Do U.S. media tilt Mideast news?

By Samuel G. Freedman
August 5, 2002

This summer, a columnist for The Jewish Week newspaper in New York, wrote with poignantly mixed emotions about her sister's love affair with a German. Two days after the article appeared, an e-mail began coursing through the Internet, urging readers to punish the paper's "pathetic and sickening display of politically correct Jewish self-hatred" with a boycott.

This episode has nothing and everything to do with the growing friction between many American Jews and several major news organizations over coverage of the Middle East. The would-be boycott of The Jewish Week deservedly flopped. Yet the ready resort to such a tactic bespeaks the angry and suspicious mood within large quarters of the Jewish community.

As Palestinians merrily slaughter Israeli civilians and as American Jews understandably cast about for some way to aid their brethren, community leaders have called for boycotts of The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers. CNN has apologized for imbalance in its coverage, while National Public Radio has been singled out by CAMERA, the media watchdog group, for a "striking anti-Israel tilt." NPR's member station in Boston, WBUR, has lost more than a million dollars in underwriting as a result.

I recently appeared at the annual convention of Hadassah, the women's Zionist group, for two panel discussions that included Kevin Klose, the chief executive officer of NPR, which reaches an audience of nearly 20 million Americans each week. Outside critics termed Hadassah a "collaborator" — very loaded language, indeed — for having invited Klose. They suggested that the NPR show Fresh Air recently had done a segment about Israeli and Palestinian doctors in Jerusalem's Hadassah hospital as some kind of payoff.

While the questions from the convention's audience managed to be tough and respectful simultaneously, I also heard plenty of belief in a sort of grand, unified scheme against Israel in the American media. Several people sincerely felt there was an agreed-upon "spin" that journalists were obliged to follow in their reports. Others were convinced that the talk-show host Alan Keyes had been dumped by MSNBC because of his pro-Israel politics rather than his low ratings.

I don't know how exactly one stops the conspiracy theories and paranoia, which, sadly, are grounded in the tragedies of Jewish history. The time has come, however, for a boycott on boycotts. This is a weapon so often used against Jews that we ought to think carefully before wielding it ourselves.

It's also a weapon that can work only once. After we've canceled the subscription or stopped making the donation, we have removed ourselves from the argument. There is a necessary and fruitful debate to be had on how to improve the existing coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hadassah contributed to it by engaging NPR and passing a resolution that "strongly condemns all forms of organized boycott."

As a Jew with both communal and personal ties to Israel, I know all too well the despair of seeing the Palestinian leadership give up imminent statehood in favor of armed struggle. One Israeli acquaintance of mine narrowly escaped the suicide bombing at Hebrew University last week. As a journalist, though, I refuse to believe that my professional colleagues in the USA have taken the Palestinian side in some lock-step, dogmatic way.

Any journalist, or news organization, deserves to have its feet kept to the fire by close, incisive analysis; CAMERA's pressure on NPR surely played a major part in the network's decision to have Klose address Hadassah and to make transcripts and audio of all of its Middle East stories available on its Web site. But for the many reporters and editors I know who handle Middle East news, the drumbeat of media criticism — from Arab-Americans as well as Jews — has grown so incessant that it approaches a case of diminishing returns. Why bother listening to the critics if they believe that everything you do is wrong?

I can hardly imagine a less appropriate cudgel than a boycott. For the first half of the 20th century, American Jews were restricted or outright banned by Ivy League colleges, elite hospitals, country clubs and tony neighborhoods. The Arab oil-producing states tried in the mid-1970s to turn United States policy against Israel with an oil boycott.

Even now, fashionable intellectuals in Europe seek to bar all Israelis from academic and cultural forums, while the European Union has considered economic sanctions against the Jewish state. Personally, I wouldn't want to be in the gutter with the highbrow bigots; I wouldn't want to use their means.

All of the anti-Israel agitation in Europe should tell us where the media truly are biased. European publications have eagerly trumpeted Israel's supposed atrocities, such as the Jenin non-massacre, and rationalized suicide bombings as somehow Israel's fault.

The scandal of CNN was that it broadcast (to my eyes) largely fair coverage of the Middle East to its American audiences while slanting its international programming to pander to a pro-Palestinian sentiment abroad.

American Jews have the right to advocate for a compensatory tilt here in favor of Israel — but they have no right to get it. Journalism, especially in wartime and even more with 24/7 news cycles, will often be hurried, flawed and mistaken. News organizations far too often will parachute in reporters who have no foundation of knowledge about the Middle East. Television will remain in the thrall of the bloodiest visuals possible.

When an Israeli missile kills 14 civilians in addition to a Hamas terrorist, there is no way to wish away the damage to Israel's cause and image. As the editor of the Israel newspaper Ha'aretz put it in a speech in May, many readers "want to regard the newspaper as a source of solidarity and consolation, and not only as a mirror, reflecting and exposing reality."

What is plausible to press for is this: an understanding in all coverage of the conflict, in every article and broadcast, that the paradigm has changed. Israel from 1948 to 1967 was an object of sympathy, a plucky nation born from the ashes of the Holocaust, defending itself against hostile Arab multitudes. Israel from 1967 to 1993 was an object of skepticism and criticism, the putative Goliath to the Palestinians' David.

That familiar template should no longer apply. The intifada raging now is not just the same old stalemate between two peoples' struggling over one land. It is the expression — in the form of suicide bombers and drive-by shootings and broken truces — of a considered refusal of imperfect statehood in favor of terrorism and a kind of auto-genocide.

Samuel G. Freedman, an associate dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, is the author most recently of Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry. He is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.