Recently, the veteran journalist Barbara Matusow wrote a rather shallow and uncomprehending piece for American Journalism Review, portraying critics of the mainstream media’s Middle East coverage as nothing more than propagandists and chronic scolds, and claiming to detect little if any conscious bias among reporters stationed in the region.
But the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America – CAMERA – found that Matusow was herself guilty of some very sloppy numbers-slinging. We’ll pick up the rest of the story from the CAMERA website (www.camera.org):
In the June/July issue of American Journalism Review, Barbara Matusow covered the contentious topic of criticism of Middle East news coverage. In avoiding any substantive assessment of the content of the criticism, Matusow’s overarching message was simply that journalists are a blameless, beleaguered group, assailed by propagandists and baseless accusations. Her implication was proven baseless when CAMERA prompted the following correction on Matusow’s own report:
Error (American Journalism Review, Barbara Matusow, June/July 2004): To understand the particular tensions in Gaza, for example, and why Israel is contemplating a pullout, it’s necessary to know that this tiny strip of land is home to 1.2 million Palestinians, while 7,500 Israeli settlers occupy 25 percent of the land and control most of the water resources.
Correction (August/September 2004): In “Caught in the Crossfire” (June/July), Barbara Matusow wrote that Israeli settlers occupy 25 percent of the land in the Gaza Strip and control most of the water resources. According to the Institute of Applied Research in Jerusalem, the Palestinians control 95 percent of the water resources in Gaza. Estimates vary widely when it comes to control of the land, however. A June 2004 report on Gaza by the World Bank states that 15 to 20 percent of the land is occupied by settlements.
The August/September issue of AJR also contained a number of letters – mostly critical – about Matusow’s article. Among them was the following letter from Andrea Levin, CAMERA’s executive director:
“Regrettably, Barbara Matusow’s article lacked even passing reference to the many substantive concerns raised by the public. Instead, the author caricatured critics generally as self-serving propagandists assailing blameless journalists. In characterizing the work of CAMERA, Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, the author mentioned a side-note of an in-depth study of National Public Radio. She omitted the central conclusion of the survey, which is prominently stated and illustrated with graphics – NPR’s disproportionate reliance on Arab or pro-Arab speakers.
“Though she asked in an interview what I considered to be the single greatest shortcoming of the media in reporting on the Arab-Israeli conflict, my answer was also omitted from the piece. For the record, this is what I said: In the decade since the signing of the Oslo agreements, the arrival of Yasser Arafat in Gaza and the creation of the Palestinian Authority, the media have overwhelmingly failed to report the indoctrination of the Palestinian public in beliefs antithetical to peace. Arafat promptly turned every apparatus at his disposal to the teaching of hatred and rejection of Israel as a sister nation.
“Television, radio, newspapers, schools, mosques, summer camps, soccer tournaments, public rallies all became vehicles for the message that Israel and the Jewish people have no historic, legal or religious rights to any of the land and, in fact, are thieves to be driven out.
“The lethal role of hate education in fostering a generation of youth unwilling to compromise and coexist with a non-Muslim nation in a Muslim-dominated region is still unreported. Matusow’s focus on the frustrations of journalists besieged on all sides by critics is a fair topic for discussion, but to suggest that criticism is off-limits and that every journalist is wrongly faulted is absurd.”