APRIL 26, 2002	| current issue | back issues | subscribe |

For U.S. Jews, the Media Is the (Biased) Message

By RACHEL DONADIO
FORWARD STAFF

In addition to holding rallies and donating money, critiquing media coverage of the Middle East conflict may now be the most popular avenue for pro-Israel activism in the United States.

A call for a one-day boycott of the Los Angeles Times last week was the latest in a series of actions by Jewish grassroots groups protesting perceived anti-Israel bias at American newspapers, including the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the Chicago Tribune. In one of the hardest-hitting moves, in Boston local activists and supporters of the Committee on Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, or Camera, withdrew their underwriting support for WBUR, the local National Public Radio affiliate, at the outbreak of the intifada in October 2000.

In the age of the Internet, global satellite television and 24-hour cable news networks, rooting out perceived anti-Israel bias in the media has become for many American Jews the most direct and emotional outlet for connecting with the conflict 6,000 miles away.

"There's a great frustration that American Jews want to do something," said Ira Youdovin, executive vice president of the Chicago Board of Rabbis. "In 1947, some number would have enlisted in the Haganah," he said, referring to the pre-state Jewish armed force. "There was a special American brigade. Nowadays you can't do that."

"The battle here is the hasbarah war," Youdovin said, using a Hebrew term for public relations. "We're winning, but we're very much concerned about the bad stuff."

"Our phones don't stop ringing, our email is an onslaught," said Andrea Levin, the executive director of Camera, a hawkish group that monitors Middle East coverage. "With Israel under such obvious threat, to compound the military threat with the misrepresentation of what they're facing provokes a lot of anxiety in people."

Media outlets, for their part, say they're feeling the heat. "I've never seen this much anxiety about the Middle East and I've been in this business for over 20 years," said Jeffrey Dvorkin, ombudsman for NPR, a frequent target of criticism from hawkish and even centrist Jewish pro-Israel groups. Dvorkin said that in the last two-and-a-half weeks he has received more than 6,756 e-mails regarding the Middle East, not including more than 1,000 that he hasn't read yet.

"In talking to ombudsmen and women at other newspapers, they also say that they've never seen so much tension and hostility and anxiety being expressed, from people who are both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian," Dvorkin said.

Speaking on CNN's Larry King Live April 2, CBS anchor Dan Rather lamented that "this situation is immensely complicated" for journalists. "When you do your best to be an honest broker of information, which is what I'm trying to do here, particularly in this region with all the emotion and hatred, you always run the risk that someone will misinterpret what you've said," Rather said.

However, said one veteran press watcher, the very journalistic ethic of objectivity invites skepticism from an impassioned public. In times of great stress, when media outlets say "our point of view is the view from nowhere, people regard this with a bit of suspicion, and rightly so," said Jay Rosen, chairman of the journalism department at New York University. "When you make the claim like this, that your news is from no one's point of view, it invites scrutiny.

"The media is a political arena in and of itself and the most visible one, and people are smart enough to know that the struggle over images is the struggle over stories, over whose narrative will win," Rosen said. "They sense a lot is at stake. But because there's so much at stake, the quality of the discussion matters."

Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, cautioned against boycotts. "The media is seen as the bearer of the bad news, and sometimes you punish the messenger," he said.

"I think it's a mistake to label the media biased or antisemitic. I think the problem is there's a lot of ignorance," Foxman said. "If you name-call you're ignored. I think the media listens to reasonable criticism."

In Los Angeles, an estimated 1,000 people joined the call by a grassroots group called "Stand With Us" to suspend their subscriptions to the Los Angeles Times temporarily on April 17, Israeli Independence Day, citing its pro-Palestinian bias.

"We feel that we serve our readership best by covering all aspects and points of view," L.A. Times editor John Carroll said in a statement following the boycott. "Some readers may take objection to specific articles, but I am confident that, over time, careful readers of this newspaper will get a full, balanced account of these unsettling events."

In Chicago, Youdovin criticized the Chicago Tribune for having "a deliberate policy that precludes labeling Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations no matter what the president of the U.S. may say."

Don Wycliff, the Tribune's public editor, explained the paper's policy to the Forward. "We agreed to forgo the use of the term 'terrorist' or 'terrorism,'" said Wycliff, whose job is akin to ombudsman. "We won't call someone a terrorist simply because today's terrorist sometimes turns out to be tomorrow's statesman." He called the word terrorist "tendentious and propagandistic."

This policy and others have rankled many in the organized Jewish community. Last fall, after the paper ran a photograph and caption that Jewish activists felt glorified suicide bombers, a suburban rabbi led a protest rally outside the Tribune. The Tribune's editors subsequently held two public forums where Jewish Chicagoans aired their grievances.

Last fall, the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago commissioned a study on the Tribune's Middle East coverage, which they have not released. In his weekly Tribune column, Wycliff wondered why the federation wouldn't release the study, which was conducted by Barbie Zelizer from the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication.

The federation said it was "more effective" to keep matters private. "This is a matter for us to engage with the Tribune," said Michael Kotzin, executive vice president of the federation. He said the federation had met with the Tribune to discuss it.

Kotzin discounted accounts that the federation didn't release the study because it did not find the Tribune coverage as bad as some Jewish activists think it is. "That is not the situation," he said.

In the Boston protest of NPR coverage, WBUR may have lost as much as $1 million, between $400,00 in cancelled corporate underwriting and listeners who said they would not pledge any more money, said Mary Stohn, a spokeswoman for the station.

She said WBUR took criticism from pro-Israel groups "very seriously." "It's probably a very constructive thing over all," Stohn said. "It opens up the conversation. We still say our coverage is fair and balanced, but we're watching it carefully."

"The spin is almost mind-boggling," countered Hillel Stavis, the owner of the Wordsworth Bookshop in Cambridge, one of several Boston businesses to withdraw underwriting. "I don't think it's actually conscious. It's second nature. Israel is bad, Arabs good, and we'll proceed from there."

In Minneapolis, two local activists formed a group called Minnesotans Against Terrorism, which has taken out advertisements in the Minneapolis Star Tribune to protest its coverage.

"We decided we had to bring to the attention of readers the fact that the Star Tribune was systematically censoring the word 'terrorism' from The New York Times and wire copy, thereby distorting the news from Israel," said Mark Rotenberg, who founded the group this winter with a friend after witnessing a suicide bombing in Jerusalem.

In response, the group received "overwhelming public support," said Rotenberg, who is general counsel for the University of Minnesota. More than 350 people, including nearly every major elected official in Minnesota and a wide range of Jewish and Christian clergy, signed an advertisement earlier this month criticizing the paper for "expunging" the word "terrorism" from a New York Times wire story about a Palestinian suicide bomber.

A spokesman for the Star Tribune, Ben Taylor, confirmed that the paper had edited the wire copy in one instance. "I'm embarrassed to say that that is true," he said. He said an editor "simply did not understand the policy."

Taylor said that the paper's policy is to take "extra care to avoid the term 'terrorist' in articles about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because of the emotional and heated nature of that dispute."

"People on both sides have such fervor, there's so much fanaticism," Taylor said.