Author: Felicity Barringer
Publication: The New York Times
Date: May 23, 2002
Intense public reaction to coverage
of the violence of the Middle East conflict has prompted unusually harsh
attacks on several news media outlets and has led to boycotts of The New
York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.
Broadcast news operations, including
CNN and National Public Radio, have also been criticized. The general manager
of one public radio station, WBUR- FM in Boston, said it had lost more
than $1 million in underwriting and pledges this year - nearly 4 percent
of its annual budget - because some supporters of Israel encouraged people
not to give.
The criticism has come largely from
supporters of Israel, and it reached a climax in recent weeks in the aftermath
of the suicide bombing at a Passover seder in Netanya, which killed 28
Israelis, and the subsequent incursion by Israeli troops into West Bank
cities like Ramallah, Bethelehem and Jenin, where the destruction of homes
and loss of life among Palestinians was highly visible.
The swift communications of the
Internet era apparently help fan the intensity of the criticism.
For instance, an account of supposedly
anti-Israel remarks made by a CNN correspondent in Jerusalem was widely
circulated, despite what Eason Jordan, the chief news executive of CNN,
said were denials by the correspondent. Mr. Jordan said he could find up
to 6,000 e-mail messages protesting coverage in his in-box in a single
day.
The network, Mr. Jordan said, has
as high a household penetration in Israel as anywhere in the world. It
is being more closely watched right now, when, he said, Israeli sympathizers
believe "that Israel is literally in a fight for its life." He added, "One
of the only things that Yasir Arafat and Ariel Sharon have in common is
they both think CNN is biased toward the opposite side."
The coverage by The New York Times
has been condemned by rabbis in several congregations.
Pictures, headlines and photo captions
have all been denounced, but the boycotters' most fundamental complaints
are that in their view The Times creates a false equivalence between the
sides in the conflict and gives disproportionate attention to Palestinian
suffering.
Critics of The Times dispatched
hundreds of e-mail messages and angry commentary earlier this month when
it published a front-page photograph of the Salute to Israel parade in
Manhattan that showed a small group of pro-Palestinian counterdemonstrators
in the foreground and pro- Israeli marchers and their supporters in the
background.
Since the pro-Israeli marchers and
supporters numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and the pro-Palestinian
group in the hundreds, the photograph and a pair of related photographs
in the Metro section reinforced the critics' impression that The Times
was straining to create a sense of equivalence.
An editors' note the next day said,
"In fairness the total picture presentation should have better reflected
The Times's reporting on the scope of the event, including the disparity
in the turnouts."
The boycott of The Times began on
May 1 and is planned to last until the end of the month. Readers were urged
by American Jewish figures critical of The Times' coverage to cancel subscriptions
for a month.
Catherine Mathis, a spokeswoman
for The New York Times Company, said the boycott had resulted in cancellations,
but would not say how many.
Rabbi Haskel Lookstein of Congregation
Kehilath Jeshurun, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, who is one of the
organizers of the boycott, said in an interview this week, "Pictures appeared
in The Times day after day, especially during Operation Defensive Shield,
of suffering Palestinians, with no comparative pictures about suffering
Israelis."
He added, "Is it O.K. to keep writing
things on suffering Palestinians who are suffering because of the terrorism
of their colleagues and not to give sufficient attention to the victims
of terror?"
Avi Weiss, the senior rabbi of the
Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, said articles like the one detailing the
lives of both a teenage Palestinian suicide bomber and the teenage Israeli
woman who was her victim reflected a skewed moral equivalence.
"The Times may feel this is necessary
to present balance," he said. "I would suggest there is no moral equivalence
between cold-blooded murder and self- defense."
Howell Raines, executive editor
of The Times, responding to the boycott, said: "We respect our readers'
right to express their opinion. We are unhappy whenever we lose a single
reader."
He added: "Our plan for future coverage
is to continue it within The Times's traditions of fairness and balance.
We feel that the coverage thus far has met our standards in this regard,
and we will remain vigilant to make sure that continues to be the case."
Gary Rosenblatt, the editor of The
Jewish Week, is a critic of The Times's coverage. But in a May 10 editorial
in his paper, which has tens of thousands of subscribers, he opposed the
boycott.
"We need more constructive criticism,
more marshaling of information, more voices speaking out for fair reporting,"
he wrote, "not a call to shut ourselves off from reporting and opinions
we don't want to deal with."
Other newspapers face similar criticism.
A portion of the Web site boycottthepost.org, which is encouraging a one-week
boycott of The Washington Post in June, complained that the newspaper "presents
both sides of the conflict as if each were equally valid and credible."
A brief boycott of The Los Angeles
Times in April resulted in the one-day stoppage of 1,200 deliveries, according
to Martha Goldstein, a spokeswoman for the newspaper.
At other newspapers, editors agree
that the intensity of the criticism has steadily increased. James O'Shea,
the managing editor of The Chicago Tribune, said: "It's not looking at
coverage over all over a period of months and asking, `Is there balance?'
It's finding headlines, pictures, looking at the placement of a story and
picking apart those elements."
While the the pro-Israeli Committee
for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, or Camera, studies newpapers
for evidence of bias, Palestine Media Watch has been monitoring the coverage
of newspapers like The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times and The
Atlanta Journal- Constitution.
Like pro-Israeli critics, the pro-Palestian
groups focus on issues of balance and equivalence and on common vocabulary.
Ahmed T. Bouzid, the president of Palestine Media Watch, argued, among
other things, that the word retaliation was often used about Israeli attacks
on Palestinian targets, which, he said, "frames it as a reaction to something,
not an action initiated by Israelis." He said he was pushing to eliminate
mediocre journalism, not charging bias.
James Zogby, president of the Arab
American Institute, echoed such criticism, but said he would not encourage
a boycott. To do "what the Jewish community has done, to incite their members
to boycott, to feel so injured that people work themselves into a lather
over press coverage does damage to the possibility of discourse," he said.
