With today’s media, taking sides instead of reporting is usual. Most of us I think know this from daily observation. For example, if whites murder a black for reasons of racial hostility, it is news for weeks, but should the crime go in the other direction, the story will be downplayed and then suppressed. One is as bad as the other, but that is not how it is reported.
Should a man suggest that men are better than women at mathematics, the press will not regard it as a question to be investigated but as a crime to be punished. “Political correctness” is nothing but herd-wired advocacy journalism. If the press couldn’t get anything else right, I thought, why should I trust it on Israel?
I have seen endless inaccuracy and untruthfulness. I was in Phnom Penh for the final siege. The papers in the States spoke of “barrages” of rockets “pounding” the city. Actually, there were scattered rockets, six or eight a day, and probably not one reporter in fifty knew what “barrage” meant. When Americans were reading about the “starving” city, I was stepping over pigs, quite chubby, tied on sidewalks. One of the newsweeklies, I forget which, ran a cover of Cambodians running in terror with the city in flames behind. I was there. No flames. It was a file photo from who knows when.
For years in Washington I covered the military in the company of reporters for allegedly meritorious media outlets – Washington Post, New York Times, the networks. There was the same preachy witless partisanship. Everyone has heard about the $600 toilet seat and the $17 dollar bolts bought by the Pentagon, no? I covered these stories. They were nonsense. The reporters easily could have determined that they were nonsense. In those days the entire press corps (the pack effect) insisted that American weapons didn’t work, were too complex, broke constantly. Not even close. On and on.
When a woman I know to be a fine reporter tells me that the press in Israel behaves exactly as I have know it to behave everywhere else, I’m inclined to take her seriously. My objection to the behavior of the press in general, and I think hers to its behavior in Israel, is not to its political positions but to dishonest reporting. The view that, say, Israel should get out of the West Bank is a political one, legitimate in a column. The Palestinians are part of the story too and should be covered fairly. But sloppy reporting according to a heavily-agendaed double standard is just lousy journalism.
When Guttman writes about reporters hanging around the press bar in Jerusalem and writing I-was-there stories when they weren’t, or about photographers looking for the Pulitzer photo without knowing or caring what was going on, or about craftily dishonest writing to support a political position, she is describing something I have seen over and over elsewhere. It’s just how the business works.
A curious fact, though she doesn’t mention it, is that many of the reporters she cites as most hostile to Israel are Jewish. For example, Ted Koppel. I assume that Suzanne Goldenberg and Rick Kaplan are Jewish, though I grant that they may be Chinese Protestants with Jewish names. She cites The New York Times, Jewish owned, as particularly hostile. Jews I know say the same thing: It isn’t caricature anti-Semites but the liberal press. Explain it as you will, but I have noticed the same thing. It doesn’t add up to Israeli control of the press.
If the Middle East interests you, I recommend The Other War. Judge it as you will. But read it.