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Saturday, May 18, 2002
The Washington Post
A21
Editorial
Examine Your Bias
In five recent columns [March 10, 24; April 21; May 5, 12] ombudsman
Michael Getler has alluded to or directly confronted allegations of
pro-Palestinian bias in your paper's reporting. While acknowledging
occasional shortcomings, he quotes your paper's assistant managing
editor for foreign news, who declares the coverage "as fair and
balanced as we can make it."
Here's another opinion: guilty of imbalance and bias by omission.
Apparently, no review has been conducted to examine the placement,
length, size and tone of the articles or how the coverage compares with
reporting about other conflicts. Absent that, three articles,
considered together, exemplify an imbalance that occurs in many of the
nearly 100 news and feature stories published on Arab-Israeli matters
and related U.S. policy in March, April and early May :
* On March 13, Lee Hockstader's 26-inch story "Father, Son Dead;
Family Wonders Why" ran as a front-page feature. It complemented
Hockstader's news story, "Massive Israeli Force Enters Ramallah;
Thousands of Troops Assault City, Camp; 30 Palestinians Killed." Both
were accompanied by a large, color photo of Israeli armor.
In the feature we read that "weeping [Izzadin] family members accused
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of terrorism, and called him a
'beast.'
" 'Oh, my son, my son, my beloved son!' sobbed Walid's mother
. . . tears streaming down her cheeks. Her enraged
daughters and daughters-in-law grabbed the two men's bloodstained
clothes from a plastic sack and held them out to foreign visitors, as
if demanding an explanation."
* On March 22, Daniel Williams's article "Young Bombers Nurtured by
Despair" also appeared on the front page. We learn that before her
attack, Dareen Abu Aisheh "had a long series of Socratic debates with
her uncle, Jasser Khalili, over the rightness and wrongness of suicide
bombing." A front-page color photo of Abu Aisheh's mother, displaying
photos of her terrorist child in militant poses, accompanies the
29-inch story.
A series of quotations from Palestinian public health and
child-development workers portrays suicide bombing as a regrettable but
predictable reaction to Israeli actions. The tone of the story --
"Socratic debates"? -- is sympathetic if not approving.
* Israeli lives and dreams shattered by numerous acts of Palestinian
terrorism generated no such personal, front-page coverage in March. Not
until the second-deadliest massacre of Jewish civilians since the
Palestinians launched their intifada in September 2000 did a similar
story appear, on March 29, Hockstader's "For an Unbowed Elder, Another
Survival Story" -- on Page A17.
This 16-inch feature about the March 27 suicide bombing of a Passover
Seder, which killed 29 people and wounded nearly 100, ran with a
two-column, black-and-white photo. It contained no quotations about the
"beastly" behavior of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, no sources
sympathetic to Israeli despair or anger, no personal details of the
Jewish dead.
In addition to imbalance, there's a chronic problem of context -- or
rather, its omission. A March 21 news story by Williams, "When Charge
Is Collaboration, Death Isn't Final Punishment," epitomizes this
failing. Williams asserts that "ever since the notion of a Jewish
national home in Palestine was broached by British mandate officials 80
years ago, Palestinians have frequently been at war with themselves."
Much is wrong here. The people known as "Palestinians" for the first
half of the 20th century were Jews -- hence Jewish institutions with
names such as the Palestine National Fund, the Palestine Post and the
Palestine Philharmonic. Arabs shunned the term. British officials did
not "broach" the idea of a restored Jewish national home 80 years ago;
they responded to the accomplishments of the Zionist movement, then
already 30 years old. The Arabs of Palestine frequently were divided --
but as much over which clans should exercise authority under the
British as how to retard Jewish resettlement.
Williams writes that for Palestinians, "a collaborator may be defined
as someone . . . who has been deemed overly cozy with
occupation authorities since Israel seized the West Bank and Gaza Strip
in 1967 or who . . . was accused of giving Israelis
information leading to the harm or death of resistance fighters."
This one sentence skews coverage in three fundamental ways. The
reference to "occupation authorities" uncritically adopts Arab rhetoric
meant to recall Nazi and Soviet occupations in World War II and the
Cold War. The phrase "Israel seized the West Bank and Gaza Strip in
1967" appears with no context that it did so in a war of self-defense
-- taking the land from Jordan and Egypt, illegal occupants as a result
of their aggression in an earlier war. "Resistance fighters"
overwhelmingly refers to terrorists who target civilians.
The ombudsman asserts that "readers are fortunate to have such
courageous reporting from the field and from both sides." But the
courage of your correspondents was never the issue. The accuracy of
your coverage is.
-- Eric Rozenman
The writer is executive editor of B'nai B'rith's International Jewish
Monthly. The opinions expressed here are his own.
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