March
14, 2003, 9:00 a.m.
All The News That’s Fit to Print?
The New York
Times and Israel.
By Tom Gross
s the world's most important daily newspaper, the New York Times
is disproportionately influential in framing the public and diplomatic
discourse on many issues, both in the U.S. and beyond. This is particularly
true with regard to the Middle East, given how much space it allocates
to the subject. One of the great myths of modern journalism, particularly
outside the U.S., is that the New York Times is "pro-Israel."
In fact, it would be truer to say that the opposite is the case.
A
TALE OF TWO BAPTISTS
On March 4, a 59-year-old American Baptist, William P. Hyde, was among 21
people killed by a suicide bomber in Davao in the southern Philippines.
That an American died was made clear in the following day's New York
Times. The Times titled its news report "Bombing Kills
An American And 20 Others In Philippines." The first seven paragraphs
concerned Hyde, who had lived and worked in the Philippines since 1978,
and another American, Barbara Stevens, who had been "slightly wounded"
in the attack. The caption alongside two photos on the front page of that
day's Times also made reference to his death, as did a news summary
on page 2. In addition, the paper ran an editorial titled "Fighting
Terror in the Philippines." And a front-page photo of a wounded boy,
and the caption that accompanied it, made clear that at least one child
had been among the injured.
On the next day (March 5), another American Baptist, 14-year-old Abigail
Litle, was among 16 people killed by a suicide bomber on a bus in Haifa,
Israel. The story and photo caption in the March 6 Times, tucked
at the bottom corner of page 1, made no mention of Abigail's name. Neither
the headline nor the photo caption indicated that an American had died,
or that the suicide bomber had deliberately chosen a bus packed with schoolchildren,
or that a majority of those killed had been teenagers.
The suicide bombers
in both Davao and Haifa were acting on behalf of Muslim fundamentalist
groups fighting for separate states. But the Haifa bomber was arguably
worse. He deliberately chose children as his target, and his bomb was
packed with specially sharpened nails and shrapnel to maximize pain and
to make it harder for doctors to save the wounded.
Readers of some newspapers
— but not of the Times — were told that Litle's Missouri-born
parents had rushed to Haifa's Rambam hospital to look for their "wounded"
daughter and instead had found only what remained of her: her legs. They
had identified Abigail from an ankle bracelet still attached to one of
them. That day's New York Post carried a picture of the pretty,
New Hampshire-born schoolgirl who had been active in Jewish-Arab school
dialogue groups on its front page.
Even the Sun
— a British tabloid not known for its foreign news coverage, and
which goes to press several hours before the New York Times
— gave Abigail's death greater prominence than the Times did.
The Sun's report began: "Fury swept Israel last night after
a suicide bomber killed 15 people on a crowded school bus. Ten children
died and 12 victims were left fighting for life after the bus was blown
apart. The youngsters killed were aged 14 and 15 and from local high schools.
One was 14-year-old Abigail Leitner, a U.S. citizen." (Initially,
Litle's name was transliterated from Hebrew as Leitner by news agencies,
hence the discrepancy; the death toll in Haifa has now risen to 17, not
including the bomber.)
The coverage of Litle's death is just part of what has become a familiar
pattern at the Times. The paper downplays Israeli suffering, and
de-emphasizes Yasser Arafat's responsibility for the suffering of Israelis
and ordinary Palestinians alike.
UPPING
THE DEATH TOLLS
While the Times couldn't find room to include a photo of Abigail
(or any injured child) last Thursday, it did choose to again run its "Mideast
Death Toll" chart alongside the news report about the Haifa bomb.
Strangely, the Times (to my recollection) usually runs this chart
— in which it lines up total numbers of Israeli deaths next to the
greater number of Palestinian deaths — only on days after Israelis
have died. The implication would seem to be that Israel is responsible
for more fatalities than the Palestinians.
It also seems odd
that the Times doesn't (to the best of my knowledge) run these
kind of football-score-type charts for any other conflict (Protestant
vs. Catholic deaths in Northern Ireland, for example, or Afghan vs. American
deaths since September 11).
The chart itself
is fundamentally misleading. It makes no distinction between civilians
and armed combatants, lumping together suicide bombers and other gunmen
killed on shooting sprees with their innocent victims. It also reports
suspected Palestinian "collaborators" killed by their own compatriots
as if they had been killed by Israelis.
If the Times
wanted its readers to gain a better understanding of what is actually
going on in the Middle East, one could think of other statistics it could
have given. It could have informed them that 80 percent of Israeli fatalities
have been noncombatants, half of whom have been female; or that less than
5 percent of Palestinian fatalities have been female; or that a much higher
proportion of Israeli casualties than Palestinian casualties have been
older people. All these would be a good indication of which party is targeting
the innocent.
When New York
Times readers complained on another occasion about the misleading
nature of its "Mideast Death Toll" chart, the response from
the paper was surprisingly brusque and dismissive. Bill Borders (senior
editor on the Times's news desk) wrote: "The graphs are correct
because everyone that they count as dead is in fact dead. All of them."
But there is a further
problem. The Times appears to have inflated the number of Palestinian
dead. "At least 2,100 Palestinians have been killed during the months
of violence that began Sept. 29, 2000," stated a caption on March
6. Yet the Reuters news agency — which even Palestinian Authority
officials have admitted is sympathetic to their "struggle" —
provides a considerably lower figure. In a story on March 7, Reuters Gaza
correspondent Nidal al-Mughrabi writes: "At least 1,906 Palestinians
and 720 Israelis have been killed since the Palestinian uprising for statehood
began in September 2000." Not only is Reuters's estimate of Israeli
dead higher than the Times's, and the Palestinian figure considerably
lower, but the Reuters statistics also included 11 more Palestinian militants
and civilians who had been killed in disputed circumstances that morning.
The New York Times
has taken its statistics for its "Death Toll" chart from the
Palestinian Red Crescent, which it should know is a highly politicized
and sometimes militant organization — Red Crescent ambulances have
on more than one occasion been caught smuggling suicide bombers into Israel.
At least one Red Crescent medic became a suicide bomber herself, killing
or injuring over 150 Israeli civilians at a west Jerusalem shopping arcade
last year.
If the Times
wants to rely on Palestinian sources, it might do better to follow the
Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group (PHRMG), whose mission is "to
end human rights violations committed against Palestinians in the West
Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, regardless of those responsible."
The PHRMG, while certainly no friend of Israel — it is often brutal
in its criticism — is nonetheless relatively free from the influence
of Arafat's security forces. A PHRMG press release dated March 7, 2003,
states that "since the start of this bloody Intifada on September
29, 2000, 1973 Palestinian people have lost their lives" — a
figure that again includes Palestinian terrorists, but is still significantly
lower than that used by the Times.
(For the record, according to a report in the liberal Israeli newspaper
Ha'aretz on March 13, 2003: 441 of the Palestinian casualties have
been suicide bombers, bomb makers, gunmen, or activists in Hamas and Islamic
Jihad; 324 in Fatah and Tanzim; 329 in the Palestinian Authority security
forces; 69 in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the
Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. In addition, 417 have
belonged to other small, armed groups, or were individuals killed in the
course of perpetrating acts of terrorism against Israel. And 365 innocent
Palestinians — unconnected to terrorist or armed activity —
have died, though some may have been killed as a result of being caught
in Palestinian, not Israeli, crossfire.)
The New York Times
is hardly the most anti-Israel newspaper. And it is much too measured
and careful to indulge in the kind of ugly calumnies found, for example,
in the London Guardian — which in a lead editorial last year
compared Israel to al Qaeda, concluding that Israel's behavior was "every
bit as repellant." Still, in all kinds of small, insidious ways —
most of which are not apparent unless you have expert knowledge on the
Middle East — the Times's coverage is more slanted than many
readers might realize. And owing to the Times's reputation as the
newspaper of record, its distortions are especially damaging.
PREGNANT
MOTHERS
Less than 5 percent of Palestinian casualties have been female, and even
fewer have been pregnant mothers. Yet when one is killed — as happened
on March 2 — the Times takes care to let its readers know:
in news reports on March 3 (page 6), March 4 (page 1), March 5 (page 3),
and March 9. Readers would be forgiven for assuming that Israel killed
pregnant mothers every day, but these stories all refer to the same unnamed
woman.
The New York Times
also neglected to emphasize that the woman's unfortunate death happened
in the course of a successful military action to capture Mohammed Taha,
cofounder of Hamas, who was hiding in the house next door. The front-page
report by James Bennet ("Israeli Raid Snares a Foe, but leaves Family
Motherless," March 4) refers to Taha only as "a known militant."
Not until the twelfth paragraph, on an inside page, does Bennet mention
that Taha is a leader of Hamas. (He is in fact the most senior one ever
caught.) Other papers ran headlines such as "Israel nabs Hamas founder
in Gaza" (Daily News, March 4).
This was an accidental death in the course of a legitimate counterterrorist
action. But a number of pregnant Israeli mothers were killed deliberately.
If their deaths were reported at all, the Times and other media
have referred to them merely as "Israelis" or as "settlers."
For example, when a pregnant Israeli, her infant child, and other family
members were attacked at their family Passover meal at Elon Moreh on March
28, 2002, the only coverage the Times provided was the following
sentence buried in an article about Yasser Arafat: "Even as Mr. Arafat
made his pledge, a Palestinian gunmen shot and killed four Israelis in
a Jewish settlement near the West Bank city of Nablus." No mention
of the seven children left orphaned in that attack.
SHE
ADORED CHILDREN
When the Times has sympathetically profiled women who have died
in this conflict, it has more often been the suicide bombers than their
Israeli victims. Wada Idris — who killed or wounded 150 innocent
civilians on Jerusalem's Jaffa Road on January 27, 2002 — had "chestnut
hair curling past her shoulders"; she "raised doves and adored
children," James Bennet reported in a front-page article for the
Times.
Another young Palestinian
woman, Ayat al-Akhras, who blew herself up in a Jerusalem supermarket
last March, was profiled no fewer than three times by Times correspondents.
The first two articles (by Serge Schmemann, March 30, 2002, and Joel Greenberg,
March 31, 2002) presented details about her name, age, sex, occupation,
and family members, and included a large, full-length photo of her and
another of her mourning father. The only information given about the victims
of the attack was that "a man and woman were killed," and that
at least 30 were wounded. No names, no descriptions, no occupations, no
ages, no mourning families, and certainly no photographs. (All these were
given in other papers.)
While the schoolgirl
victim of al-Akhras's bombing (Rachel Levy, 17) was finally named a week
later in a third Times article (which again provided a photo and
details of the terrorist — Joel Greenberg writing that al-Akhras
wore jeans, had "flowing black hair," and so on), the male victim
of the bombing was apparently deemed to not be newsworthy: His name was
never mentioned. He was in fact Haim Smadar, who was temporarily working
as a security guard at the supermarket during the Passover holidays, and
who used himself as a human shield to keep al-Akhras from taking more
lives.
New York Times
reporters have employed sympathetic language in describing male terrorists
too. When 26 Palestinian gunmen, who had seized control of Bethlehem's
Church of the Nativity, were exiled to Gaza last May, Tim Golden's report
("Cast Adrift After Siege, Bethlehem Exiles Grieve," May 21,
2002) was surprisingly sympathetic. These men had just shot their way
into one of Christianity's holiest shrines, trashed it, and held its priests
hostage; before that they had been involved in shooting at Israeli motorists,
preparing bombs, and dispatching suicide bombers. Yet Golden went so far
as to describe the difficulties the men might now have finding work: "The
echoes, critics of the deal said, could scarcely be crueler: after half
a century in which Palestinians have fought for the return of compatriots
who fled at Israel's creation, they have been forced from their homes
once more."
DOES
THE TIMES HAVE AN AGENDA?
The Times's distorted presentation of events is especially troubling
given the very high respect in which the paper is generally held by its
readership, policymakers, and other members of the media. The Times's
framing of the conflict has for years contributed to bad diplomacy at
the State Department and elsewhere, and has fueled negative images of
Israel among the public at large. As I know from personal experience working
as a correspondent in the Middle East for both American and European papers,
foreign news editors throughout the world often look to the Times
for story ideas. Every evening, editors across America check the next
day's front-page stories on the New York Times before altering
their lineups.
Especially abroad,
some mistakenly presume that the New York Times must be pro-Israel
since it is Jewish-owned and has several prominent Jewish writers and
editors. In fact, it may be precisely for this reason that it bends over
backward to avoid being seen as the "Jew York Times," as one
European journalist I used to work with in Israel called it. There would
be nothing new in this. The Times deliberately downplayed reports
on the Holocaust in the 1940s. It hid news of the ongoing genocide of
European Jewry "in small print on the back pages… Jewish-owned
but anxious not to be seen as Jewish-oriented," as historian David
S. Wyman put it.
WHAT
PASSOVER MASSACRE?
The slants and omissions in the Times extend well beyond basic
reporting. For example, in last year's "Year in Review" calendar
(December 29, 2002), the Times highlighted the most important events
of the year. The entry for March 28 read: "Arab world agrees to relations
with Israel if land is returned" (this is hardly news; it is a claim
some Arabs have made for decades) — followed directly by, on March
29, "Israel invades Yasser Arafat's headquarters, 5 Palestinians,
1 Israeli die." The reader is left with the impression that Israel's
only response to the supposed Arab peace offer was violence.
In fact, on March
27 (on which only the death of comedian Milton Berle was marked by the
Times), 29 Israelis — including an 89-year-old Auschwitz survivor,
Sarah Levy-Hoffman — were blown up while celebrating a Passover seder
at a Netanya hotel, something the Times did not list in its calendar.
(The Times does mention the Passover bomb in a footnote to its
calendar, but says only that "more than a dozen people died,"
an odd way to characterize a group of 29 people. Incidentally, six Israelis
— not one — were killed by Palestinians on March 29.)
These are the kind
of errors that the Times makes almost every day in it Middle East
coverage. If the paper were making similar errors in favor of Israel,
we might put it all down to sloppiness. But it doesn't.
As Bret Stephens,
the editor of the Jerusalem Post, pointed out last August, when
one carefully examines the New York Times's corrections column,
one can see that in all cases the mistakes were made against Israel. "In
a more normal world," wrote Stephens, "a newspaper's mistakes,
particularly in its political and diplomatic reporting, would more-or-less
be randomly distributed... Yet while a search of NYT corrections over
the past two years discloses the usual measure of forgivable bloopers,
not once has the paper erred on the side of Israel. A pattern of bias,
maybe?"
The Times
does not seem to be living up to its self-proclaimed reputation for thoroughness.
"All the news that's fit to print," trumpets the paper in a
famous box on the top left corner every day. In practice, however, the
editors only correct a very small proportion of the paper's many Middle
East errors and slurs against Israel. The celebrated political commentator
Walter Lippmann once observed that "The study of error serves as
a stimulating introduction to the study of truth." This seems to
be the case here.
EARLY
ERRORS REMAIN
The Times's misreporting may well have continuing repercussions.
Take a mistake made on the very first day of the Intifada. A Jewish student,
Tuvia Grossman, was brutally beaten and stabbed by a Palestinian mob near
the Western Wall. Yet the New York Times picture caption (September
30, 2000) identified him as a Palestinian victim of Israeli violence.
Even though the Times did publish a correction in this case (following
intense pressure from the Grossman family), today an official Egyptian
government website continues to use the Grossman photo — perhaps
lifted at the time from the Times website — as part of its
propaganda campaign, in a "photo gallery" of Palestinian victims.
Until last year, the website of the Palestinian Information Center incorporated
the mis-captioned photo of Grossman onto its homepage banner, too. Last
year, Arab groups calling for a boycott of Coca-Cola used the photo of
Grossman's bleeding face on its "Boycott Israel" poster with
the accompanying slogan: "By supporting American products, you're
supporting Israeli terror."
THEY
DO IT THEIR WAY
The imbalance extends to the op-ed pages as well. For example, on a visit
to Saudi Arabia, Times columnist Maureen Dowd allowed the anti-Semitic
slanders of the Saudi deputy education minister to be repeated unchallenged
and uncriticized, as if they were fact: "Why don't you go to Israeli
math textbooks and see what they're saying — If you kill 10 Arabs
one day and 12 the next day, what would be the total?" he said ("Under
the Ramadan Moon," November 6, 2002). When a reader asked why the
Times allowed such slanderous and utterly untrue statements to
go unquestioned, Gail Collins, a member of the editorial board, replied:
"Maureen was using the textbook comment as an example of the extreme
misinformation that floats around in the Mideast. It's obvious that she
didn't expect anyone to take it literally. However I'm very sorry you
were disturbed by it."
But, given the Times's track record of Middle East coverage —
and the inflammatory accusations and conspiracy theories against Jews
and Israel presently popping up elsewhere in the media — does anyone
really believe that this will be so "obvious" to the Times's
millions of readers?
The Times does have a pro-Israel columnist, William Safire. But
this hardly makes up for the slant of other columnists (it would take
a whole book to explain how Tom Friedman gets it wrong on Israel), let
alone those of its outside contributors — such as Allegra Pacheco,
a Jewish lawyer-activist who represents Palestinians in the West Bank
and condemns Israel as an "apartheid" state; or Henry Siegman,
another Jewish activist whose writings are presently proudly displayed
on the website of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Indeed, the New York Times's idea of balance almost seems to be
to run alternating pieces — first by Palestinians and others condemning
Israel, then by far-left Jews condemning Israel. When an outside op-ed
writer, the noted international human-rights expert Prof. Anne Bayefsky,
included a sentence sympathetic to Israel in her article (May 22, 2002),
the Times tried to muzzle her. Only through dogged persistence,
Bayefsky says, did she manage to persuade the Times to restore
a sentence criticizing the U.N. Human Rights Commission for directing
a full 30 percent of its resolutions against Israel. Bayefsky was so exasperated
by her experience with the Times op-ed desk that she wrote an entire
article about it in the June 2002 edition of the legal magazine Justice.
JEWS
FOR ARAFAT
The Times also likes to devote ample publicity to anti-Zionist
Jews. Last March and April, for example — in a period when it ran
almost no stories on the hundreds of Israeli victims and survivors of
suicide bombs (which were then occurring at a record rate) — the
Times carried at least four stories quoting Adam Shapiro, an American
Jew who entered Ramallah to protect and assist Yasser Arafat when Israel
responded.
The Times repeatedly referred to Shapiro as a "humanitarian
worker." This was curious, since Shapiro himself admits to support
for "armed resistance" and a Palestinian "violent movement."
Nowhere in its extensive and largely sympathetic coverage of Shapiro did
the Times quote from his article in Palestine Chronicle
a month earlier, in which he explains that when he said he told Western
journalists he supported non-violence this was merely a tactical maneuver
to "manipulate … a story". In the same article, Shapiro
also referred to a "suicide operation" as "noble."
The Times's largely sympathetic portrayal of Shapiro fits into
a familiar pattern of photo captions, headlines, and articles about Western
supporters of Yasser Arafat, in which they are described as "pacifists,"
"peace advocates," or "peace activists."
WHITEWASHING
ARAFAT
But perhaps, when future historians examine the Times's record
in this period, they will conclude that their biggest mistake of all was
to have spent years sanitizing the image of Yasser Arafat, in effect helping
to persuade Western governments to continue propping up his regime even
as both Palestinians and Israelis died and the formation of a democratic
Palestinian state was continually delayed.
The Times has consistently underplayed Arafat's role in orchestrating
the ongoing terror against Israel. It has failed to report how the al-Aqsa
Brigades, the militia Arafat set up after launching the Intifada, has
been responsible for as many Israeli civilian deaths as Hamas. Even when
the al-Aqsa Brigades proudly claims responsibility for killing a mother,
her 5- and 4-year-old sons, and two other Israelis at a Kibbutz (as it
did on November 10 of last year, posting a photo of the perpetrator on
it website), a front-page Times report on December 17, 2002, described
the gunman merely as "mysterious" — as though it wasn't
known who had pulled the trigger.
SADDAM'S
BEST FRIEND
Over the last year, the New York Times has devoted hundreds of
thousands of words to both Arafat and Saddam Hussein. Yet you would be
hard-pressed to find any reference to Arafat's continuing support for
Saddam. When Arafat sent "holiday greetings" to the Iraqi dictator,
as he did last month in a telegram (reported in other Arab and Western
media on February 22, 2003), calling him "Your Excellency, Brother-President
Saddam" and writing that "Together, hand in hand [we will march]
to Al-Quds Al-Sharif [Jerusalem] with the help of Allah" — you
won't find mention of it in the Times.
The Times will publish an editorial which it says was written by
Yasser Arafat ("The Palestinian Vision of Peace," February 3,
2002) allowing him to make statements such as "I condemn the attacks
carried out by terrorist groups against Israeli civilians." But it
will barely report that in that same week, at a rally in Ramallah (February
7, 2002), Arafat repeated his call for "millions of martyrs"
to attack Jerusalem; nor will it emphasize that it was the Arafat-affiliated
al-Aqsa Brigades that claimed credit for an attack on Israeli civilians
in Moshav Hamra, a farming community, on February 6, 2002.
DON'T
MISS YASSER'S VIEWS
The Times even took the unusual step, in its February 3 daily e-mail
update sent to subscribers ("Today's Headlines from NYTimes.com"),
of listing Arafat's op-ed as the lead article in the International news
section, even though it has a specific Op-Ed section in the daily digest.
The Times's e-mail update did not identify the story as an opinion,
nor did it identify the author. It just read: "Palestinians want
to live as equals alongside Israel in an independent and viable state
on the territories occupied by Israel in 1967" — a very different
message than that being broadcast at the same time in the Arafat-controlled
Palestinian media.
That the Times
has on occasion run editorials calling on Arafat's followers to cease
"attacks on Israeli soldiers, settlers, and civilians" hardly
makes up for its overall record of obscuring the truth about Arafat's
views. For example, when the paper published a long interview and profile
of Arafat on July 8, 2001, detailing the Palestinian leader's insistence
that he had lived up to a recent U.S.-brokered cease-fire agreement calling
on him to stop incitement against Israelis, they failed to mention that,
only days before, he had praised the suicide bomber who had recently killed
21 Israelis (mainly teenage girls) at a Tel Aviv seaside disco as a "noble
soul" and "the model of manhood and sacrifice for the sake of
Allah and the homeland."
Even though Arafat's standing internationally is now greatly diminished
(no thanks to New York Times reporting), the Times continues
its pattern of omitting information that might cast him in a bad light.
Two weeks ago, for example, on February 27, Forbes magazine released
its annual list of the world's wealthiest people. In a new category for
"kings, queens, and despots," it ranked Arafat sixth, just behind
Britain's Queen Elizabeth.
Forbes outlined
how Arafat has "feasted on all sorts of funds flowing into the Palestinian
Authority, including aid money… Much of the money appears to have
gone to pay off others... [including] payments to alleged terrorists...
Take the money out of his hands, reform a corrupt financial system and
you could reduce the violence."
Yet, while the Times did run a story on the corruption of the Palestinian
Authority — "Palestinian Assets 'a Mess' Official Says,"
March 1, 2003 — correspondent James Bennet not only refrained from
mentioning the Forbes findings, he barely even mentioned Arafat's
name. The man who has maintained an iron grip on Palestinian finances
and funds for the past four decades apparently has nothing to do with
the corruption.
WOULD
THEY DO THE SAME TO MECCA?
The Times works against Israel in other, subtle ways. Sometimes
it is the small words that creep into news pieces in an attempt to tarnish
Israel: "After 26 months of Palestinian suicide bombings and pitiless
Israeli retaliation," reports Michael Wines — December 8, 2002.
(Apparently it is not the suicide bombers that are "pitiless.")
Or sometimes in the course of the same article, armed Arab rioters trying
to kill Jews are referred to as "demonstrators"; meanwhile,
Jewish rioters "rampage" when they respond (as in a report by
Deborah Sontag, October 10, 2000, or in a report in the Times on
the same day by Chris Hedges, titled "Crowds of Jews Rampage in Nazareth").
On other occasions, information that might cast the Palestinians in a
bad light is omitted. For example, even though its news reports are much
longer than those in most papers, no mention was made in the Times
of the mass celebrations in Gaza following last summer's Hebrew University
bombing (five American students and teachers died in that attack).
The New York Times has also subtly altered its definitions and
terminology. Take the Temple Mount, for instance, which historians, archeologists,
Christians, Muslims, and others have for centuries acknowledged as Judaism's
holiest place, the site of two holy Jewish temples. In apparent deference
to Yasser Arafat — who has recently begun claiming that no Jewish
temple ever existed there — the Times began, two years ago,
to add the phrase "which the Arabs call the Haram al Sharif"
in mentions of the Temple Mount. A few weeks later, the Times referred
to "the Temple Mount, which Israel claims to have been the site of
the First and Second Temple." And then, in a subsequent article,
the Times described Israeli troops as having "stormed the
Haram, holiest Muslim site in Jerusalem" — without even mentioning
the status of the "Temple Mount" as Judaism's holiest site.
Would they do that to Mecca?
WHATEVER
YOU SAY, MR. ASSAD
When it comes to altering history, Times reporters are taken in
not only by Arafat's propaganda but by that of other Arab dictators too.
For example, when it covered Pope John Paul II's historic visit to Syria
in May 2001, the Times, swallowing Syrian claims, charged that
Israel had been responsible for the destruction of the border town of
Quneitra. "Pope Prays for Peace at City Destroyed by Israel,"
read its headline (May 6, 2001); readers were informed that Israel had
destroyed Quneitra in 1974 (when, in fact, Syria did so in 1973). A few
days later, the Times printed a correction — albeit an only
partially accurate one. They may only have done so, however, because alert
readers wrote in pointing out that the Times itself had over a
period of several years reported on the Syrian destruction of Quneitra:
Syria shelled
Israeli positions in the Golan for three hours, hitting "El Quneitra,
Nahal Gesher and Ein Zivan," reported the New York Times ("Fighting
Flares in Golan Heights as Syrian Tanks Attack Israelis," June 25,
1970).
Damascus
radio announces that Syrian artillery had shelled "Kafr Naffakh and
El Quneitra," reported the New York Times ("Syria Shells
Israeli Bases in Occupied Golan Heights," November 26, 1972).
A Moroccan
brigade aligned with Syria is "taking part in an attack on El Quneitra,"
reported the New York Times (October 11, 1973).
Quneitra
is now "a bombed-out military town," following the Syrian and
Moroccan bombardment, reported the New York Times (October 21,
1973).
What could have happened to the integrity and professionalism of Times
reporting to make its correspondents, in 2001, accept Syrian propaganda
as fact?
Of course, the Times is hardly alone in swallowing the propaganda
of Arab dictators. During the Pope's visit, CNN's Brent Sadler referred
to Israel's "systematic destruction of Quneitra"; Time
magazine's Tony Karon wrote that Quneitra "was destroyed by Israeli
forces in 1974 and has been maintained as a ghost town ever since";
and so on. But shouldn't we expect more of the "paper of record"?
MURDERING
FOR SPORT?
Sometimes, New York Times correspondents only admit how they really
feel after stepping down. When Deborah Sontag ended her stint as Jerusalem
bureau chief, she wrote a 6,200-word article (July 26, 2001) in which
she essentially blamed Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister,
and not Yasser Arafat, for the Intifada — even though Palestinian
cabinet ministers have themselves admitted at rallies in Gaza and Lebanon
to having carefully planned the Intifada months before it started, following
Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon; unsurprisingly, these rallies
were virtually ignored by the Times). Sontag's piece has been dubbed
"the mother of all Arafat-rehab articles."
Sontag has continued her sympathetic account of Palestinian extremists
in her new job as feature writer for The New York Times Magazine,
for example in a 7,700-word article (February 3, 2002) in which she allowed
Palestinian interviewees to make outrageous accusations against Israel
without rebuttal.
Another former Times correspondent, Chris Hedges (he was the Mideast
bureau chief for the Times from 1991-95), is also continuing to
make wild accusations against Israel. For instance, he wrote (Harper's
magazine, October 2001) that he has seen children shot in El Salvador,
Guatemala, and Sarajevo, and mothers with infants lined up and massacred
in Algeria, but that until going to Gaza he had "never before watched
soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport."
We have only Hedges's word for this claim, which was furiously rejected
by the Israeli army (although Hedges doesn't mention this in his piece).
No other journalist in Gaza — and there are plenty of them —
claims to have seen what Hedges does. Nevertheless, Harper's was
so impressed by the quote that they flagged it in very large type on the
flap attached to the cover of the magazine, and National Public Radio
was so excited that they invited Hedges to repeat his allegations on the
air ("Fresh Air," October 30, 2001). Of course, the Times
can't be held accountable for an article that appeared elsewhere, but
one nevertheless has to wonder how balanced the reporters it assigns to
the Middle East are.
MEDIA
BIAS PROLONGS THE CONFLICT
Today the New York Times is held in as high regard as ever. (Last
year it won a record seven Pulitzer Prizes.) But it isn't doing a very
good job when it comes to the Middle East. The distortions of the media
are depressing not only because they are untrue, but because they set
back the day when there might be peace and coexistence between Israeli
and Palestinian.
Liberals like myself want to see two democratic states coexisting in peace.
But we have also followed the conflict closely enough to know that the
Western media's misreporting has contributed to the failed policies of
both American and European diplomats.
For ten years now, ever since Arafat returned to Gaza, moderate Palestinians
— outside the earshot of the dozen different security forces Arafat
has set up to safeguard his rule — have long whispered to those Western
reporters who would listen that they should help to expose the corrupt,
dictatorial, and duplicitous ways of Arafat and his clique. Few reporters
have done so.
Various groups of Times readers in New York, exasperated with the
paper's bias against Israel, have repeatedly sought to discuss the matter
with publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and executive editor Howell Raines.
Yet Sulzberger and Raines have refused to meet them. Instead, last November,
they agreed to answer questions on their Mideast coverage (for the first
time, according to an AP report) from a group of mostly anti-Israel radicals
at the University of California at Berkeley. When one student there did
ask Raines why the Times's reporting wasn't more accurate, he replied:
"In this business, there's only one thing to do when you get it wrong,
and that's get it right as soon as you can."
Fine words —
and it's about time the New York Times lived up to them.
—
Tom Gross is a former Middle East correspondent for the London Sunday
Telegraph and the New York Daily News. Among his previous pieces
for NRO is "Jeningrad:
What the British Media Said."
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s the world's most important daily newspaper, the New York Times
is disproportionately influential in framing the public and diplomatic
discourse on many issues, both in the U.S. and beyond. This is particularly
true with regard to the Middle East, given how much space it allocates
to the subject. One of the great myths of modern journalism, particularly
outside the U.S., is that the New York Times is "pro-Israel."
In fact, it would be truer to say that the opposite is the case.
Syria shelled
Israeli positions in the Golan for three hours, hitting "El Quneitra,
Nahal Gesher and Ein Zivan," reported the New York Times ("Fighting
Flares in Golan Heights as Syrian Tanks Attack Israelis," June 25,
1970).
