged imperfections; critics cited bias; a sense of shared history and even common terms proved elusive — an "occupied" territory to a Palestinian is "disputed" land to an Israeli. European coverage of the Middle East was praised by some as being "more fair" than U.S. coverage but was criticized by others as "biased" against Israel.
Akiba Cohen, who teaches communication at Tel Aviv University, said bias is nearly unavoidable, given that journalists are no different from other humans — everything is filtered through life experience. Add to that a severe and pitched conflict, he said, and you have the makings for coverage that will prove deeply unsatisfying to someone.
"No matter what you write, you'll be criticized," said Michael Arnold, managing editor of the New York-based Jewish Telegraphic Agency. The event, sponsored by the World Association for Christian Communication and the Communication Commission of the National Council of Churches, resulted in a 12-point "Code of Fair Practices" that seminar sponsors hope will find its way into newsrooms and improve coverage by emphasizing the need for digging beyond the surface of the story, getting as wide a range of viewpoints as possible and avoiding loaded terms such as "Islamic bombers."
In its preface, the code acknowledged the difficulty of reporting as "the first draft of history."
"By definition, this draft is not always complete, often presenting facts without adequate context, filing reports in a hurry and sending pictures that emphasize immediate action and consequences. Still, there is more to informing the public than merely relaying raw data quickly."
Indeed, as John Zakarian, editorial-page editor of The Hartford (Conn.) Courant and chief drafter of the code of practices, said of U.S. coverage: "The more raw information we have, the more confused we become." An almost over-abundance of information has led to an almost "mental implosion" on the part of Americans, he argued. "Oceans of words and images," he said, "don't guarantee clarity."
The question of context
What does? Context. But whose context? That was a crucial question and not one easily agreed upon.
Benny Avni of Kol Israel Radio said he thought it was a mistake to portray Israel and the Palestinian Authority as equals in a host of ways: politically, economically, militarily; on the issue of press freedom, he said, Israel's press is far freer and more critical of the Israeli government and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon than the Palestinian press is of Yasser Arafat.
Arnold, of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, said he thinks American journalists were liberal politically and had taken the view that the Palestinians were the "underdogs," resulting in a perceptible "pro-Palestinian bias."
Not so, said Ahmed Bouzid, president of Palestinian Media Watch, who criticized Israeli policy but also passionately lambasted the U.S. media less for biased coverage than for what he called "journalistic mediocrity."
"I don't tell them they are biased or bad people — I tell them they are not doing their jobs correctly," he said, citing what he called a long tradition of U.S. journalists deferring to the Israeli viewpoint and underplaying Palestinian suffering.
Marda Dunsky, who has covered the Middle East and teaches at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, concurred with Bouzid and said there was an urgent need to examine what was not covered in the U.S. media, including what Dunsky called "the daily details of Palestinian life."
"The U.S. public," she argued, "lacks a complete picture."
On the other hand, The Washington Post's ombudsman wrote in an April 7 column that while his paper published "powerful stories about Palestinian suffering" from Israeli offensives, it did "less well in capturing the impact of (suicide bombings) ... on Israeli families and society."
Leonard Downie Jr., executive editor of the Post, says that imbalance was not intentional but the result of having "so many of our reporters covering the military action on the West Bank."
In an attempt to redress that shortcoming, the Post dispatched reporter Glenn Frankel to Israel, and he subsequently wrote two long front-page stories about the impact of suicide bombings there.
Still, criticism of the Post — and of other newspapers — has continued, and even intensified. Emotions on both sides are raw.
"The complaints have really ratcheted up," says Lillian Swanson, assistant managing editor and ombudsman at The Philadelphia Inquirer. "I came to work (Wednesday) ... and I couldn't do anything but answer calls and e-mails attacking us for a 'remarkably biased approach' on a story we ran on Page 1 about Israeli soldiers who allegedly trashed a Palestinian cultural center in Ramallah."
The story quoted the director of the center as saying, "This was not a security operation. It was just vandalism, part of a conscious desire to ruin everything Palestinian." She estimated it would cost $5,000 to repair the damage, and this prompted Giora Becher, the Israeli consul general in Philadelphia, to complain, "There is a war taking place, and $5,000 worth of damage is worth a front-page article?"
Warwick, the foreign editor, attributes some of the Jewish community's criticism to "their own apprehension about what's taking place" on the West Bank — and to their realization that "Israel is losing in the court of world opinion right now."
The e-mail factor
Other journalists say the speed and reach of e-mail and the Internet have played a major role in growing Jewish criticism of media coverage.
"Readers are hearing directly from friends or relatives in Israel and the occupied territories who tell them what's happening in e-mails before the L.A. Times and The New York Times and CNN can even get in there to see or confirm anything," says Dan Hortsch, public editor of The (Portland) Oregonian, "and then they want to know why we didn't have that story."
Sanders LaMont, ombudsman at The Sacramento (Calif.) Bee, says he senses "more intensity, more polarity in readers' complaints of late," and he says, "The big difference is that people who have strong feelings have found sites on the Internet that they agree with — newspapers in Europe or Israel or other sources."