On March 13 The Post’s main headline read, “Massive Israeli Force Enters Ramallah. Thousands of Troops Assault City, Camp; 30 Palestinians Killed.” The fourth paragraph of the news story reported that seven Israelis, six of them civilians, were killed by Arab gunmen in other incidents. Some other newspapers that day managed to get the Israeli deaths, as well as those of the Palestinians, into the headlines or leads of their stories.
On March 5 an Israeli shelling that killed a Palestinian woman and five children was front-page news. Two days before, a Palestinian suicide bomber killed nine Israelis, including three children, outside a synagogue in Jerusalem. That story appeared on Page A15.
Those readers alleging that The Post’s Middle East coverage has an anti-Israel bias cite these and other items as evidence. Yet these examples, which I think are legitimate points to question, have little to do with actual coverage, nor in my view do they reflect institutional bias. Reporters in the region, and foreign news editors here, don’t determine the front-page headline and how much can be fit into it. Nor do they have the final say on what goes on the front page. On March 3 The Post had a number of strong front-page stories, and a suicide bombing is not always an automatic choice.
As the conflict grows more intense, so do the e-mail responses — many from organized campaigns, some from individuals. Some are ugly. One ended with the Nazi salute, “Sieg Heil.” Another said a “more appropriate name for your newspaper would be ‘Der Stuermer,’ [a Nazi-era anti-Semitic newspaper] since you are supporting the murder of innocent Jews.”
“You almost hesitate to comment,” says Post Assistant Managing Editor for Foreign News Phil Bennett, “because anything you say can and will be used against you by some of these readers, and the more the conflict heats up, the more complainants come to reveal themselves. This label of pro-Palestinian is attached to us by people who are not unbiased observers. I reject this idea. Our coverage is as fair and balanced as we can make it. It is driven by no agenda. It conforms to standards we apply to all news stories.
“I read all those letters because I think it’s important to face criticism,” says Bennett, a former foreign editor and Latin America correspondent for the Boston Globe. “But there’s a way these criticisms always get personalized that’s really interesting. They attack the correspondents’ motives and inevitably attack their values and perceived prejudices, and I just think it’s absurd that you could have Lee Hockstader and Dan Williams get attacked constantly as if they had a personal ax to grind. You’re talking about two guys who between them have 35 years of reporting on conflicts between people who hated each other, who couldn’t get along, who did terrible, appalling things to one another. And their professional lives are devoted to sorting those things out and bringing those stories alive in a clear and honest way to readers.”
His deputy, foreign editor David Hoffman, a former correspondent in Moscow and Jerusalem, says much of the criticism “is an attempt to measure small bits. But if you look at the long run of our coverage, you would see a lot of time devoted to both sides. This is a war between two peoples, and we cover both peoples’ pain, suffering and aggression. You can’t microbalance this story, measure it in column inches or bodies on any day. But we can make a claim for fairness over a long period of time.” Bennett adds: “We know what our values and standards are, and that’s why errors or lapses or imperfections that come into the paper don’t undermine our overall fairness and accuracy.
“Traditionally,” he says, “the Israeli government has been held, and holds itself, to a higher standard . . . and so when countries that are democracies, that have a very self-conscious commitment to principles of individual rights and freedoms, then engage in actions that would appear to be in violation of that self-image and those commitments, that’s also news. In saying that, you of course open yourself up to all sorts of criticism, but I think that’s a fact that also informs our coverage.”
As Bennett says, lapses and imperfections will occur in recording and displaying such a long and brutal conflict. On balance, my view remains that The Post’s readers are fortunate to have such courageous reporting from the field and from both sides.
