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Sunday, May 5, 2002;
Page B06
Caught in the
Crossfire
By Michael Getler
Fifty years of Israeli-Palestinian hostility has always brought charges
of bias about the way the conflict is reported. But the escalating
brutality of recent months has caught the American press in the
crossfire as never before.
The Post's coverage has been the subject of this column on a couple of
occasions as a number of people -- some on their own and others as part
of write-in campaigns -- challenge what they view as a fairly
consistent anti-Israel bias. The Washington-area director of the
American Jewish Committee wrote recently to say that while The Post's
coverage "has gotten better with time, the early coverage was bad
beyond belief. There was simply no effort whatsoever to use Israeli
sources, balance Palestinian narratives with Israeli perspectives, or
even check the validity of certain reports." He said his committee is
working on a three-month analysis of Post coverage.
At a gathering of news ombudsmen in Salt Lake City last week, a
representative of the Hartford Courant displayed a 108-page analysis of
the paper's alleged pro-Palestinian bias provided by a group called
PRIMER, for Promoting Responsibility in Middle East Reporting.
Last Sunday, Los Angeles Times media reporter David Shaw wrote: "Major
Jewish organizations and other supporters of Israel in this country
have increasingly bombarded newspapers in recent weeks with charges of
biased reporting." Almost 1,000 subscribers to the Los Angeles Times
suspended home delivery for one day to protest what they called
inaccurate reporting, and in New York, Shaw reported, "many in the
Jewish community are calling for a reader boycott of the New York
Times." The article reported similar challenges of varying degrees at
The Post, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the
Chicago Tribune, the Portland Oregonian and the Sacramento Bee. From
the San Francisco Chronicle to Boston's Christian Science Monitor,
editors have reported increasingly vocal challenges to their reporting,
not to mention National Public Radio, whose ombudsman told the Salt
Lake gathering that he received some 8,000 e-mails in the past week,
"some rants, some vicious and some quite good."
The scope of this barrage raises an interesting question. Is it
possible that so many major American news organizations are getting
this story wrong; that some sort of national media conspiracy is at
work here?
That, of course is not the case, and news organizations will persevere
in reporting this story in an unflinching, unintimidated fashion that
presents the news in the most accurate way possible for their entire
readership.
But it is also true that within the barrage of criticism there are
challenges of fact and context, issues of balance, fairness and,
importantly, verification, that must be assessed and, when valid,
heeded by editors. My view is that Post reporters in the field have
done a solid job recording this difficult and dangerous clash. They
have also provided more steady coverage of the Palestinian side than
they did in earlier conflicts, and it may be that some readers are not
used to this. Verification is difficult in some of this reporting, and
some degree of trust must be given to the judgment and experience of
correspondents and editors. But in such a fierce, high-stakes fight,
that won't be forthcoming from all readers.
I think The Post has done less well providing context. There has not
been enough information about the Israeli settlements, or about what
happened in 1948, 1967 and 1973 for readers who don't know or need to
be reminded. The impact of Arab television on policy and the public,
and the string of anti-Semitic incidents in Europe, have been given
short shrift.
On Thursday, a story about a 21-year-old Palestinian who left the
besieged Church of the Nativity ended with him saying, in a "soft, calm
voice," that "Jesus, in history, went through a lot of hardships caused
by the Jews. Finally, he won and came out victorious. I think we had
the same experience." The quotation, reflecting "one of the oldest and
ugliest libels against the Jews," as one message said, angered a number
of readers. The paper should not shy away from reporting sentiments
that are relevant to a struggle. But conveying them uncritically or
without some effort at context also feeds the perception of bias, or
worse.
ombudsman@washpost.com
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