A front-page story last Sunday by Jerusalem correspondent Molly Moore focused on Israel’s increasing use of targeted assassinations of known or suspected Palestinian militants as a primary weapon in its battle to curb suicide bombings and other attacks against its citizens.
The story, which, with photographs, also occupied a full page inside the paper, reported that the number of Palestinians tracked and killed by Israel had more than doubled in the previous year and that at least 249 Palestinians had been killed in these attacks since the fall of 2000, including 149 who were targets and 100 who were civilians or bodyguards.
This was a legitimate and important story, focusing on a tactic that has become more controversial in Israel as it has become more frequent. But several readers wrote to complain about the way this article was handled. In their view, it was “shamefully one-sided” in sourcing and analysis, as one reader put it, painted “a sympathetic picture of mass murderers,” as another said, “and with essentially no mention of the number of Israeli civilians murdered by these terrorists,” another wrote. Still another found it ironic that the article quoted a primary target who survived an Israeli attack, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, one of the most strident leaders of the Hamas resistance movement, as saying, “The thing that makes me angry is they mean to kill as many people as they can.” This while Rantisi, the reader says with tongue in cheek, “devotes all his efforts to avoiding [killing civilians] — unless the civilians happen to be Jews.”
This story was informative and largely well reported, and it had more balance, at least in my reading, than the critical readers gave it credit for. But it is indeed hard to understand why this lengthy article did not state clearly, and with whatever precision was available, that many hundreds of Israelis (821, according to the Israeli Foreign Ministry) have been killed in suicide bombings and other violent attacks since September 2000 and that almost 5,000 have been injured or maimed. This is clearly part of the anguish and anger that fuel this brutal and seemingly endless conflict, and it needs to be explained, just as the Palestinian side is explained, in more than passing terms in an article of this length and interest.
Over the past 21/2 years, I have written frequently about the paper’s Middle East coverage, sometimes agreeing with specific reader criticisms but also defending the paper’s overall coverage as generally solid, pull-no-punches reporting. What is frustrating to me is that some of the stories that have attracted criticism, and deserved it in part, could have been fixed before publication. At least that’s the way it seems to me. Reporting on this conflict is so fraught with emotional and special-interest criticism that it seems the paper would benefit from making sure that the power and impact of the news is not overwhelmed or degraded by stories with obvious holes.
Here are some other things that caught readers’ attention last week:
Some people thought The Post gave Kraft Foods a public relations bonanza on Wednesday with a headline that said, “Slimming Down Oreos; Kraft Plans to Make Its Food Products Healthier,” and a lead paragraph that said essentially the same thing. One reader called this “a minimally processed press release that parrots the corporate food processors’ claims that they can make junk food ‘healthier.’ ” He suggested another headline: “Oreos With Certain Ingredients Removed Are Nutritionally Less Bad for You.” Another said, “They are going to helpfully recommend on the label that you eat only one instead of three. Gee, thanks. Like that has any effect on how many people will eat.”
People wrote to say they really enjoyed and appreciated some other recent stories. Among them was a two-part series last month by Metro reporters Carol D. Leonnig, Lena H. Sun and Sarah Cohen about the lack of accountability in the District’s system of court-appointed lawyers who act as guardians for aged and incapacitated residents. Another was staff writer David Finkel’s front-page effort last Sunday to capture some of the 9 million Americans either jobless or underemployed through the tale of one man in Newark, Ohio. There were warm comments for Stephen Hunter’s portrait of the late Katharine Hepburn, “The American Queen,” on Monday and for New York correspondent Michael Powell’s earlier portrait of a 93-year-old storyteller in Buffalo. Readers had good things to say about Emily Wax’s reports from Congo, about continuing Post coverage of the situation in Iraq, and about a reconstruction by staff writer Dana Priest of a nightmarish and mysterious ambush in an Indonesian rain forest 10 months ago in which two Americans and one Indonesian were murdered and eight other Americans were wounded.
