Caught in the Crossfire

By Michael Getler

Sunday, May 5, 2002; Page B06

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