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The Coverage--and Non-Coverage--of Israel-Palestine
Again, this sounds so deceptively simple. We made our way through armed Israeli checkpoints, rode in crowded vehicles that were stopped by Israeli police, wondered when or if we would be harassed. When we arrived in Jerusalem, we went straight to the AP bureau. We discovered that it was in a large building in the Israeli section of Jerusalem that appeared to house most, maybe all, of the major U.S. news bureaus. We went up to the 8th floor, still carrying our packs, and entered the AP office. We walked up to the bureau chief, Steve Gutkin, and asked him about this incident and why the tape was erased instead of broadcast. He became flustered and said he wasn’t allowed to say anything, that AP requires its Corporate Communications office to respond to all requests for information. Later, when we returned to the U.S., we phoned AP Corporate Communications and asked Jack Stokes, director of media relations, about this incident. I told Stokes about what I had learned, and asked him whether AP had indeed erased this video, and, if so, why. He said he would look into this and get back to me with the information. When I phoned him a few days later, he said that he had looked into it, and that this was “an internal AP matter” that he could tell me nothing about. In other words, AP had video footage of an Israeli soldier specifically and intentionally shooting a young Palestinian boy who was not attacking them, and they erased it. I don’t know how often they do this. But back to the West Bank, and Steve Gutkin. My daughter and I run a small organization that focuses on the Israeli-Palestinian issue and, in particular, studies how it is covered in the American media. We were there to present our research into this topic at a conference in Ramallah, as well as to gather more information. Extremely disturbed at what we were discovering about AP news coverage, we decided to investigate further. Months earlier I had heard that AP had a bureau in Ramallah in the West Bank, but when I had phoned AP in Washington, DC, and New York about this, no one seemed to have heard of it. AP receptionists kept trying to look it up, and then would give me the number for the Jerusalem bureau, saying that was the only one listed. We traveled to Ramallah, phoned a Palestinian agency, and asked if there was indeed an AP bureau in the city. They said there was, and gave us the phone number. We called this and were readily given directions to the bureau. When we arrived, we found a fully-staffed, professional bureau. While the Jerusalem bureau had appeared to be largely, perhaps exclusively, staffed by Israelis and Jewish Americans, this office appeared to contain journalists of Palestinian ethnicity. We spoke to the bureau chief at length, and to his associate, an on-camera female reporter. They described how their news process worked. They and other correspondents throughout the Palestinian territories would cover events that took place in the area, then send their reporting to writers in the Jerusalem bureau, who would write the actual article. For example, while we were there, they received a phone call from a correspondent in Nablus. This time a 12-year-old boy had been killed. The boy, Bashar Zabara, had been throwing stones toward Israeli forces approximately 300 meters away. He had been shot in the throat with live ammunition. The bureau chief immediately phoned the Jerusalem bureau with all the details. Journalists in the Jerusalem bureau would then write up the story and send it out to the many worldwide papers that subscribe to AP’s services. The fact that everything reported by the West Bank bureau was vetted by the Jerusalem bureau flagged our attention. AP Jerusalem was the bureau that had recently erased footage of a similar incident. We asked the Ramallah bureau journalists if they could send out wire stories themselves. They said no, that all reports went through the Jerusalem bureau. I remembered the Ramallah bureau chief’s name from having occasionally seen articles with his byline in the past. Confused, we asked him if he ever wrote news stories himself. He said no, that he always called the information into Jerusalem, and that they then wrote the stories there. We were surprised—and concerned—to learn that the bylines and datelines of stories were being misrepresented in this way. Given the ethnic nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the fact that the ethnicities live and suffer in two different (if neighboring) locations, both the location and ethnicity of journalists writing about the conflict are particularly relevant. While it is certainly appropriate to give full credit to journalists who gather information for a story, we felt that it was highly misleading that stories with a Palestinian byline and West Bank dateline were being written by Israeli and Jewish correspondents living in Israel—that one ethnic group in the conflict actually wrote news stories purported to be by reporters from the other ethnic group in the dispute. If such a situation is for some reason necessary, it would seem important to disclose this fact with more accurate attribution, perhaps in the form of a byline reading “Reporting by …, Written by …“
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