There's always another Mideast viewpoint
Facts should not be trumped by factionalism in news coverage

Don Wycliff
August 28, 2003

This was the first paragraph of the lead story in last Friday's Tribune:

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip--Israel killed a top political leader of Hamas in an airborne missile strike Thursday in retaliation for a suicide bombing in Jerusalem that killed 20 people, prompting the militant group to call off a cease-fire it declared with other factions nearly eight weeks ago.

The headline on the story read: "Hamas abandons truce after Israel kills leader." And a subhead: "Missile attack retaliation for suicide blast."

It's hard for me to imagine a more straightforward lead or a more straightforward headline. It's the latest news, crisply and concisely rendered.

Yet many readers did not see it that way.

"Your Aug. 22 headline was horrendously misleading," wrote one correspondent, Vicki Fishman, of Alexandria, Va., in an e-mail. "Hadn't Hamas already abandoned its so-called truce when it blew up a bus in Jerusalem--not to mention committed (and claimed responsibility for) other suicide bombings during the course of its supposed cease-fire? To cast blame on Israel, as your headline does, simply is false reporting."

Fishman's question--hadn't Hamas already abandoned the truce when it blew up a bus in Jerusalem?--was a part of virtually every one of the more than 300 phone calls and e-mails of protest that had reached the public editor's office by Wednesday morning.

And it's an entirely valid question--for the secretary of state, or a special Middle East envoy, or the president of the United States, or the prime minister of Israel or a Palestinian Authority negotiator.

It's an entirely valid conclusion for a passionate observer of events in the Middle East to reach. But it's not a conclusion for a journalist to reach and foist on her readers as fact, in the same way that Hamas' announcement that day was fact.

What Fishman and the other protesting readers were demanding was that the lead story in the newspaper become the lead editorial, a brief against what they consider the unslakable thirst for blood of terrorists who want only to see Israel eradicated.

Such language, such conclusions, are entirely appropriate on the opinion pages, but not in the news pages, and especially not on this issue, where every word gets parsed differently and endlessly by each side and each of its factions.

Headline writers have quite enough to do to fairly represent the stories for which they're responsible. They don't need the additional burden of arguing a case.

Group urges fairness on Palestinian deaths

As if to underscore that there is always another point of view to consider on the Middle East, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, a media watchdog, issued a report a week ago with the provocative title: "Journalists Find `Calm' When Only Palestinians Die."

The report noted that the horrific Jerusalem bus bombing of Aug. 19 "was foreshadowed by a pair of suicide attacks a week earlier which killed two Israeli civilians." American news organizations portrayed these attacks, on Aug. 12, as a return to violence after a six-week period of relative calm, the result, apparently, of the Palestinian cease-fire.

What they overlooked entirely, said FAIR, was the Palestinian death toll during this period--"17 Palestinians were killed and at least 59 injured by Israeli occupation soldiers and settlers, according to the Palestine Red Crescent Society."

This, FAIR suggested, was in keeping with an historical pattern in American reporting on the Middle East conflict: Israeli deaths matter; Palestinian deaths are invisible.

"In order to convey the Mideast crisis in all its complexity," the report said, "journalists need to take seriously the violence suffered by all communities. References to `relative calm' while Palestinians are being routinely killed only serve to trivialize human life and obscure the cycle of violence that afflicts the region."

There undoubtedly will be responses to this argument. That's why my e-mail address is given below.

Don Wycliff is the Tribune's public editor. He listens to readers' concerns and questions about the paper's coverage and writes weekly about current issues in journalism. His e-mail address is dwycliff@tribune.com. The views expressed are his own.

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