A bullhorn, a boycott and charges of bias.
More than 100 protesters who say The Inquirer’s coverage of the Middle East is slanted against Israel staged a noisy demonstration Friday on the sidewalk outside the newspaper’s main office.
The protest coincided with a boycott of the newspaper by some pro-Israeli groups, led by the 2,000-member Philadelphia district of the Zionist Organization of America. About 360 subscribers have dropped the paper for the month of July or canceled altogether.
“Freedom of speech does not mean freedom to deceive your customers,” Leonard Getz, president of the ZOA, said as cheers erupted from the pickets. He charged the newspaper with “being a propaganda tool for terrorists” and having “a culture of blatant bias against Israel.”
A few steps down the sidewalk, a group of about 35 pickets from the Jewish Mobilization for a Just Peace, staged a counterdemonstration. “We need more information, not less,” said Elliott batTzedek.
In their midst was Ahmed Bouzid, president of the Palestine Media Watch, who only Thursday delivered to the paper another detailed, three-month critique, this one of photos on the front page.
“Between March 28 and June 15, The Inquirer published only one picture above the fold depicting the human suffering of Palestinians…. while it published nine pictures showing human suffering from the Israeli side.”
So it goes in the media war, where American newspapers – by most accounts, far more pro-Israeli than their western European counterparts – take it on the chin from both sides. And keep on reporting.
Walker Lundy, editor of The Inquirer, invited leaders of the ZOA-led protest to come inside the paper so he could better listen to their complaints.
“You will get a better hearing if you don’t call us anti-Semites,” he said at one point.
Michael Goldblatt, who was attending his ninth meeting with editors, explained why his group felt so much was at stake with the paper’s coverage.
“You are eroding support for Israel. That is very, very dangerous,” he said.
Criticism of the coverage has led to the boycott, only a blip in The Inquirer’s 760,000 Sunday circulation. Lundy sent a letter to each subscriber, asking him or her to reconsider.
“This is a time of high tension and deep frustration in the Middle East over the violence and the failure to make progress toward peace,” he wrote. “More than at any other time, it is our job to try to do our best to remain scrupulously balanced and insightful in our coverage of a very complicated story…
“We must be able to agree to disagree on important issues without either of us refusing to listen,” he wrote.
With the boycott, The Inquirer has joined the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post — all of which have been recently hit by similar actions. On the airwaves, CNN and National Public Radio have come under intense criticism.
Are The Inquirer and these distant media outlets all in cahoots?
No, what we have in common is how we see our role as a free and independent press. Journalists set out to report what they see and hear, interviewing as many sides as they can. The goal is a fair and accurate report.
This philosophy, second nature to journalists, is the biggest bone of contention with passionate readers on both sides whose frame of reference is much different. To them, there is only one side to the story. To report the other, and especially to present a human portrait, is to aid the enemy.
This sentiment is understandable, given the despair, frustration and anguish of the conflict, and an Internet that provides immediate, detailed reports of suffering by relatives and friends in Israel and the West Bank.
Where the newspaper and these readers differ is over what is fair coverage.
Criticism of The Inquirer’s coverage of the Middle East has been steady since the outbreak of violence in September 2000. The number of complaints, from both sides, peaked in late March and April, coinciding with a rash of suicide bombings and the Israeli Defense Force’s incursions into the West Bank. Since June, the paper has heard mostly from pro-Israeli readers.
The biggest recent flashpoint was a Sunday front-page article June 9 describing the Israeli practice of holding on to the remains of suicide bombers. The story, by Jerusalem-based correspondent Michael Matza, and the headline “Palestinians’ remains fuel a bitterness” prompted dozens of responses from furious readers who saw the piece as sympathetic to bombers’ families.
The Jewish Exponent, a weekly with a circulation of 55,000 published by the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia, ran a front-page editorial condemning the article. In a phone interview, editor Jonathan Tobin called it “macabre” and “out of left field.”
“It’s seen by many readers as justifying the attacks,” he said.
The Inquirer saw it differently. The piece was one of hundreds of articles over the last 21 months intended to explore the myriad causes of the deep-seated antagonism on both sides.
Matza learned of the dispute over the corpses while covering the siege at Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity.
“I decided to write the story because it presented an interesting issue that had also been raised in a white paper by B’t Selem, a well-known Israeli human-rights organization,” he said.
The Inquirer was not alone in reporting on the “captive corpses.” Four days later, Ha’aretz, Israel’s leading daily newspaper, published a page-one news story about Palestinian bodies being held at the same forensics lab.
Back-to-back news stories that were presented very differently became a second major friction point for pro-Israeli readers. On June 21, the paper ran a front-page article about a sense in Israel that the Sharon government could not protect residents from the rash of suicide bombings. A box on the front page pointed to a story on Page A9 that Palestinian gunmen had invaded a house in a Jewish settlement near Nablus and killed five Israelis.
On the following day, Saturday, June 22, The Inquirer’s lead story on Page One carried this headline: “Israel admits error in killing four Palestinians.”
Those who wrote or called to complain bitterly about the presentation said they thought it showed the paper cared less about the lives of Israelis than those of Palestinians.
Editor Lundy said he thought the paper had overplayed the Saturday story. “It was an honest error in judgment, not part of some deliberate anti-Israel strategy,” he wrote to the subscribers.
Throughout, the paper has remained open to those who fault its coverage. In June, the paper ran 26 letters on the Middle East, including 17 that were pro-Israel, seven that were pro-Palestinian and two that were neutral. Of these, five denounced Matza’s piece on the “captive corpses” and two criticized the apparent disparity in the back-to-back stories.
A third, long-standing friction point comes down to one noun: terrorist.
Some have demanded that the paper use the word to describe those instigating the violence against Israel. The paper’s practice has been to refer to Palestinians fighting in the streets as gunmen or militants and to those who detonate explosives on their bodies as suicide bombers. In writing the news, the aim is to be as specific as possible in the description.
This practice is applied to both sides. When Baruch Goldstein opened fire in 1994 in a mosque in Hebron, killing 29 Muslims, he was described in this newspaper as a Jewish settler or an extremist, but not a “terrorist.”
Since Sept. 11, it has become more difficult to defend the paper’s practice. After all, if suicide bombers struck on Broad Street, this newspaper would likely call them terrorists. Only when they hit overseas, in any foreign country, are they suicide bombers.
Pro-Palestinian readers have trigger words, too. They have objected to some uses of errant, response and retaliate. If the paper were to begin reconsidering all the contested words, there is no telling where the word challenge would end.
The most alarming change in reader response over the last few months has been the polarization on both sides. Those who took moderate positions just a few months ago now seem unwilling to listen to any other view.
But it’s the newspaper’s job to report all facets of a story and let readers draw their own conclusions. In weighing bias, readers need to look beyond a single sentence or story to the coverage over time – to the thousands of pieces published over many months.
Those who quit the paper are cutting off a whole spectrum of ideas. In addition to the news reports that have angered them, they also lose the columns and letters that support their views. Most of all, they lose a useful window into how the other side thinks.
