The Middle East? The tilt to Israel is noticeable to a powerful extent with straight news coverage, even more obvious with analysis, and blatant with editorial and op-ed coverage. We’re treated to frequent features on the personal and psychological impact of suicide bombings on Israelis, but seldom see stories about the impact on Palestinians of the occupation and all its aspects–the civilian deaths, the roadblocks, the land confiscation, the curfews, the depredations by settlers, the shootings by soldiers, the destruction of olive groves, etc., etc.
Imbalance in news coverage is chiefly a matter of omission rather than commission, and since the beginning of the intifada almost two years ago, the Times has only rarely given casualty totals for Palestinians and Israelis–one suspects because Palestinian deaths outnumber Israeli deaths by about three to one, which makes it difficult to portray Israel as the party under siege. (In contrast, The Washington Post did report casualty figures with some regularity until Israel’s reoccupation of the West Bank in April.)
Most Times editorialists have not yet seen fit to comment on the July 22 Israeli missile attack on Gaza, although they generally do run editorials decrying large Palestinian terrorist attacks.
The Times also seldom uses the word "occupation" to describe Israel’s 35-year-old rule over the West Bank and Gaza, seldom describes East Jerusalem as occupied territory, seldom informs readers that the 200,000 Israelis who live in East Jerusalem are settlers who reside not in "neighborhoods" or in "suburbs" of Jerusalem but in settlements built on land confiscated from Palestinians, seldom reports on the steady expansion of Israeli settlements throughout the West Bank and seldom indicates that the intifada is an uprising against Israel’s occupation.
As Kathleen Christison, a former CIA analyst who’s written a couple of fine books on the Palestinian questions, puts it to me, "One gets the impression that few if any Times correspondents understand what drives the intifada or accept that there is any legitimacy to Palestinian resistance to the occupation."
The Times demonstrated its partisan approach most noticeably in July 2001 in its commentary on a major one-year-later retrospective on the Camp David summit published by Jerusalem bureau chief Deborah Sontag.
Christison points out that "In a striking–and, one must assume, deliberate–effort to maintain its own blame-Arafat position on Camp David, a Times editorial on the Sontag story undermined Sontag by contradicting her principal conclusion."
Having done extensive interviews with Israeli, Palestinian and American participants in the summit and in-depth analysis of what went wrong, Sontag concluded that Arafat was not solely to blame for the summit’s collapse and that all three parties were responsible for mistakes made over the entire seven years of the peace process.
A "potent, simplistic narrative has taken hold" in Israel and the U.S., Sontag wrote. "It says: Mr. Barak offered Mr. Arafat the moon at Camp David last summer. Mr. Arafat turned it down, and then ‘pushed the button’ and chose the path of violence." But officials to whom she spoke had concluded that the dynamic was actually far more complex than this, that Arafat did not bear sole or even a disproportionate share of the responsibility.
In fact, Sontag concluded, Barak did not offer Arafat the moon at Camp David but rather proposed a solution that might have been generous and even politically courageous in Israeli terms, but that would not have given the Palestinians what they regarded as a viable state.
Rather than accept Sontag’s considered assessment of where responsibility lay, a Times editorial two days later took care to praise Barak and blame Arafat. Barak had come to Camp David, the editorial proclaimed, "with a daring offer, a peace plan that essentially vaulted over the interim steps outlined under the Oslo accords… Mr. Barak gambled that Mr. Arafat would accept his approach." But, the editorial went on, Arafat was not up to the task and stirred up "the violent uprising" that erupted two months later.
Of course the worst offender was Thomas Friedman, who in repeated columns over two years heaped blame on Arafat and the Palestinians and seriously distorted what Israel offered at Camp David (repeating the fiction that Barak offered "94% of the West Bank [and] half of Jerusalem," never mentioning that the resulting so-called "state" would have been broken up into several noncontiguous parts).
For which, among other sins of commission and omission too numerous for individual citation, Friedman was given his third Pulitzer, possibly the most ludicrous decision in the long and infamous lifespan of the Pulitzer industry. Why did the Pulitzer board, overruling the various juries on at least two instances, decide to heap seven prizes on the Times last April?
I thought Les Payne (himself victim of the
Pulitzer board when it overruled a jury’s decision to honor him for foreign reporting) put it well in Newsday: "The tilt toward the Times, I suspect, issues, at bottom, from the all-too-American notion of rallying around the flagpole… [T]he Pulitzer board might give the nod to a ‘second-tier’ paper during peacetime… Once the balloon goes up, however, it’s back to the flagpole, and the closest thing the newspaper industry has to a flagpole is The New York Times. The move to The Times is so much easier, given its visibility and clout and number of sheep-dipped Timesmen the paper has spread over the industry and in academia."
So the function of those seven awards was to tell the world, See, we really do have a good newspaper. It must be good if it wins seven Pulitzer prizes.
Trouble is, just like I said at the start, the Times really isn’t that good, if you want to find out what’s going on.