Tense Times

By Michael Getler

Sunday, June 9, 2002; Page B06

This is a time of sharpened edges. Some supporters of Israel say The Post is providing biased coverage; some Palestinians say the same thing.

In the past two weeks, scores of people contacted me to say they were joining a boycott of The Post and would cancel their subscriptions for the week of June 10-17. Although these readers all identified themselves, they were responding to a "Boycott the Post" campaign Web site in which none of the organizers is identified.

According to this anonymous entity, The Post's "coverage of the Middle East -- in particular their handling of the Arafat-orchestrated Palestinian Terror Campaign that began in Israel in September 2000 -- has been a very poor example of journalism." It claims The Post:

"1) Favorably reports the position of terrorists, who embrace Islamic jihad,

"2) Is biased against objective facts with misleading headlines and subheadlines, stories that leave out key details that are present in the [Associated Press] source material, and images that mislead readers, and

"3) Presents both sides of the conflict as if each were equally valid and credible."

Many boycotters last week cited a picture on May 29 as an example of the routine bias. The photograph appeared on Page A12 with the continuation of a front-page story about Palestinian gunmen who cut through a fence at a Jewish settlement in the West Bank and killed three students at a religious high school. The AP photo showed three Palestinian women sitting by a barbed wire fence separating Jerusalem's outskirts from the West Bank. Readers felt it was outrageous to illustrate a story about a horrible crime with what they viewed as a sympathetic shot of Palestinian women.

When I asked the photo editor about this, he explained that much of the story, including the secondary headline on the front page, was about the increasing use of fences to seal off areas and that the photograph illustrated that aspect of the story. He also checked what else was available at the time and did not see any pictures from the scene of the attack, and I didn't see any in other newspapers. The picture selection seemed to me to be the result of a reasonable news decision, not bias.

Palestine Media Watch, meanwhile, has issued a report titled "Double Standards at The Washington Post: Selective Use of the Terms 'Terrorism' and 'Retaliation' in News Coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict." The report says Palestinian actions are always depicted as an "attack" while Israel's are described as a "response" or "retaliation."

Describing Israeli actions in that fashion, the report says, "does nothing more than reinforce the already well-entrenched view that Israel has always been at the receiving end of aggression and itself has never provoked any violence . . . And this in spite of the fact that the acts themselves (demolishing homes, bombarding buildings, blockading whole towns and villages) have been patently perpetrated to punish an entire civilian population, and as such have been condemned by the United Nations, international governments, and humanitarian organizations (including Israeli human rights groups)."

The report also criticizes The Post for "always describing" as "terrorists" Palestinians who intentionally target and kill Israeli civilians "while Israeli civilians and settlers who did the same to Palestinian civilians were consistently labeled as 'vigilantes.' "

In general, I believe The Post uses language properly in individual stories, although the vigilante label can, indeed, understate the actions taken.

But there is a fundamental, underlying point about covering this conflict that some readers want to see in every story and others prefer never to be the focal point. That point is that the Palestinians have been living with Israeli occupation and settlement of territory in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem for decades, and that, too, can be a cause of violence that makes the action-reaction cycle less clear.

Critics who see an anti-Israeli bias claim that The Post frequently fails to point out that organizations such as Hamas or Islamic Jihad, which carry out terror attacks, do not want an end just to the occupation but to Israel as well. That, in my view, is a fair criticism. Yet some of the criticism also seems to me to have an unstated component of wishing to shift the focus of the coverage almost exclusively toward this kind of terrorism and away from the occupation and despair, and the violence that it causes.

In several previous columns, I have sought to address some of the criticism. This has not been entirely satisfactory to either side. I don't want to repeat myself, other than to say my general sense remains that, despite some lapses and shortcomings, a fair-minded reader would be very well informed by Post coverage during the course of this almost two-year-old uprising.

Whatever the source of the criticism, it is passed along, at times publicly in the Sunday column or in letters to the editor, at times in internal memos to the staff and always to the editors responsible for Middle East coverage.