Last week, I posted a short piece on an article by Neil Lewis in the Columbia Journalism Review, discussing whether the New York Times reporting is hostile to Israel. As I noted, Lewis gets the basic story right–the Times’ isn’t anti-Israel, as such, but its reporting on Israel tends toward the adversarial, for two reasons. First, for several decades the Times’s Israel correspondents have typically had views on appropriate Israeli policy well to the “Left” of the governments in power in Israel. And, second, reporters find it naturally appealing to take the “David” (Palestinian) side in a David vs. Goliath (Israel) story. I should have added a third factor, noted by Lewis: the growth of leftist domestic NGOs in Israel strongly opposed to government policy (and often to Zionism), which–though Lewis doesn’t mention this–are typically staffed by English-speakers, often Americans, and that, because they are so far out of the mainstream of Israeli opinion, tend to focus on feeding stories to a more sympathetic international media.
The problem with the article is that Lewis seems to think that this is more or less the end of the matter. If the Times isn’t affirmatively anti-Israel, it doesn’t matter whether the Times’s reporters are nevertheless implicitly opposing Israeli government policy and/or supporting Palestinian claims by virtue of the stories they choose to pursue, how they frame those stories, what photographs they choose to run with the stories, and so forth–none of which he analyzes in any detail. Other critics, some much more vociferous than I, have noticed the same thing.
Indeed, even though Lewis acknowledges the points noted in the first paragraph, and he cites critics of the Times (including critics who think the Times is too favorably inclined to Israel), he manages to avoid acknowledging any instance where he agrees that pro-Israel critics of the Times’s coverage have had a valid objection. Instead, the piece comes off as suggesting that the only folks who could reasonably object to the Times’s coverage are right-wing Orthodox Jews who support the settlements. [FWIW, I'm neither Orthodox nor support the settlement enterprise, yet I've found the Times's coverage wanting on many occasions.] And he spends an awful lot of time on other matters that are peripheral to the issue he was supposed to be writing about, including the Times’s failure to adequately report the Holocaust as it was happening, and gossipy matters perhaps of interest to media insiders, such as confusion within the Times’s hierarchy over whether former Israel correspondent David Shipler is Jewish (he’s not, but who cares?)
Meanwhile, it turns out that I gave a poor, indeed, incorrect example of something that I said Lewis didn’t mention, but should have: that the far leftist Chris Hedges, who we now know as a vociferous critic of Israel, was the Times’s Middle East Bureau Chief from 1998-2001, when the Times’s coverage of Israel by Deborah Sontag was subject to particular criticism. It turns out that I was relying on misinformation from several websites that identified him as bureau chief at that time. In fact, Hedges was Middle East Bureau chief earlier in the decade (a fact that, oddly enough, Lewis didn’t know, as he acknowledged to me). So mea culpa on that.
It was Lewis himself who alerted me to my error via a response he asked be posted here. Here it is, with a bit of additional commentary from me following it.
here is my comment as i would like it published/posted:i am the author of the cjr piece abt the times and israel.i try not to respond to the range of comments it has produced — people are entitled to ….etc. if someone thinks i failed to analyze specific articles enough, i think they did not read my article thoroughly, but that’s their view and i have no need to try and rebut.
but i found the comment [by prof. bernstein] so exquisitely typical of the ignorance of many i have read, i thought i would respond.
the facts: chris hedges, heartily disliked by fervent supporters of israel, was not debbie sontag’s superior or supervisor. ever. he was, for a time, the correspondent based in cairo (and i am not sure their times much overlapped if at all).
but mr bernstein says he was “middle east bureau chief” and thus he extrapolates he was sontag’s supervisor. this is a “salient” fact to explain her coverage, he writes that i omitted.
this has all the elements of the conspiracy-spinning mind that snatches at odd facts (and untrue notions) and puts them together in a way to confirm some previous notion.
as i suggested above, it has been heartily dismaying to read so many nonsensical comments — from people who come at the issue from both sides– as it demonstrates the obstacles such obduracy presents to honest, or even minimally intelligent discussion
From this comment, one can perhaps see the origins of the problems with Lewis’s piece. First, Lewis implies that Hedges is apparently not reasonably considered hostile to Israel by anyone except “fervent supporters of Israel.” Recall that Hedges has expressed a strong preference for Hezbollah and Hamas in their conflict with Israel. I should think that any person who values liberal democracy over Islamic theocracy and terrorism would find Hedges’s views objectionable; Lewis apparently disagrees. Moreover, it’s hardly just supporters of Israel, much less just “fervent” ones, who have objected to his radical foreign policy views. But Lewis’s attitude is consistent with the notion implied in his article that only the fringe is likely to see anything worth criticizing in the Times’s Israel coverage.
Second, while I can understand why Lewis was annoyed by my misstatement of fact, it’s a long way from such a misstatement to being “ignoran[t]” and having a “conspiracy spinning mind” incapable of “intelligent discussion.” (Mr. Lewis, did the Times never have to issue a correction for any of your articles? If so, does that make you ignorant etc.?) This, however, is apparently what Lewis thinks the Times’s more vocal critics, an attitude that occasionally reveals itself in his article. Indeed, Lewis is so caught up in what he sees as the unreasonableness of his critics that he failed to note that I started my post by agreeing that the basic thrust of his piece was correct, i.e., that its general take on the Times’s coverage reflects what every “fair-minded observer already knows.” But hey, I’m just a simple-minded ignoramus.
Finally, what does Lewis’s piece say about the attitude of the MSM toward its critics on the right? Lewis seems to acknowledge that the Times’s coverage of Israel has a point of view (i.e., a “bias”), but seems perplexed that anyone cares or objects when that bias manifests itself in the Times’s reporting.
Ed Grinberg says:
David Bernstein says: “I’m neither Orthodox nor support the settlement enterprise”
January 27, 2012, 10:56 pmBe careful, Prof. Bernstein. In the age of Obama, it is not unthinkable to call Jerusalem itself a “settlement”.
Tom Rigid says:
The Times seems extremely solicitous of Jewish/Israeli sensitivities, to me. Perhaps you’d prefer to get your reportage from the Jerusalem Post?
January 28, 2012, 3:45 pmEliyahu says:
I find that American Jews who are Orthodox are much better informed about Israel –on the average– than other American Jews. The better informed one is, whether Jew or Gentile in fact, the more likely one is to find NYT coverage of Israel to be wanting. I have noticed deep ignorance of Israel’s modern and ancient history to be commonplace and even typical among journalists, NGO operatives, and pundits claiming expertise on Middle Eastern affairs. There is also a good bit of dishonesty, consider the Muhammad al-Durah Affair. That has to do with the 12-year Arab boy allegedly killed by Israeli troops at the Netzarim intersection in Gaza in late September 2000. The rushes not shown in the TV broadcast by France2 after that date were shown in a French court in 2008. They indicate that the boy not only was not killed by Israeli troops, but that he did not die at that time and place, if ever.
January 28, 2012, 3:54 pmThe lies about the history of the Israeli War of Independence are commonplace in the writings of journalists and NGO & international organization operatives, although a brief study of the files/archives of newspapers published in the 1947-1948 period would show a much different picture than has now become conventional in political discourse, especially in Britain but in the US too.
Mr. Whiskas says:
“Hedges has expressed a strong preference for Hezbollah and Hamas in their conflict with Israel.”
I’m not sure that’s a fair or correct reading of the article by Hedges linked to. Hedges does say “We cannot ascribe equal amounts of moral blame to all sides. Israel is the oppressor in Gaza, the West Bank and now Lebanon” but he’s clearly condemning occupations there as he follows it immediately with “America is the oppressor in Iraq.” He condemns Hamas, Hezbollah and extremists in general several times in the article, it’s just that his argument seems to be “occupations breed and elevate to power extremists among the occupation.” He then quite explicitly condemns and laments the actions of these extremists. That doesn’t strike me as exhibiting a “strong preference” for these extremists.
This strikes me as a general problem with claims of “bias”, whether they be from PC Left or from the “New Anti-Semitism” right (or, for that matter, the folks on the American who scream about “anti-Christian bigotry”): what seems to be “biased” stances or coverage is often relative to the stance of the person viewing it…Over and over Hedges gives equivalent condemnations of Hamas, Hezbollah, and extremists in Iraq alongside Israeli and American actions; it’s just that he thinks the Israeli and American occupations are the cause of it all.
January 28, 2012, 4:21 pmMr. Whiskas says:
Consider this: if someone said “This mess in Afghanistan is terrible; the extremists kill innocents with suicide bombings and the US responds with drone massacres of entire villages in ‘a dance of Ahab-like self-immolation’, ‘one which demonstrates an indulgence in collective necrophilia’. ‘The atrocities committed by one—real or imagined – make possible the atrocities of the other’. Now we can’t ascribe moral equivalance here: the US occupation of Afghanistan has caused the rise of extremists. It is only when the US leaves that this death spiral might end.”
Would it be fair to say that statement reflected “a strong preference for the extremists in their conflict with the US?”
January 28, 2012, 4:33 pmDavid Bernstein says:
Perhaps “strong preference” isn’t quite right, but neither is your formulation, because he’s talking about moral blame. Indeed, whether morally or causally, I blame Hamas–if not for Hamas’s sabotage, it’s very possible Israel and the P.A. would have reached a deal sometime between 1993 and 2000, and the conflict would be over, or at least closer to over. Moreover, Hamas now governs Gaza, and could end the conflict with Israel at any time by simply agreeing to end hostilities with Israel, now that Israel has withdrawn from Gaza.
Same with Hezbollah–Israel has not a single soldier in Lebanon, so what “occupation” is Hezbollah fighting against? Admittedly, Hedges is just as wrong about other matters of foreign policy as about Israel, I’m not claiming that he has some special loathing for Israel apart from his general far leftist views.
January 28, 2012, 4:52 pmDavid Bernstein says:
I agree that if your views are well to the “left” of that of the Times’s coverage, you will find the Times to be unduly sympathetic to Israel. But Lewis’s article is about why so many Jews (and, he might have added, other supporters of Israel) find the Times’s Israel coverage troubling, and the obvious answer, which he never really gets to, is that their views are to the “right”, often well to the right, of the implicit perspective of the Times’s coverage.
January 28, 2012, 4:59 pmThirteenthLetter says:
Yes they would, because that statement’s description of US actions in Afghanistan is wildly incorrect bordering on libelous. For starters, can you point to these multiple “drone massacres of entire villages” carried out as “responses” to suicide-bombings? And while you can undoubtedly point to some bad things done by the United States, you most certainly cannot total up both sides’ misdeeds and come up with the same score. Nobody is perfect in war, and if American soldiers shot a civilian or the wrong guy was dragged in for interrogation it no more makes things equal than Allied soldiers’ shooting German POWs out of hand means the Axis and Allies were of equal merit. As for the uncomfortable, throat-clearing admission that maybe the Taliban aren’t quite lily-white themselves, it’s classic misdirection, only in there as a fig leaf over the real purpose of the statement: to attack the United States.
As well, “the US occupation of Afghanistan has caused the rise of extremists” is absolute madness. If the extremists did not “rise” until 2002, are you (sorry, is “someone”) saying that it was moderates who destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas, eliminated women’s rights, pushed walls on top of homosexuals, and, oh yes, invited Osama bin Laden to move in and acted as his military and diplomatic bodyguards while he planned and then executed 9/11? And even aside from that absurd rewriting of history, the idea that the other side’s evil deeds can somehow be ascribed to our side is ridiculous. By that “logic” the United States would be entitled to massacre anyone it wants anywhere in the world and blame the Taliban for “causing” the rise of American militarism.
So to answer your question: yes, such a statement damn well would reflect a strong preference for the extremists, as it deliberately distorts history, propagates explicit lies, and uses logical fallacies in order to move all responsibility off the shoulders of the Taliban and on to the United States.
January 28, 2012, 5:21 pmGoggins says:
Here is an example of slanted NYT reporting: Several times the paper has reported, usually in stories about some minor skirmish, that since the three-week war between Israel and Hamas-controlled Gaza in January of 2009, Israel and Hamas have been “observing an informal cease-fire.” Of course there is no “cease fire,” informal or otherwise. The relative lack of missiles being fired by Hamas since the 2009 war is only the natural consequence of Israel’s winning that war. Hamas eased up on missile bombardment only because of how hard it was hammered by Israel in retaliation, not because of any agreement. For someone with an outlook such as the NY Times has, to acknowledge this would be to acknowledge the good that came from Operation Cast Lead — an idea that is “off limits,” because the operation was, by definition, all bad.
January 28, 2012, 7:42 pmneurodoc says:
If Mr. Lewis would maintain that Christopher Hedges is other than unabashedly anti-Israel, along the lines of a Noam Chomsky or an Alex Cockburn or others of their ilk, then Mr. Lewis is either a fool or a knave. The evidence of Hedges prejudice is unequivocal.
http://www.alternet.org/story/147786/chris_hedges%3A_it%27s_israeli_officials_who_are_terrorists/
The Lewis apologia on behalf of the NYT was, in a word, crap. Anyone who imagines that the NYT’s coverage is not seriously biased should look at critiques of that coverage at http://www.camera.org/.
January 28, 2012, 8:29 pmMr. Whiskas says:
“he’s talking about moral blame”
He seems to judge the attacks from both sides as equally egregious, several times lumping them together and equating them as awful things. I think he’s singling out the occupation as the blameworthy thing that leads to all the other blameworthy things, sort of like saying “this occupation has led to all kinds of demented tragedies and atrocities on both sides.”
“so what “occupation” is Hezbollah fighting against”
I’d guess he’s referring to the one that spawned Hezbollah, and subsequent invasions that, in his view, empower them.
As to your comments on Hamas thwarting the hopes of a peaceful resolution to all of this, I largely agree. I don’t think any meaningful peace can be gotten with them as a player…
January 28, 2012, 8:59 pmMr. Whiskas says:
“Anyone who imagines that the NYT’s coverage is not seriously biased should look at critiques of that coverage at http://www.camera.org/”
See, this is what I was getting at above. To a strongly pro-Israel watchdog group like CAMERA of course the NYT’s coverage doesn’t seem to be sufficiently pro-Israel and therefore “pro-Palestinian”…Likewise I imagine someone like Edward Said would find the NYT’s coverage insufficiently pro-Palestinian and therefore “pro-Israel.” Bias often is something relative to the one looking…
“that statement’s description of US actions in Afghanistan is wildly incorrect bordering on libelous”
My goodness, it was an analogy, friend, meant not to put forward these hypothetical claims as truth but to highlight whether someone using language similar to Hedges could be said to be exhibiting a “strong preference” for the hypothetical extremists.
January 28, 2012, 9:15 pmDavid Bernstein says:
We can debate this all day, but MY point is that Lewis acknowledges that Times’s reporters have a point of view that’s critical of Israeli policy and that affects their reporting, acknowledges that they did to favor the “David” side in how they frame their stories, and then concludes that the proper implication to draw from this is … nothing, unless you are a right-wing Orthodox supporter of settlements. Surely it would have been more logical to conclude that the logical implication is that Jews who have a mainstream pro-Israel viewpoint will at times correctly perceive the Times’s coverage as adversarial and even unfair.
January 28, 2012, 9:44 pmThirteenthLetter says:
Precisely. And what your analogy establishes is that the answer is yes: someone using language like that would indeed be exhibiting a “strong preference” for the hypothetical extremists. Hedges’s description of the Israeli-Palestinian issue is no more accurate than your hypothetical disputant’s description of the American war in Afghanistan.
January 28, 2012, 9:58 pmMr. Whiskas says:
“Lewis acknowledges that Times’s reporters have a point of view that’s critical of Israeli policy and that affects their reporting”
Professor Bernstein, I’m not sure that comes across clearly from Lewis’ article. He seems to say that the coverage of Israel has gone from one very favorable to one that is less pro-Israel and more pro-Palestinian than the previous phase. That doesn’t mean the same thing as pro-Palestinian and “critical of Israel.”
For example, he says “In those early decades, the bulk of the news about and from Israel was distinctly favorable, sometimes even admiring…But, beginning in the late 1960s, the narrative began to change to a second, more equivocal phase.”
If the coverage began as “distinctly favorable, sometimes even admiring” then a more balanced view would be one that is “more equivocal.” This would seem to fit better with Lewis’ pronouncements in the article such as that “the paper’s coverage has been overwhelmingly fair and appropriate” and that criticism that the coverage is “anti-Israel” is ” largely an ill-founded—as well as toxic—notion based on misunderstandings of journalism.”
January 28, 2012, 10:05 pmDavid Bernstein says:
“Critical of Israeli policy” is not the same as “anti-Israel,” and Lewis makes clear that the reporters became more critical in part because they opposed Israeli policy, esp. re settlements. But his “misunderstanding of journalism” point seems to be that journalists are inclined to support the “davids.” In other words, we should expect journalists to be unfair to/overly critical of the goliaths. That doesn’t strike me as much of a defense. It may mean the reporters are not specifically biased against Israel in their reporting, just against all “Goliaths,” but that still would mean that the critics are right and that a bias against Israel shows up in the reporting. There’s no substantive difference in this context between saying that reporters exhibit bias against Israel and saying that reporters exhibit bias against Goliaths, and perceive Israel as a Goliath.
January 28, 2012, 10:14 pmMr. Whiskas says:
“Precisely.”
Nope. You’re argument seems to be “that kind of equating of the two sides and attributing the origin of the problems to an occupation is so patently incorrect that a person doing it is obviously actually displaying a strong preference for the occupied.” However obvious your points on Iraq may or may not be, they strike me as less so regarding Israel’s occupation. But much more importantly they are less obvious the speaker (hpothetical in my case, Hedges in the actual one), who seems to believe what they say. If you take their comments that way, realizing that a reasonable and honest person could hold them (though you think them ultimately incorrect), then they don’t seem to indicate a “strong preference” for one side…You seeing a “strong preference” there says more about you, i.e., that you’ve determined these statements are so obviously false that there must be dishonesty and preference lurking behind the ostensibly equal condemnations of both sides (including the one the person is supposedly expressing a “strong preference” for!).
January 28, 2012, 11:14 pmMr. Whiskas says:
“Lewis makes clear that the reporters became more critical in part because they opposed Israeli policy”
More critical, yes, but he also expressly disavows and argues against the view that the coverage is “unfair.” His argmument seems to be that Israeli coverage in the NYT was at one time very favorable to Israel and has become less so due to changes in reality that tie in to journalistic tendencies (the Palestinians fit the mold of underdog more while Israel fits that mold less). But the coverage could be “more critical” than a phase where it was “distinctly favorable, sometimes even admiring” and still be “overwhelmingly fair and appropriate.” This seems to be what Lewis is saying, not that it is now “unfair.”
I’m only pointing this out because your argument seems to be “Lewis admits the coverage has become unfair, but then acts like nobody should be upset about it, what gives?” To the contrary, I don’t think Lewis admits the coverage is unfair at all in the CJR article and that is why he thinks nobody should be upset about it…
January 28, 2012, 11:24 pmDavid Bernstein says:
Yes, but (1) as I noted, he doesn’t actually bother to address any of the specific instances in which critics have said the coverage is unfair, but rather seems to think that any perceived unfairness is a product of right-wingedness. But once you admit that reporters’ coverage is influence by their ideology, by journalistic tendencies, and by the influence of NGOs, you can really dismiss claims of unfairness without actually investigated them. If he has, it’s not apparent from the piece. (2) Even if the coverage isn’t “unfair” overall in some objective sense (i.e, you can’t inherently say the implicit positions taken by the Times’s reporters are unreasonable), he should acknowledge that if the Times’s reporters are, for the reasons noted, tending to be increasingly adversarial in their coverage of Israel, that mainstream “friends of Israel” could quite reasonably from THEIR perspective think the coverage is unfair. Again, why exactly is it a DEFENSE of the Times’s coverage to note that journalistic tendency tends to favor the underdog? Isn’t that an acknowledgement that such tendencies will tend to operate to the disadvantage of the “overdog”? “We don’t dislike Israel, we just always tend to favor underdogs, and the Palestinians are underdogs,” is only a defense to the charge of specific hostility to Israel, not a defense to the charge of bias in reporting on Israel. If Fox News gives Senator Sanders a hard time with adversarial coverage, it would hardly be a defense to complaints by Sanders’s supporters that Fox gives ALL Senators with ADA ratings over 90 a hard time. It would just mean that unfairness to Sanders was part of broader problem of unfairness.
January 29, 2012, 12:12 amMr. Whiskas says:
I think the key is that “tending to be increasingly adversarial in their coverage” does not equal “tends to favor the underdog.” If the coverage was, in the earlier phase, “distinctly favorable, sometimes even admiring” of Israel, then simply backing off that favoritism would constitute “tending to be increasingly adversarial [in comparison to before] in their coverage.”
Consider an outlet that clearly favored one side in a conflict. For whatever reasons, over time the outlet starts to favor them less so, printing stories that call into question or cast in a critical light the side they once “distinctly favored.” This needn’t mean the coverage is now biased against the once favored side, just that it is less or no longer biased for it. It could be, in the words of Lewis “overwhelmingly fair and appropriate.” Of course it would seem to those onlookers who “distinctly favored” and still distinctly favor that side that the coverage has changed, and, distinctly favoring that side as they do, they might additionally see this as “unfair” rather than just the outlet no longer sharing their favoritism towards one side. Lewis seems to be saying to those people “yes, the outlet is more critical of the side you favor than they were, they no longer distinctly favor that side as you do, but it has not moved to ‘distinctly favoring’ the other side but has instead come to rest at a place “overwhelmingly fair and appropriate.”
January 29, 2012, 12:38 amThirteenthLetter says:
You’re stealing a base here by simply asserting that Hedges’s description of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is more plausible than your hypothetical disputant’s description of the Afghan war. You can’t just wave your hand and say “it strikes me this way” and expect that to convince all doubters!
Now yes, a lot of people in this world do think that Hedges’s point of view is right. And maybe most of them are very nice people in other respects. A lot of people also think that the moon landing was faked, or 9/11 was an inside job, or Josef Stalin really wasn’t so bad, and most of those people are perfectly pleasant folks in all other respects. But they’re still wrong, and wrong in a way which could cause grave harm if that point of view is not pushed back against when the issue arises.
So too, I would argue, is someone who genuinely looks at the Israeli-Palestinian issue and decides to blame Israel for the entire thing. They would have to ignore the history of the Palestinian mandate, ignore the wars launched by the Arabs against Israel in 1948, 1967, and 1973, ignore the decades of suicide terrorism not just in the Middle East but in the Western world as well, ignore the little detail of the PLO being formed before Israel ever occupied any territories, ignore Arafat’s broken promises and the Oslo war, ignore Hezbollah’s behavior after Israel retreated from Lebanon, ignore the thousands of rockets fired into civilian areas, ignore the apocalyptic rhetoric from Iran, ignore the refusal of the Palestinian Authority to negotiate, ignore the incitement and promises of a Jew-free Palestine “from the river to the sea” from the so-called moderates on the West Bank. That’s an awful lot of ignoring, and just because a lot of the world media and miscellaneous NGOs are eager to help out doesn’t make it right.
Nobody’s obligated to care about this, mind you. It’s fine to throw up your hands and say “not my problem if they kill each other.” But it’s not fine to deliberately dive into the issue, be deliberately wrong about it, and then use your position of authority to mislead others as well.
January 29, 2012, 1:03 amzuch says:
Latest I heard, Israel has suggested moving the “border” to include in Israel anything inside that wall they were building in the West Bank, along with east Jerusalem. Slices off some 10% of the West Bank. What a concept. All we need to do is unilaterally move the U.S. border 10 miles north, and we have over half of Canada conquered.
Cheers,
January 29, 2012, 1:39 amneurodoc@gmail.com says:
Presented with evidence and arguments in support of the contention that the NYT’s coverage of the I-P conflict is biased against Israel, you simply decline to engage with any of it. Instead, you dismiss it out of hand as put forward by pro-Israel partisans, and hence not worthy of consideration, no matter the amount and quality of the proof presented. Not surprising that you should be so willing to accept that assurances that Lewis offers on behalf of his former employer.
As for Hedges, in view of the link neurodoc provided in which Hedges railed against Israel’s leaders as the true “terrorists,” something entirely consistent with what he has written/said many other times, will you maintain that he is not strongly biased against Israel?
January 29, 2012, 3:26 amDavid M. Nieporent says:
You heard incorrectly. There is no “border,” and therefore Israel can’t have suggested “moving” it. (And it’s a fence, not a “wall.”)
And your knowledge of Canadian geography is… lacking.
January 29, 2012, 4:06 amKirk Parker says:
Wait–I’m supposed to pay attention to the opinions of someone who doesn’t even know where the Shift key is???
January 29, 2012, 4:12 amHyman Rosen says:
It’s amusing to search Mondoweiss for articles on the NYT () and see how they complain about the paper’s complete pro-Israel bias.
January 29, 2012, 4:31 amJames Patrick says:
He mentions the Israeli concept of “hasbara.” As the “overdog,” Israel has a sophisticated engagement with the “Global Conversation”. Israel is a well established state with it’s own Newspapers. The state makes a concerted effort to engage the foreign press. There is an established and respected Jewish presence in the United States.
They do not need much help from the NYT to ensure that they have a voice in the national US discussion. I do not think the same could be said for the Palestinians.
I think this is generally true in situations involving an “underdog.” I have no problem with a rather limited(and I do not think Lewis suggested anything more) reporting preference for underdogs. In much the same way as I have no problem with public defenders.
I think that news coverage can be “fair and appropriate” without necessarily being strictly egalitarian.
Doesn’t he? He includes a quote from Lookstein which describes executive editor Lelyveld openly admitting that sometimes the coverage was slanted, and that some complaints were legitimate.
I think he would likely admit that the coverage is, at times, adversarial. I think he makes two responses to that. The first is that the paper publishes tens of thousands of words a day, and that if it was not at least occasionally adversarial it would be timid and not worth reading. On this point, I think it is enlightening to consider that the Times is as likely to be bashed for being voraciously Pro-Israel as it is to be bashed the other way. A reader’s confirmation bias tends to cause them to ignore cases where a paper has been unfair to positions they disagree with.
The second point he makes is that it is not unfair to hold Israel to a higher standard. Israel is our ally. They are our trade partner. We formally recognize their government. They receive millions of dollars in aid and have the explicit backing of the US government politically and militarily. Palestine is an unrecognized territory, whose elected government is official classified as a terrorist organization. That level of support should come with increased scrutiny.
January 29, 2012, 4:35 amDavid Bernstein says:
But again, that’s all way too abstract. He can assert that the coverage is fair and appropriate, but where’s the evidence? There are organizations out there that document many instances perceived unfairness, but he only addresses only one or two specific examples.
January 29, 2012, 8:52 amMr. Whiskas says:
“But again, that’s all way too abstract.”
I don’t think it’s too abstract in defusing this problem you have with his article:
“Lewis acknowledges that Times’s reporters have a point of view that’s critical of Israeli policy and that affects their reporting, acknowledges that they did to favor the “David” side in how they frame their stories, and then concludes that the proper implication to draw from this is … nothing, unless you are a right-wing Orthodox supporter of settlements”
Lewis doesn’t acknowledge that the coverage is “favoring” the David side at all, just that it was at one time favoring the Israelis and now takes a more critical stance than they did, but one that leaves it overall as “overwhelmingly fair and appropriate.”
You can say that he doesn’t prove his assertion that while it has become more critical than it was it is “overwhelmingly fair and appropriate.” But that’s a different tack than you’ve taken in several posts here where you dismiss the argument over whether the coverage is biased or not (“We can debate this all day, but MY point is that Lewis acknowledges…”) and argue that he acknowledges the bias but then oddly says nobody should be upset about it. That would be odd if he said it, but I don’t think he did…
January 29, 2012, 10:29 amDavid G. Epstein says:
Ethan Bronner, NYT correspondent in the Zionist entity, has a son in the IDF. The Times is very much pro-Israel. Hardly surprising, given its readership, largely “PEP”–progressive except for Palestine.
As an adversary of progressivism, Zionism, and a skeptic of democracy, I can only snicker.
January 29, 2012, 10:47 amzuch says:
I think you understand well what I said and meant, even as you quibble with the words. And if you didn’t, I gave a link.
Slight exaggeration but not much. Extend it to 50 miles in a couple of places (Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver), and more that half the Canadian population is within that area.
Cheers,
January 29, 2012, 12:05 pmDavid Bernstein says:
You’re still missing the point. Last time: once you acknowledge that the Times’s reporting is influenced by a variety of “non-objective” factors–the reporters’ ideology, favoring “Davids”, NGOs feeding stories–and that all these factors operate to Israel’s disadvantage, then the claim that the Times’s coverage has grown unfair, biased, or whatever you want to call it from Israel advocates becomes eminently plausible. And merely saying (a) all journalism exhibits such biases; and/or (b) but I think, without presenting any evidence, that the coverage is overwhelmingly fair and appropriate, regardless of any specific instances one can name and hey it’s just a bunch of right-wing Orthodox who really object (which is false), just doesn’t cut it. (a) is obviously not a sound defense, and (b) requires us to take Lewis’s opinion, based on who-knows-what, as gospel.
January 29, 2012, 12:55 pmDavid M. Nieporent says:
I understood what you meant; I just don’t think you understood that what you meant was wrong. There’s no border; this is a fundamental misunderstanding on your part.
January 29, 2012, 12:58 pmMr. Whiskas says:
DB
I agree with you that the article seems to simply assert, rather than demonstrate, that the coverage is overall fair, and is bizarre in claiming that only the Orthodox would find it otherwise. I still think though that you might be missing my (or rather what I think is Lewis’) point, or more likely I’m not presenting it clearly enough. I think its that he thinks all these things (reporters, ideology, NGO’s, and ‘David’ sentiment) which work to the disadvantage of Israel in the coverage, have simply moved the coverage from a phase where it was very pro-Israel to one where it is less so and therefore more “fair and appropriate.” To those that are very pro-Israel of course the move of the NYT from likewise pro-Israel to more critical of Israel will seem like a move to “being unfair” to Israel. Though I think you are spot on to ask why in the world he would posit that for the most part only Orthodox folks would fall into that category, or to wonder why many people in the US, who are in fact pro-Israel, wouldn’t notice, and be concerned with, this move.
Again, this is just what I got out of the Lewis article when I read it. My reading seems to explain why he thinks the increasing criticism is no big deal. But my reading could be wrong :). I’ll let you get in the last point, and appreciate the thought-provoking post and exchange on your part, thanks.
January 29, 2012, 1:32 pmGoggins says:
Here’s why East Jerusalem was considered “Palestinian” (or “Arab”) for 20 years before the Six-Day War: Because after the armistice line ending the 1948 War was drawn through the middle of the city, Jordan expelled each and every Jew who was living East of that line, and then bull-dozed the dozens of Synogogues East of the line. There’s an easy way to show that you don’t discriminate against a minority population: expel all of them — problem solved! I challenge anyone to find one mention of this historical fact in any NY Times article in the last 20 years (I’ve been reading the paper daily for about 35 years), despite dozens of articles about the status of East Jerusalem.
January 29, 2012, 2:39 pmneurodoc@gmail.com says:
So what do you affirm?
January 29, 2012, 2:45 pmleo marvin says:
Will the illeist formerly known as neurodoc henceforth refer to himself as neurodoc@gmail.com?
January 29, 2012, 8:01 pmKirk Parker says:
Goggins,
More broadly, has any expulsion of Jews anywhere received the sort of coverage afforded the Palestinians?
January 29, 2012, 9:43 pmfaultliner says:
Is this the right forum for this? There certainly are interesting legal issues to discuss about Israeli issues. I’m not sure that a discussion of “Israel Firsters” or the editorial stance of the NYT qualifies. How about some observations about comparative law, or observations about Israeli treatment of Palestinians under occupation? Or something relavant to law?
January 30, 2012, 1:09 amGoggins says:
Thanks Kirk, good point. Maybe the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492, or from England in 1290 — ancient history is OK, it’s just modern history that’s off-limits (such as the expulsion of Jews from Egypt, Iraq, Syria, etc.).
January 30, 2012, 9:30 amMiddle East Media Sampler for January 29, 2012 says:
[...] Chief of the New York Times at the time Deborah Sontag was reporting from Israel. Lewis has sent a correction to [...]
January 30, 2012, 4:35 pmspool32 says:
Some punctuation and a couple of capital letters would have done that comment a lot of good…
January 31, 2012, 4:08 pmneurodoc says:
Would have done which comment a lot of good. (e.e.cummings who was widely acclaimed for his contributions to American letters didn’t see the need for either punctuation or capital letters)
February 1, 2012, 7:33 pm