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The Coverage--and Non-Coverage--of Israel-Palestine
I phoned the foreign desk immediately—there was still time to correct this story before it was published in the following day’s print version—and pointed out that this alleged “months-long period of relative calm” had in reality been a time of particularly high Palestinian casualties. The preceding months had included the killing of 170 Palestinian men, women, and children and the wounding of 379 more. I was told that the story said the calm was “relative,” and therefore would not be modified. Not only did the next day’s paper contain this highly false statement, the LA Times refused to print a single op-ed or letter to the editor correcting it, despite receiving many. By the way, the story carried a double byline. I looked into the reporters and found that one was a neophyte to the Middle East, while the other was an Israeli whose son was about to join the Israeli military. REACTIONS FROM THE MEDIA How have these news organization responded to such studies? In our reports we write: “Given that the media have a desire and a responsibility to cover this topic accurately, we provide these reports in the hope that our analyses can assist them in achieving this goal.” In our conclusions, we use almost the identical words that we used in one of our very first studies: “We assume that the San Francisco Chronicle is as disturbed as we have been to find these shortfalls in its quest to provide excellent news reporting to its readers. Now that it has been alerted to these distortions in its Israel-Palestine coverage, we encourage the Chronicle to undertake whatever changes necessary to provide accurate news coverage of this vital issue.” Sadly, it appears that the Chronicle was indeed as disturbed as we were—but not at the distortion we had documented. Rather, indications have been that the paper was only disturbed that the profound flaws in their coverage were being exposed; there seems to be little interest in remedying the situation. Numerous phone calls to editor Phil Bronstein to present our findings in person remained unreturned. When we had the opportunity to ask Bronstein about it at a community forum, he publicly promised he would meet with us to discuss our findings. However, he has continued to refuse to meet with us. It is interesting to note that Bronstein got his start at the San Francisco Jewish Bulletin, where one of his early journalistic exposés was on American corporations participating in the international boycott of Israel (Congress, following Israel’s directions, had made such financial pressure on Israel illegal). Despite the Chronicle’s lack of interest in our findings, several local organizations and many individuals have found them important and have distributed thousands of summaries of our report throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. We have presented our findings to a variety of Bay Area Rotary Clubs, at libraries, schools, and college campuses, and have discussed them on a number of radio programs. In addition, thousands of people have read our report online. Other editors around the country have been more open to meeting with us. The reception has been mixed. Some editors of smaller papers were extremely surprised at the number of Palestinians actually being killed, and clearly had no idea that their coverage was so distorted. Their frequent conclusion—that the wire services that they subscribe to for international news stories bore much of the blame for this distortion—no doubt holds some validity. The New York Times, unable to use the same excuse, instead has tried to ignore our evidence. An April 24, 2005 column by Public Editor Daniel Okrent on the Times coverage of Israel/Palestine, published a week after we had presented our findings to him in detail during a lengthy face-to-face meeting, omitted all mention of our two-year study of The Times’s coverage, the forty-plus pages of documentation we provided, and our significant findings. He did mention our organization, however, in a statement misrepresenting our views. Interestingly, during the meeting in which we presented our findings, Okrent had asked us what we felt was the cause for the Times distortion, and how we would fix it. We gave two answers: that figuring out where their system had broken down was up to them. They are the only ones who know the internal workings of the Times newsroom and thus are the best equipped to discover what is wrong. At the same time, I told Okrent that I wondered how diverse their team of editors and reporters working on this issue is. Since Israel’s purpose and avowed identity is as “the Jewish state,” I commented that it seemed to me there should be approximately equal numbers of Jewish journalists and Palestinian/Arab/Muslim journalists, as well as journalists without ethnic connections to either side—perhaps African-American, Asian-American, or editors and reporters from other non-involved ethnicities . He responded that there were insufficient numbers of Arab-American or Muslim-American journalists to balance out the many Jewish reporters in this country, and ignored the suggestion that people of other, neutral ethnicities be involved in covering this issue.
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