During the winter of 1974, Seymour Topping, the assistant managing editor of The New York Times, and his wife, Audrey, visited Jordan as part of a tour of the Middle East.
On their stops in Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, Topping often had to confront criticism that the Times’s coverage was too favorable to Israel. It was a familiar enough situation for him; to be the editor of the Times in charge of international coverage meant you were a magnet for complaints. They were usually about the paper, but sometimes about US policy, which foreigners often believed was refracted through the Times’s coverage.
In Jordan, King Hussein took a different approach: he arranged for the Toppings to visit a nearby Palestinian refugee camp. The visit affected Topping markedly—he saw both the squalor of the camp and the festering hatred of Israel—and he recounted afterwards that he realized he had not understood the role of the Palestinians in the region’s future until then.
Topping had also regularly discussed the region’s problems with some good friends in New York, Najeeb and Doris Halaby. Topping was fond of Halaby, the chairman of Pan American World Airways and a man of Syrian and Lebanese ancestry who stayed engaged in the politics of the Arab world.
Once, when their families were together at a conference, the Halabys’ teenage daughter, Lisa, babysat for the Toppings.
A few years after his visit to Jordan, Topping, now the managing editor, was having lunch with Doris Halaby and again the subject was the Times’s coverage of the region. By that time, the grown-up Lisa Halaby was Queen Noor of Jordan. She had become Hussein’s fourth wife, after his third wife was killed in a helicopter accident.
Mrs. Halaby, likely reflecting as well the views of Jordan’s royal household, said the Times’s coverage of the Middle East was often biased in favor of Israel. She cited as a reason that the correspondent in the region, David K. Shipler, was a Jew.
The coverage by the Times was straightforward and fair, Topping asserted politely. And, after checking (for he actually did not know), he was later able to offer a winning rejoinder to Mrs. Halaby: Shipler was not Jewish.
Topping’s response made the issue seem irrelevant to the way in which the newspaper covered the region. But the issue was no simple matter at the Times, either for Shipler or for those who followed him.
Topping did not, for example, mention that when Abe Rosenthal, the paper’s executive editor, chose Shipler to be the Jerusalem bureau chief, it was with the explicit but mistaken belief that the man he was assigning to Israel was Jewish. Rosenthal believed he was breaking an invidious pattern at the Times of declining to send Jewish reporters to cover Israel. It was a practice predicated on the speculative notion that a Jewish correspondent would have an inherent conflict of interest that would leave the coverage open to criticism.
After making his choice, Rosenthal remarked proudly to a small group on his decision to end the practice. Joseph Lelyveld, then the deputy foreign editor, told Rosenthal he was puzzled because he thought the paper was sending Shipler. We are, Rosenthal said. Lelyveld then told an amazed—and somewhat embarrassed—Rosenthal that their new correspondent was, in fact, Protestant.
Rosenthal wasn’t the last to make that mistake. During Shipler’s tenure in Jerusalem, several of his readers who held Israel dear apparently also assumed he was Jewish—he regularly received mail from them denouncing his coverage in vitriolic terms. One reader, in a series of letters, wished many kinds of ill fortune upon him. Then, in a piece for the paper’s travel section, Shipler described himself in an aside as a fallen Protestant.
This is a ridiculous, misguided, and--might I say, "toxic"--topic for an article. Just about everyone who covers the Middle East on the ground for a major western news organization other than the Times would agree that the Times has had some of the most disgraceful coverage of Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank; that the Times' coverage of the region carries such an obscenely pro-Israel slant, that its typically superior standards of objectivity, neutrality, and nuanced international reporting fall by the wayside when it comes to Israel and the Palestinians. Every single one of the New York Times' Israel/Palestine permanent correspondents in Israel are Jews. No staff correspondent is permanently based in Gaza or the West Bank. And all but one is an Israeli Jew (as opposed to an American Jew married to an Israeli Jew, in Ethan Bronner's case), which means that they're legally prohibited from entering the Gaza Strip--a stipulation that makes it pretty tough to do journalism, given that Gaza is a huge part of the Israel-Palestine equation. Bronner, according to his colleagues, has also made clear on numerous occasions that he hates making the trip into Gaza to cover the Palestinians. Would this be the case had the Times made any attempt to balance the ethnic and religious make-up of its Israel/Palestine staffers? Possibly. But at least they'd be trying.
#1 Posted by Gilbert Hoffman, CJR on Fri 13 Jan 2012 at 04:18 PM
As it happens, I received a similar complaint in the 1980s, when I was based in Paris and CBS News sent me down to Israel to fill in for the resident correspondent, Bob Simon. After I'd produced a couple of stories that the government clearly did not like, Zev Chafets, then Menahem Begin's press counselor, called me in and asked how someone like me could present stories like this about his own people. Americans? I asked, surprised. No, Jews. I explained that I was an American correspondent and was there anything inaccurate in any of my reports? Not the point, Chafets replied...and let that hang.
Later that evening, as it happened, I had dinner with Shipler, an old friend from my Times days, who said that eventually they would just write me off as a Jewish anti-Semite, though I probably would not be in the country long enough for them to come to that conclusion. He remarked on how astonished they were when he revealed to them that he was not Jewish....hence they'd need another ploy!
#2 Posted by David A. Andelman, CJR on Fri 13 Jan 2012 at 04:58 PM
One enters this with humility, however, in defence of Arthur Hays Sulzberger, may I quote Max Hastings, the distinguished British journalist and historian, who who wrote in his just published history of WW2 "All Hell Let Loose": 'The limited attention paid to the Jewish predicament by the wartime allies was a source of frustration and anger to informed co-religionists at the time, and has prompted powerful indignation since. But it is important to recognise that between 1939 and 1945 the Allied nations saw the struggle overwhelmingly in terms of the threat posed by the Axis to their own interests...'
#3 Posted by Simon Holberton, CJR on Sat 14 Jan 2012 at 04:59 AM
This long and chatty article about the personalities involved in the New York Times
sheds no light upon the real issue, whether or not the Times is anti-Israel. Why not mention the number of cases CAMERA has presented where the headline was not about a Palestinian terrorist attack, but the Israeli response? Why not question the op-eds that distorted the truth including Israel "pinkwashing' the oppression of Palestinians? The author mentions the squalor of the Palestinian camps, but fails to mention that Arab governments practice apartheid not allowing Palestinians out. As for terror, my family was displaced from Lithuania. When was the last time anyone heard of Jews attacking Lithuanians or Germans just because of their nationality in spite of what they did to us? I really do not care about the history of the New York Times correspondents in Israel. Look at the facts and examine whether or not there is justification to call the Times anti-Israel. I believe there is, and I am not an orthodox Jew, contrary to the insinuation that these people are the ones raising the issue. By the way, nice anti-Semitic cartoon you have with the article. Why don't you make his nose a little longer???
#4 Posted by Laura Goldmeier, CJR on Sun 15 Jan 2012 at 08:33 PM
When was the last time the NYT published anything about the 1 million Jews ethnically cleansed from Arab countries? This is one important part of the story that receives almost no coverage.
#5 Posted by ex-syrian Jew, CJR on Mon 16 Jan 2012 at 09:38 AM
Look, the Israeli - Palestinian situation is a complex one with many bad dynamics and few worthy heros. There are dispossessed people within a land surrounded by hostile neighbors who will not take them. There are settlers who are annexing bubbles of land, and absorbing the lion's share of resources of food and water, based on non-internationally recognized claims. There are actors who supply weapons instead of medicine and resources to the desperate population in order to advance the cause of a fearful and discredited Israel. There are Israelis who make unreasonable demands of the peace process and tolerate and provoke terrorist organizations within Israel to advance the cause of a angry and discredited Palestine. In the end, it breaks down to a conflict of who has a right to exist in a dignified manner in an area of limited resource and questionable security.
Questions of bias in a conflict with no heroic party are stupid. This isn't sports. It's a situation which demands a careful and honest eye in order to resolve this conflict justly. Acts must be evaluated apart from sides so that we can drag both sides closer to ideal humanitarian behavior. Israel's attack on the Turkish flotilla has to be evaluated for what it was, Hezbollah rocket attacks have to be evaluated for what they are, both have to be condemned for what they are.
We, as observers, have to make a choice. Are we going to root for Israel or Palestine or peace and dignity?
Now the times is biased in favor of othrodox US foreign policy dogma. US policy is unabashedly biased for Israeli interests, partially out of energy concerns and partially out of religious and ethnic ties to Zionism. An honest look at times reporting would make us look at American government and ask questions of what it's attempting to do in that area, with the money and diplomatic support it gives - often uncritically - to one actor. That's my opinion at least.
#6 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Mon 16 Jan 2012 at 02:43 PM
I think phrases like “everyone would agree …” or “everyone knows …” when making an argument is often used to mask a weak case; it can suggest to people who might be unfamiliar with the facts there is some consensus of belief out there among those who are familiar with the issue at hand.
It is understandable and fair that different people have varying views on how The Times covers Israel and that is reflected in my article.
But Gilbert Hoffman’s comment above that almost every western journalist in Israel would agree that The Times’s coverage is disgracefully pro-Israel is simply untrue and offers no enlightenment. There may well be a correspondent or correspondents for some western news outlets who feel this way, but Mr. Hoffman’s claim is misleading and not an honest or fact-bound portrayal of the situation.
#7 Posted by neil lewis , CJR on Mon 16 Jan 2012 at 05:15 PM
Further Mr. Hoffman complains that The Times does not cover Gaza or the West Bank because its local stringers are generally Israeli Jews and cannot legally travel to Gaza. But The Times has long employed local Palestinian stringers as correspondents in those places; Taghreed al_Khodary served in that post for 10 years and her successor is Fares Akram. Both have been featured and credited in Times coverage. Mr. Hoffman seems unaware of their existence or role, although both are mentioned in my article which he professes to have read.
#8 Posted by neil a. lewis , CJR on Mon 16 Jan 2012 at 05:38 PM
This story is symptomatic of reporting on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in general. Bad journalism is rife and the NYT is not exempt. While The Times might not be biased against Israel, the end result is the same.
For a story in a "review journal," there isn't much review. Here are some points the write should have examined.
The Palestinian/Israeli reporter Khaled Abu Toameh recently wrote about a Palestinian professor imprisoned by the Palestinian Authority for criticizing the PA. A number of Palestinian stringers went to the Western media, including the NYT, and found no takers. Then a stringer invented the story of a Palestinian professor who was offered a teaching position at an Israeli institution, but wasn't allowed in by Israeli authorities. All the news outlets that had passed on the earlier story wanted the one that made Israel look bad.
Another example of bad reporting that made Israel look bad was the so-called Jenin massacre that never was. At the time the Palestinians claimed thousand upon thousand of dead Palestinians. News reports, including the NYT, were rife with Palestinian claims of Israeli bulldozers pushing innocent Palestinians into mass graves.
Sure those same stories had a sentence somewhere that Israeli denied the claims but that's hardly good reporting; it's more like typing. In the end, a UN investigation found that roughly 56 Palestinians were killed, most of them armed combatants. While Mr. Lewis might find this kind of initial error part of the reporting process, it certainly defames Israel.
I think anybody who has worked as a reporter, and I've been doing this for almost 20 years, has made some really bad mistakes. What I've learned from my mistakes is that no amount of correction can undue the damage caused by the original error. That's holds with Jenin, where the massacre story persists but one has to look hard to find the corrected truth.
Everybody makes mistakes, but it's important to learn from them. Unfortunately that didn't happen with the Jenin. The massacre represents a clear case of Palestinian lying. That doesn't make the Palestinians unique; everybody lies. We need to understand that as reporters, but that doesn't mean sources get a free pass for lying and it doesn't mean that we treat those same sources as reliable when a similar situation arises.
Unfortunately, during Cast Lead, the media again simply reported casualty figures given by Palestinian groups. There was never any mention that Palestinian groups had a past history of lying about such figures. Of course that takes column inches and effort.
The most commonly cited figures came from the Palestinian Commission on Human Rights which concluded roughly 1,400 Palestinians had died and that all but about 150 were civilians. A group of bloggers, however, looked at open Palestinian sources and found a number of errors in the PCHR counts. You can agree or disagree with the bloggers, but their work is documented and the methodology transparent so people can draw their own conclusions. Why didn't the Times do this type too?
Interestingly Hamas later admitted it lost around 600-700 fighters in Cast Lead. Combine this with the 125 or so dead other armed groups admitted to, and it matches nicely with IDF claims that it killed 700 combatants, with another 100 or so undetermined -- out of an estimated 1,200 deaths.
The IDF methodology isn't transparent. Still you now have two sources from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum saying the same thing. Yet the Times still tends to use the 1,400 figures. (con't)
#9 Posted by Mike, CJR on Tue 17 Jan 2012 at 02:13 PM
(con't) These types of reporting errors were common throughout Cast Lead. There was the story of Israel shelling a UN school and killing another 40 "innocent Palestinians." Again, this didn't happen. A Toronto Star, I believe, investigation found that the school was never shelled directly -- Israel rounds hit nearby -- and nobody died. A long-after-the-fact report, but still more than the Times did.
These types of errors continue. In 2010 (I believe) an Israeli court convicted an Arab man of raping an Israeli woman by deception. The woman claimed that the man had told her he was single when he was really married. But in the international press, and to be fair the Israeli press, the story somehow morphed into one where the man was convicted of rape for telling the woman he was a Jew when he was really an Arab.
An Israeli weekly decided to actually commit journalism by having the court files on the case unsealed. What it found was that the woman was forcibly raped by the man -- lots of physical evidence -- but that she had a history of sexual abuse and had been a prostitute. The prosecutors wanted to spare the woman a trial and the defendant's attorney had proposed the plea deal so widely reported in the media.
Some Western papers ran correction, but I don't think the Times did, although I might be wrong. I guess for the Times, if it didn't appear in Ha'aretz, it didn't happen. Again, we have the Times and other media engaged not in reporting, but typing.
Just recently, in reporting on the Israel release of Palestinian prisoners for Gilad Shalit, Ethan Bronner reported on a Palestinian youth (15 when arrested) who said he spent several years in prison for throwing stones and hanging Palestinian flags.
Clearly Bonner, who Mr. Lewis mentions so prominently, just took the word of his Gaza stringer. An Israeli Prison Service press release in English indicates the prisoner was convicted of attempted murder, weapons training and was caught with weapons and explosives. Again, in a situation where lies are rampant, a source was taken at face value. CAMERA prompted a correction.
Does all of this add up to a bias in Times reporting? I don't know but they certainly represent bad reporting and consistently making the same mistakes over and over. Certainly these incidents paint a different picture than the one shown by Mr. Lewis. An actual review of NYT reporting on Israel would have touched on these examples, and more, and let us come to our own conclusions. Instead Mr. Lewis presents us with a few anecdotes to produce a story as poorly reported as most stories now coming out of the Middle East.
#10 Posted by Mike, CJR on Tue 17 Jan 2012 at 02:55 PM
Sorry but the Jenin situation was one where no one was allowed to step into the fresh crime scene and observers were finally allowed under tight Israeli restrictions to document what they could find.
What Human Rights Watch found was " The organization documented fifty-two Palestinian deaths in the camp and its environs caused by the fighting. At least twenty-two of those confirmed dead were civilians, including children, physically disabled, and elderly people. At least twenty-seven of those confirmed dead were suspected to have been armed Palestinians belonging to movements such as Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and the al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigades. Some were members of the Palestinian Authority's (PA) National Security Forces or other branches of the PA police and security forces."
What the UN found was... Nothing.
"The report was written without a visit to Jenin or the other Palestinian cities in question and it therefore relies completely on available resources and information, including submissions from five United Nations Member States and Observer Missions, documents in the public domain and papers submitted by non-governmental organizations."
Jenin was an awful act on par with Sabra and Shatila. It does no good to no party to pretend it wasn't and that those who dispute Israeli accounting are, at best, hyperbolic and, at worst, liars.
#11 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 17 Jan 2012 at 03:00 PM
Thimbles, your post is odd since it proves my point. The Palestinians lied. They claimed the death toll was in the thousands. They claimed Israel had bulldozed bodies into mass graves. The media dutifully reported these lies.
Nothing of the sort happened as your quote from HRW shows. Most of the Palestinians who died were armed combatants. The civilian died because the the Palestinian combatants chose to hide among innocent civilians.
The Palestinians on the other hand kill innocent civilians almost exclusively. They attack sites -- pizza parlors, passover seders, etc. -- that have no military value. The only goal is to kill innocent civilians -- often children.
In the second intifada the Palestinians killed more than 1,000 innocent Israelis. Now that really is a massacre and that those who dispute that accounting are, at best, hyperbolic and, at worst, liars..
Peo[ple who deny this
#12 Posted by Mike, CJR on Tue 17 Jan 2012 at 05:02 PM
"Thimbles, your post is odd since it proves my point."
Funny, my point was there was delayed inspections of the site with limited access. The reports even stated these were not definitive accounts and required further and more open investigation.
"The Palestinians lied. They claimed the death toll was in the thousands."
The Palestinians estimated about 800, the Israelis estimated about 200, everyone was estimating based on the amounts of artillery and weapons used on an area of half a kilometer housing over 15,000 people. We still have estimates because Israel locked down the site from through inspection. It appears that many left the city in spite of how that would subject them to strip search and incarceration which minimized the casualties from what they could have been, but it was still horrible.
I find it interesting that you suppose the vaunted IDF was held at bay for a week by the 30 or so insurgents killed. Only 52 casualties, 20 or so being civilian."
"They claimed Israel had bulldozed bodies into mass graves. The media dutifully reported these lies."
They reported claims and counter claims. What are you supposed to do when one party is denying access to a conflict site while being secretive and hostile to the press? Trust the guys looking nervous?
"Nothing of the sort happened as your quote from HRW shows. "
Did you read the whole report? Or how about this report on the UN findings which you brought up:
http://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/01/un-jenin-report
"The Palestinians on the other hand kill innocent civilians almost exclusively. They attack sites -- pizza parlors, passover seders, etc. -- that have no military value. The only goal is to kill innocent civilians -- often children.
In the second intifada the Palestinians killed more than 1,000 innocent Israelis. Now that really is a massacre and that those who dispute that accounting are, at best, hyperbolic and, at worst, liars.."
I would suggest you read some more of those UN reports you like before spouting off. For instance:
http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/BE07C80CDA4579468525734800500272
As I said before, there are no heroes here. There are only humans who both have reasons for aggression and fear. Neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis are animals. Both peoples require security, dignity, respect of person and property. Neither are getting enough of these. Terrorism, whether it's the state or guerilla kind, is detestable. How do we serve god and respect his mitzvahs by allowing ourselves to be lead by people who are focused on blowing up our neighbors, not loving them. We can choose to remain enslaved to old conflicts and hatreds or we can attempt to transcend them and, through the grace of god, embrace the promised land. I for one do not accept a land of bloody cafes in Tel Aviv or a land where 15,000 people are crammed together on half a kilometer squared as promised. Are we going to live under rules which degrade the human condition or elevate it? Are we children of Abraham or of Cain?
#13 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 18 Jan 2012 at 03:06 AM
Thimbles, I want to thank you for showing so clearly the larger point I wanted to make in my original post -- that no amount of corrections or follow-up stories can undue the damage caused by bad reporting. You insinuate that there has been some great cover up and that maybe many, many more people were killed. This kind of argument can survive only because the initial reporting was so bad. Journalists took statements made by people who had every reason to lie at face value then printed and aired them without much effort to get at the truth.
You say the initial Palestinian casualties were based on the amount of firepower used. But the Palestinians clearly lied about these facts from the very start and the media reported those lies with little effort to find the truth.
Israeli “soldiers had received orders from the Israeli army chief of staff Shaul Mofaz for the complete destruction of Jenin,”Nabil Sha'ath, Deutsche Presse-Agentur, April 6.
Israel is performing “blanket bombing today of the cities of Nablus and Jenin, and it is on television,” Hassan Abdel Rahman, CNN, April 6.
“There is no longer a refugee camp there. And maybe the [Israeli] defense minister and the prime minister of Israel want to deny what CNN is showing, that the camp was totally destroyed,” Saeb Erekat, CNN, April 17.
I could go on but I think it's clear the Palestinians created their inaccurate casualty estimates based on their inaccurate accounts of what was happening on the ground.
In the end an area of the Jenin camp slightly lager than a soccer pitch or football field was leveled. The rest of the camp was and still is very much in existence.
As you say, casualty figures varied wildly from 300 to thousands, all based on false charges.
"The invasive Israeli tanks, planes and bulldozers are demolishing the Jenin refugee camp house by house over the heads of their remaining residents…the heroic resistance men are still holding out…while the Israeli invasion army bulldozers are burying the martyrs in mass graves in order to conceal the massacre," WAFA news agency, April 10, Translation by BBC Worldwide Monitoring
“Thousands of Palestinians were either killed and buried in massive graves or smashed under houses destroyed in Jenin and Nablus," Ahmed Abdel Rahman, UPI, April 12.
Israel did at one point estimate up to 200 dead, but quickly revised that figure. The Israeli figures were much closer to the truth.
“Obviously, there was no massacre. Probably about 60-65 people were killed.” In response, Hassan Abdel Rahman retorted, “Mr. Shoval is really perpetuating a lie when he says there is 65 people killed, only," Zalman Shoval, CNN April 14.
The media worked hard to correct it's mistakes as the truth started to emerge, but as I say, the initial damage is never undone. You claim that there was some sort of cover-up because Israel kept people out of the cam for so long.
Aid workers actually entered the camp on April 16. Fighting ended on April 11. People can decide for themselves if that was enough time to hide all those bodies. But the end of April , even the Palestinians admitted their claims were false.
"The official Palestinian body count was disclosed by Kadoura Mousa Kadoura, the director of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement for the northern West Bank, after a team of four Palestinian-appointed investigators reported to him in his Jenin office," Washington Times, May 1. (con't).
#14 Posted by Mike, CJR on Wed 18 Jan 2012 at 01:42 PM
2 questions:
1) How much kool aid has Mr. Lewish been drinking?
2) What is his phone number - I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I'd like to sell him.
The NY Times has become the NY Slimes in terms of it's reporting on the middle-east. Even the article it selected to carry in the travel section this weekend paints Israel in a bad light.
#15 Posted by paul jeser, CJR on Wed 18 Jan 2012 at 02:19 PM
The last quote before the break should have read "Palestinian officials yesterday put the death toll at 56 in the two-week Israeli assault on Jenin, dropping claims of a massacre of 500 that had sparked demands for a U.N. investigation. The official Palestinian body count was disclosed by Kadoura Mousa Kadoura, the director of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement for the northern West Bank, after a team of four Palestinian-appointed investigators reported to him in his Jenin office."
Interestingly, after the body count was lowered, the Palestinians made the same argument you do. It was still a massacre because so many civilians died. That's a matter of opinion and the place for that is op-ed pages, not news stories. I could just as easily argue the 23 or so IDF soldiers killed were murdered, but that's an opinion too.
My favorite line in all your comments was this:
"'They claimed Israel had bulldozed bodies into mass graves. The media dutifully reported these lies.'
"They reported claims and counter claims. What are you supposed to do when one party is denying access to a conflict site while being secretive and hostile to the press? Trust the guys looking nervous?"
This is just an excuse for lazy reporting. "Somebody said something so I'll just type it up. The hell with my job of looking for facts." Clearly the Israelis -- the guys looking nervous according -- were the ones telling the truth. The Palestinians lied.
What we are supposed to do is look for the truth, confirm statements with documents or other information that can be proven. If we can't do tat, then we need to point at that there's no way to confirm anything. If a source has a history of lying, then we need to point that out. If that isn't done, it's just typing. You are excusing that because it suits your clearly political goals. But excusing that means the death of journalism.
You can't liable a country or an organization like the IDF. I can only image the liable suit that would emerge if the media applied the same standards used in Jenin and in covering Israel generally to an individual who could sue.
Oddly enough, despite all the lies, the Arab press did a better job in some respects than everybody else.
“[We placed] explosive devices on the roads and in the houses; surprises [await] the occupation forces...The truth is that the fighting is being conducted from neighborhood to neighborhood, like guerilla warfare. The Mujahideen are using automatic rifles, explosive devices, and hand grenade,” Jamal Bu Al Hija, Hamas commander, Al-Jazera, MEMRI translation.
Somehow Al-Jazera managed to talk to a Hamas member while the fighting was still underway, but the Western media couldn't quite get the story.
The reporting on Jenin was bad. The reporting on the Middle East in general is bad. There are no neutral parties, including the UN and human rights groups that you like to quote so often. For instance, one of the UN investigators looking into Jenin for instance once said the Star of David is like Swastika. The head of HRW Middle East office used to gush over Khadafi and talk about how Libya was about to become a leader in human rights.
Reporters need to keep these biasses in mind as they report. Instead, papers like the Times have made the same mistakes in Jenin over and over. There's no excuse for that.
#16 Posted by Mike, CJR on Wed 18 Jan 2012 at 02:30 PM
The NY Times has consistently slanted against Israel. This is clear in its headlines which minimize Palestinian attacks and focus on Israeli responses.
It is also clear in covering refugees. The Times doesn't tell the story of JEWISH REFUGEES FROM ARAB COUNTRIES. Their descendants form half of Israel's populace. They came to Israel penniless, but rebuilt their lives.
Compare this to the sympathetic stories on Palestinian refugees. All blame Israel. Yet BOTH refugee issues were caused by wars started by the Arab world. And Israel uplifted Jewish refugees, while Arab regimes still manipulate descendants of the Arab refugees.
#17 Posted by Dorn , CJR on Wed 18 Jan 2012 at 03:16 PM
It's plain to see that the Times skews it's news reporting in favor of ant-jewish elements. An egregious example of this is its review of that famous Israel Day parade at which more than a million supporters of Israel attended. They were met by a few hundred pro Arab protestors. The front page of the Times, on the following day, gave the distinct impression that the numbers supporting both sides were just about equal. How could they possibly have not seen that the difference was overwhelming!!! How could the editors not know that they had forever alienated a significant portion of their readership? How could the editors not know that they had tainted their "Journalism" forever.
#18 Posted by Herbert Charles Beim, CJR on Wed 18 Jan 2012 at 08:24 PM
If the NY Times is not anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian, how is it that, while it reports freely and often that Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza from Jordan (actually, TransJordan) in the 1967 war, it almost never reports that it had been held at the time by Jordan only because it seized it in the 1948 war when it did not even have a claim of right to it? And why does The Times NEVER mention that all of Palestine, including the West Bank and Gaza) were at the time (1948) still under a League of Nations' Mandate, reaffirmed by the UN Charter, of over 25 years duration, to be held in trust as a Jewish homeland, except to mislead the readers into believing, falsely, that the land belonged to Arabs and was stolen by Jews.
#19 Posted by Herbert Grossman, CJR on Thu 19 Jan 2012 at 01:29 AM
Okay. It appears we're not going to have a discussion about the realities of the situation and its reporting, we're going to have a bunch of people rah rah for Israel.
I would suggest to people to read the full reports on Jenin, read the un reports showing Palestinian to Israeli casualties are 4 to 1 with similar percentages of civilians killed, and consult resources like this http://www.fmep.org/ before making statements about the palestinian/israeli conflict.
On the question of the New York Times's anti-Israel bias? I find that laughable. The New York Times plays it fairly straight for the American press, a lot more pro-Israel than the international and some Israeli press, a lot more anti-Israel than say the National Review. And journalists? No matter who you are or how reasonable your perspective is, if you are accurately reporting the facts in this conflict, you will likely be accused of being a filthy Zionist half the time and a anti-Semite the other half. That's probably what this guy faced:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/opinion/30taub.html
There are no heros, but there is an imbalance of power. I don't believe the Palestinians would act more just were they the ones armed with Blackhawks and tanks, but that does not excuse Israeli injustice.
The individuals here are attempting to work the refs. I would ask readers to be very careful with their research and to avoid picking sides. Instead, understand the problems and try to pick solutions.
#20 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 19 Jan 2012 at 03:59 AM
Thimbles, again thank you for proving my overall point that reporting out of Israel is worse than sloppy. I've never accused anybody of anything other than bad reporting or you of anything other than apologizing for bad reporting.
I'm curious how long you have worked as a reporter and how much of that time was spent on staff of a pub that wasn't the house organ of some organization.
You seem to assume that just because the UN or some NGO publishes a report that the information in that report is accurate or that the organization doesn't have an agenda that causes it to skew its conclusions one way or another. You seem to think these reports "prove" you are right and there isn't an alternate view to consider and report.
So lets do a little real reporting so you can see what it looks like. I looked at all your links On the FMEP site I found this interesting table on water use:
www.fmep.org/reports/archive/vol.-8/no.-6/statistics-comparison-of-water-allocation?searchterm=water
The source is the Palestinian Water Authority. Publicly, the PWA claims average Palestinian water use is 60 liters a day. But a Dutch group called the Missing Peace obtained correspondence between Israeli and the PWA (actual reporting often involves that kind of work), and the PWA in 2009 plugged daily Palestinian use at 110 liters a day.
Documents are good. People are likely to say things they won't in public, especially when they think the general public won't see those documents. The takeaway -- the Palestinians lie and so the FMEP source isn't reliable. That makes it likely its table is unreliable.
Don't like Missing Peace -- I understand. A new report on water just came out from The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. The author's figures can be disputed, but his methodology is transparent and he lays out those issues.
He shows daily household water us in Israel as 230 liters a day versus 107 for the Palestinians (you have to do a little math to get the numbers.) Now when you look at FMEP table, it shows 1997 water use at Kiryat Arba at 547 liters per day. That seems high, but the difference could be from time (Israel has steadily reduced water use), or Kiryat Arba could just use a lot of water, but as a reporter, I'm somewhat suspicious.
Now look at the Palestinians in Hebron. According to FMEP, in 1998 they used only 45 liters a day. Now remember in 2006, the figure for all Palestinians was 107 liters a day. Maybe Hebron isn't getting water or time could account for the difference, in which case it might mean that the Palestinians have more than doubled their water use in eight years. Now that would be a news story. But what's mostly likely is that FMEP simply started with inaccurate information.
Obviously, to turn this into a fair story would take a lot more work, but if just a look at one small table raises these types of questions, just think of what an in-depth look at its other reports is likely to show. (con't)
#21 Posted by Mike, CJR on Thu 19 Jan 2012 at 05:30 PM
But since nobody's paying me, I won't. Still, in just an hour or so, I've done more actual reporting on water issues than FMEP probably did on it's table or the NYT has done ever.
Usually some NGO comes out with a report on how Israel steals Palestinian water and the Western media just types it up with maybe a quote from some Israeli official saying this study is wrong, but no details. Again, that's not reporting and it's certainly not balance.
Now if you were to write something about the Begin-Sadat report, you would want to get critical comments too. But in the real world, that's not an issue because no Western news outlet will ever cover that report.
So you can put up as many links as you want. All it shows is that you know how to surf the net and put up links. Just because a group shares your ideology doesn't man as a reporter you don't question what it says. Hey I support a two-state solution and I don't really like the settlements, but when you look at FMEP, they have a clear political agenda and it's reflected in their research.
The Palestinians have a clear political agenda and HRW has one and the UN has one (at least) and the Israelis have one. You want to ignore that and instead suggest good reporting is just taking some report from some group with an agenda at face value and writing it up.
It's the same mindset that says if it isn't in Ha'aretz it didn't happen and if it is in Ha'aretz, it must be true. It's the same mindset makes news organizations to lazy to even go to an Israeli courthouse and get the files on a rape case they have decided to write about.
If a courts and cops reporter ran his or her beat like that on a regular basis, the paper he worked for would be sued into bankruptcy. Of course even at a small daily, the reporter would get fired long before that. At the NYT apparently, it's okay though.
Okay, I have real reporting to do.
#22 Posted by Mike, CJR on Thu 19 Jan 2012 at 05:57 PM
Sigh. Of course you're going to use an irrelevant, unsourced, op-ed to attack fmep's credibility.
So yeah, after I look up your source and try to source their claims, what do I find? World Bank Report No. 47657-GZ on palestinian water supplies.
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTWESTBANKGAZA/Resources/WaterRestrictionsReport18Apr2009.pdf
"Domestic water availability averages 50 [liters per capita per day]. Per capita domestic supply is very variable and discontinuous, with relatively small improvements since Oslo."
"JWC has not fulfilled its role of providing an effective collaborative governance framework for joint resource management and investment. The JWC was established under Article 40 to implement the Oslo Interim Agreement on Water. However, it has not been an effective mechanism for facilitating sector investment. A high proportion of Palestinian projects has been rejected or long delayed in the JWC. Records show that 106 water projects and 12 large scale wastewater projects are awaiting JWC approval, some of them since 1999. According to the records, the pending water projects would have benefited 1.1 million beneficiaries, and the pending sanitation projects almost 800,000. Out of the $121 million of projects presented to JWC in the 2001-2008 period, 50% by value ($60.4 million) have been approved, and one third have been implemented or begun implementation. By contrast, records suggest that all Israeli-proposed projects for development in the West Bank except one have been approved by the JWC. Israeli projects drawing on the shared aquifers on Israel’s side of the Green Line, are not presented to the JWC."
etc etc..
Never mind your using of inapplicable comparative statistics (2009 isn't 1998, the month of July isn't a year's average, Hebron isn't the whole of Israel) but your source makes claims using secret correspondences and unsourced reports which you have complete faith in because "Palestinians lie. It's what they do."
I guess the World Bank is a bunch of liars too. Sigh.
Thanks for bringing up the issue of water though. Reporters should be looking into access to water, electricity, and the supplies required to build up the necessary infrastructure to provide those resources in palestinian territories - just as long as they're all clear on the 'fact' that everyone but Israel is a liar.
#23 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 19 Jan 2012 at 08:38 PM
Again, you prove my point. You completely ignore the Begin-Sadat study because it doesn't say what you have decided is the truth. You can't admit there's another side to the story.
Your an activist and your job is to ignore anything that gets in the way of your view. That's fine. It's not reporting and that's the problem. In the Middle East, more and more the reporting standard is that of typing up up a report from a group with an agenda.
It's cut and past, like you are doing. Let's be honest, nobody's a forensic audit of what's happened to billions in aid to the Palestinians. Khalid Abu Toameh, a real journalist has tried, and the PA threatened to kill him.
Everybody but Israel is lying -- I don't know. The Palestinians lied about Jenin, the PA lies about it's own corruption. Hamas lies claiming they aren't taking medical aid and selling ti Gaza residents. This is all fact, not opinion. It's logical to at least assume they might be lying about water. After all, as you say, when it looks like it's the Palestinians looking nervous. By your standards, that means they must be guilty. And again, what's your reporting background.
#24 Posted by Mike, CJR on Thu 19 Jan 2012 at 10:23 PM
"Again, you prove my point."
I don't think these words mean what you think they mean.
"You completely ignore the Begin-Sadat study because it doesn't say what you have decided is the truth."
If you had confidence in it, maybe you'd link to it.
"Your an activist and your job is to ignore anything that gets in the way of your view. That's fine. It's not reporting and that's the problem. In the Middle East, more and more the reporting standard is that of typing up up a report from a group with an agenda."
Yeah. You're the one mainlining Camera links and the Jerusalem Post and I'm the activist. Dude, please.
"Everybody but Israel is lying -- I don't know."
Of course you don't. I think I've expressed myself pretty clearly on the topic of palestinian culpability, and I would do so more here if anyone was attempting to claim Palestinian wool was as white as driven snow, as you are doing with Israel. But hey, it's not like we're having a discussion about Israel anymore. You want to have a discussion about me, my activism, my sources, anything but what human rights watch, amnesty international, the UN, the World Bank, FMEP, and other respected institutions say about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
"And again, what's your reporting background."
Did you notice how many questions I asked about you? Know why? I don't care. My case doesn't rest upon what I can say about you.
Good day.
#25 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Fri 20 Jan 2012 at 12:01 AM
Since you bring up the issue of incitement consider Mahmoud Abbas condemns killing of Jewish family. The reporter, Isabel Kershner inserts herself into the dispute on the side of Abbas though there is plenty of documentation that the Israeli charges are accurate.
Your argument about double standards also falls flat. Israel is held to very stringent standards; the Palestinians (and Arabs generally) are held to virtually none.
You aren't writing about the bias at the Times rather you are writing about arguments over bias at the Times. These are two separate issues.
#26 Posted by David, CJR on Fri 20 Jan 2012 at 03:13 AM
Well, if, as we learnn right at the beginnning, that Topping was persuaded by the false "Palestinian refugee" narrative, Lewis' conclusion that the NYT is an 'okay guy' is way off and worthless. Given the Holocaust record of the paper, Lewis had an impossible task in any case.
Another bias point: how many op-eds by Arabs, their supporters, Israeli leftists, Jewish antizionists get published and how many op-ed by those holding "retain the territories" opinions? How many op-eds by members of Hamas & the PLO versus how many from the Jews actually living in "settlements", the communities?
#27 Posted by Yisrael Medad, CJR on Fri 20 Jan 2012 at 06:22 AM
"an editorial about the Warsaw ghetto uprising somehow managed to omit that it was a ghetto of Jews"
Can you point out to this editorial?
#28 Posted by Moshe Vardi, CJR on Sat 21 Jan 2012 at 10:28 AM
mr vardi -- it is referenced in the leff book and footnoted in the version of the paper that will appear on the shorenstein website to be published feb. 1
#29 Posted by neil lewis, CJR on Mon 23 Jan 2012 at 09:45 AM
NewsBusters: Long Defense of NYTimes's Israel Coverage Utterly Fails to Rebut 'Toxic' Critics
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/clay-waters/2012/01/23/long-defense-nytimess-israel-coverage-utterly-fails-rebut-toxic-critics
#30 Posted by StewartIII, CJR on Mon 23 Jan 2012 at 11:29 AM
This is for Neil Lewis, whose email I could not find. In the the lengthier version of this study, published by the Shorenstein Center, the website Mondoweiss is identified as a project of The Nation Instituted, and associated with The Nation Magazine. This was true once, but has not been true for quite a while, well over a year. And so the language should be changed to the past tense.
#31 Posted by Eric Alterman, CJR on Tue 21 Feb 2012 at 08:30 AM
Forget about the bias against Israel—it goes even further.
The Times has consistently presented its biased view against "ultra-religious" or "Haredim" Jews in the U.S. and Israel. These holy Jews are simply a segment of Jewish Orthodoxy. The words t "ultra-religious" or "Haredim" have become almost code words for anti-Semitism.
While Syria was massacring their own citizens the Times felt it was very important to report a religious bus route where women willingly went to the back so as not to mix with the men.
It has rarely had anything good to say about Orthodox Jews anywhere in the world. The many services they provide to the sick and the poor are ignored. The organizations they have that work to stop people from gossiping or improve their character are never to be found on the pages of the Times. The list goes on…
The Times has in general promoted their religious beliefs while degrading those who they do not understand.
#32 Posted by Michael, CJR on Sun 26 Feb 2012 at 11:51 AM
This article expresses why I am always ambivalent about renewing my subscription to CJR, and sometimes don't. More importantly, this long and self-satisfied defense of the NY Times essentially as 'not anti-Zionist' and 'not anti-semitic' explains why I have never subscribed to that newspaper.
Yet the author himself recognizes the Times' horrible failure to cover the Holocaust. "Laurel Leff, in her superb book on how the paper underreported the Holocaust, Buried by The Times, wrote that the newspaper, suffused with the publisher’s sensitivities, was ever frightened of being seen as an organ of special pleading for Jews. "
That fear is obvious in an action he does not recognize; the Times consistent effort to minimize and deny the anti-Semitism of the Crown Heights riots, as belatedly acknowledged by former NY Times religion writer Ari Goldman.
As for Israel, the New York Times has failed consistently to report the pervasive and genocidal rhetoric against Israel and the Jewish people, the latest outrage of which was the murder of three Jewish school children by a Moslem lone wolf terrorist in France.
Israel remains the only true democracy in the Middle East, the only country with modern attitudes about women's and gay rights, and the only country with relative freedom of religion--try being a Christian or a Jew in Saudi Arabia. Of course, such points are never addressed in the NY Times. Perhaps it's that fear of 'special pleading' for the Jews, even if the Sulzbergers have removed what they seem to see as that ethnic and religious millstone from their necks.
#33 Posted by Michael Goldstein, CJR on Fri 23 Mar 2012 at 06:50 PM