watchdogs on the media battlefield

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The Jerusalem reporTebruary 25, 201318

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The Jerusalem reporTebruary 25, 2013 19

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Adam Levick requires for his job is a laptop and a touch of masochism. He employs

both to peruse The Guardian, one of Brit-ains so-called progressive dailies, and itspopular online spinoff, Comment is Free,or CiF. Levick is managing editor of CiFWatch, which monitors bias against Israel inthe two publications. He doesnt have to look

too hard.The Guardian is well known for its hostil-

ity towards Israel, and, despite perfunctoryprotestations of balance, wears its anti-Zion-ism bias proudly on its sleeve. The newspa-per has eulogized Palestinian terrorists, and

CiF has posted attering comments aboutunabashed Jew-haters like Israeli-born saxo-phonist/conspiracy theorist Gilad Atzmonand Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.

In The Guardian and especially on CiF,

Israel is the subject of rebuke and moral op-probrium quite out of proportion to any othercountry, Levick, a Philadelphia native, whonow lives in Jerusalem, tells The JerusalemReport. Their criticisms of Israel containclassic anti-Semitic tropes about the danger

of Jewish power, the old charge of dual loy-alties, and sometimes even the insidious sug-gestion that Jews are inherently racist.

Exhibit A on that last score: Israels deci-sion in September 2011 to release more than

1,000 Palestinian prisoners, many of themconvicted murders, in exchange for kid-napped Israel Defense Forces soldier GiladShalit is simply an indication, opined TheGuardian columnist Deborah Orr, of howinured the world has become to the obscene

idea that Israeli lives are more importantthan Palestinian lives.

Her reasoning: The disproportionate num-ber of Palestinians released in return for asingle Israeli soldier tacitly acknowledges

what so many Zionists believe that the livesof the chosen are of hugely greater conse-quence than those of their unfortunate neigh-bors. A fact the journalist described by heremployer as one of Britains leading socialand political commentators conveniently

overlooked is that Hamas, not Israel, had in-sisted on the terms of the prisoner swap.

Orr resorted to the anti-Semitic cho-sen people canard, Levick says. It wasatrocious.

Faced by an outcry, the journalist issued anapology. Writing in the passive voice of art-ful evasion favored by bureaucrats and poli-ticians the world over, she noted, My wordswere badly chosen and poorly used. Shethen went on to lament the problematic

circumstances of Israels creation in 1948,before implicitly chiding Israelis for not be-ing more open to criticism.

The editors of CiF and The Guardian didnot respond to The Reports repeated re-quests for comment. In a recent column,

however, readers editor Chis Elliott ac-knowledged the use of anti-Semitic termi-nology in certain Guardian articles. These

included, he wrote, references to Israel/US global domination and the term slav-ish to describe the US relationship with Is-

rael. Journalists, the editor added, have tobe aware that some examples involve codedreferences. They need to ask themselves, forexample, if the word Zionist is being used asa synonym for Jew.

Bias against the Jewish state, say pro-Israelmedia watchdogs, comes in several forms from purposeful slants to selective omis-sions, from subtle verbal cues to outrighthostility.Purposeful Slant: In its online country

proles during the run-up to the LondonOlympics, the BBC failed to list any city

as Israels capital, yet declared East Jeru-salem to be the capital of Palestine. TheBBCs culture of political over-correctnessoften hampers impartial reporting on Israel,

says Hadar Sela, a British-born Israeli whoruns the BBC Watch blog, adding, The or-ganizations Editorial Guidelines prescribethat BBC journalists cannot describe Hamas

as a terrorist organization or a bus bombing

as a terror attack in the name of avoidingvalue judgments.

Selective omission: Foreign reporters rou-tinely cite Israels occupation of Gaza,even though Israel unilaterally withdrewfrom the territory in 2005, uprooting all its

settlements in the process. Often the BBComits relevant context that would help to ac-curately present Israels case, says SimonPlosker, the Jerusalem-based managing edi-tor of the inuential media watchdog, Honest

Reporting. That matters because the Britishmedia has a global inuence far beyond its

size, adds the British Jew, who moved toIsrael in 2005.

Such complaints against the BBC havebeen voiced for years. In 2004, senior BBC

news editor Malcolm Balen was even taskedwith investigating the BBCs reporting fromthe Middle East over persistent allegationsof anti-Israeli bias. His reports ndings arerumored to be damning of the corporation,and the BBC has fought against their release.

Subtle verbal cues: Members of Fatah orHamas known for their past involvement interrorism and openly genocidal anti-Semiticviews are often labeled moderate as longas they pay lip service to the peace pro-

cess. Meanwhile, Israelis who insist onreciprocal concessions from Palestinians inthe land-for-peace scheme may end up beinglabeled right-wing.

The common media labels include Ne-tanyahu is hawkish, Abbas is a moderate,

Settlers are all religious fanatics, Pales-tinians just want to harvest their olives inpeace, a prolic American Jewish bloggerwho goes by the pseudonym Elder of Ziyontells The Report.

Outright hostility: In a discussion ahead

of the US presidential elections last year on

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21The Jerusalem reporTebruary 25, 2013

Irelands TV3 channel, presenter VincentBrowne opined, Israel is the cancer in for-eign affairs. It polarizes the Islamic com-munity of the world against the rest of the

world. That statement, Honest ReportingsPlosker points out, has put the Irish broad-caster on a par with Iranian President Mah-moud Ahmadinejad, who has labeled theJewish state a cancerous tumor. Browne

later apologized for his infelicitous use ofthe word [cancer], before citing, like TheGuardians Orr, the injustice [of Israelscreation] at the center of the conict.

To most Israelis, the second intifada broke

out as follows: Then-Prime Minister EhudBarak offered historic concessions to Pales-tinian leader Yasser Arafat during the CampDavid 2 negotiations of July 2000 to end theconict. After some dithering, Arafat re-jected them, returned home and launched abloody uprising against Israel.

The inTernATionAl media, however, asis their wont, had a different spin on causeand effect: After the failed negotiations, dis-gruntled Palestinians started rioting, where-upon Israel began responding with brutal

force.The dichotomy between reality and media

coverage proved the tipping point for ShragaSimmons, an American-born Israeli jour-nalist. He set up an email alert team whose

members would notify one another of in-stances of biased news coverage and re offletters to editors, demanding corrections.The grassroots activism soon mushroomedinto a professionally run nonprot organi-zation. Today, Honest Reporting has some

150,000 subscribers worldwide. Headquar-tered in Jerusalem, the media watchdog op-erates ofces in the United States, the UnitedKingdom and Canada.

The start of the second intifada, withthe ensuing lopsided media coverage, was

also a turning point for Levick, a political

science graduate of Temple University inPhiladelphia. It caused me to drop my Oslodelusions that the Israeli-Palestinian conictwas largely about territory, he recalls. I re-

alized that Israel was in a war of survival.He began writing letters to editors in de-

fense of Israel, and went on to work for theAnti-Defamation League, where he scoured

progressive journals and blogs for anti-Se-mitic content. In 2009, he moved to Israel,and was appointed editor of CiF Watch ayear later, dedicating himself full time eversince to combating bias in The Guardianand its online mouthpiece.

Last December, without warning or ex-planation, CiFs administrators deletedLevicks account and erased all his postsin the talkback section of the site, in which,

he says, he strove to set the record straightabout Israel. They banned me, a Zionist

Jew, from their talkback section, even asradical Islamists like Raed Salah [a leaderof Israels Islamic Movement] and Hamasleaders are afforded above-the-line plat-forms [for full-length essays] despite pro-

moting extreme anti-Semitism, he fumes,

branding the ban petty and vindictive.Undeterred, Levick maintains his mission

on his blog. His aim, he says, is to demandnot only balance but also an accurate reec-tion of the facts. The disinformation propa-

gated daily about Israel in [some] foreignmedia outlets is astonishing, Levick says.Its our job to make sure that theyre heldaccountable and the truth about the MiddleEast is told.

Easier said than done: A hatchet job onPage 1 carries far more weight than a subse-quent brief correction at the bottom of Page13 if any editorial mea culpa is forthcom-

ing at all. And once a malicious claim aboutIsrael is afforded legitimacy by mainstream

media coverage, it will often gain a life ofits own even once proven false by beingrepeated endlessly on social media by anti-Zionists.

The fact that cause-and-effect relationsare routinely ignored or obscured in me-

dia reports, thus masking the reasons forIsraels actions, is cause for concern. TheIDFs response to a deadly terror attackor a series of provocations often ends upbeing presented as just another case of

Israeli aggression, seemingly out of theblue, against long-suffering Palestinians.

Its invariably described as dispropor-tional. We [often] see biased headlineswhere chronology is inverted and Israelicountermeasures against terror are the fo-

cus rather than the Palestinian terror thatprompted them in the rst place, Ploskernotes.

Similarly, whereas journalists exer-cise a healthy skepticism towards all Is-raeli sources, they rarely extend the same

courtesy to Palestinian ones. They oftenallow accusations by pro-Palestinian ac-tivists about Israels alleged crimes andnefarious intentions to go unchecked, pub-lishing them as fact.

One studio guest on an AustralianBroadcasting Corporation radio showrecently suggested that Israel had beenresponsible for attacking its own embas-sies [during a recent spate of terror attacksfrom India to Thailand] in a pretext for

a planned attack on Iran, Plosker says.That disgusting canard was allowed tostand by the interviewer. Equally appall-

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The Jerusalem reporTebruary 25, 2013 23

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ing was one Canadian television hosts as-sertion on Quebec TV that Israel simplydidnt deserve to exist. Which other countryhas its own existence called into question in

the media?

ofTen iTs not only what foreign media re-port, but also what they dont. Calumnies ofJewish perdy and Zionist brutality are com-monplace in the Arab and Palestinian media,

but almost none of it shows up in foreign me-dia analyses about the root causes of theconict. All cycles of violence and any lackof peace are down to Israels brutal and il-

legal occupation of Palestinian territories,and thats that.

In the same vein, whereas Israel is a mod-ern, democratic, multicultural country inwhich citizens enjoy a vibrant cultural life andboisterous free press, many foreign journalistsprefer to ignore all this and frame almost any

story, even about mundane matters of dailylife, in the context of the Israeli-Palestinianconict. In news report after news report, Is-raelis and Palestinians are portrayed as mereextras in a great morality play of the oppres-sors and the oppressed.

This reductionist view leads to predicablecaricatures. In a recent article on the BBCs

website, the organizations Gaza correspon-dent used the pretext of an upcoming show-down between Spanish footballing giants

Real Madrid and Barcelona to present Pales-tinians as sport-loving underdogs under thethumb of a mighty opponent.

Then theres Time magazines notoriouscover story on September 7, 2010: Why Is-rael Doesnt Care About Peace. Featuring

a picture of Israelis smoking hookahs on abeach, the report, by correspondent Karl Vick,describes Israelis as callous, happy-go-luckysouls, who prefer to engage in making mon-ey rather than peace. The Anti-DefamationLeague condemned the article for its insidi-

ous subtext, and Honest Reporting named

Vick Dishonest Reporter of the Year in itsroundup of most noteworthy journalistic hit-and-run jobs.

A few months later, Time followed up with

a piece arguing that Israels promotion of itsprogressive gay-rights record [is] a way tocover up ongoing human-rights abuses in theWest Bank and Gaza. The theme was taken

up by The New York Times, which publishedan op-ed by Sarah Schulman, an American

gay rights advocate and anti-Israel activist,who argued that the Jewish state uses suchpinkwashing to conceal the continuing vio-lations of Palestinians human rights.

Pro-Israel bias? What pro-Israel bias? Well,

according to pro-Palestinian media watchers,its agrant pro-Zionist bias that permeatesthe media. Last October, Middle East Moni-tor (MEMO), a news agency that promotes apro-Palestinian agenda, staged a book launchat the University of London for The Battle

for Public Opinion in Europe, which argues

that mainstream European media outlets rou-tinely espouse Israeli government propaganda[in the service] of the Israel lobby in Europe.The launchs panel featured The Guardiancolumnist Seamus Milne and Tim Llewellyn,

the BBCs former Middle East correspondent.Llewellyn insisted that a tremendously

well-organized, careful, assiduous and ex-tremely well-nanced propaganda campaignis under way in Britain through the higher

levels of pro-Israel Zionists who are scatteredat strategic points throughout the British es-tablishment. He lamented the pressure onthe BBC to exercise self-censorship aboutZionist atrocities by an alien people in the

region [Middle East]. The Guardians Milneseconded Llewellyn. There are well-fundedand well-organized organizations that cam-paign in support of Israel, he said. If youreediting in these areas, you will nd pressureand campaigning constantly by those groups.

Presumably, they were referring to the

likes of Honest Reporting and CiF Watch.The charge of an orchestrated pro-Zionist PRjuggernaut to cow Western news organiza-tions into submission through letter writingcampaigns and other tactics is nothing new.

Vocal critics of Israel dismiss all noise aboutperceived anti-Israel bias in the media as justanother bogus claim ofhasbara (literally ex-planation, but often used as a synonym for

Zionist propaganda).Pro-Israel media watchers do call on their

readers to re off letters of complaint to of-fending news organizations. Honest Re-porting openly engages in such pressuretechniques. Often, the sheer weight of thenumbers of people sending complaints or just

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a change, Plosker acknowledges. This canbe anything from a simple correction or re-traction all the way to, for instance, the ringof CNNs senior Middle East editor Octavia

Nasr [in July 2010] after she tweeted her ad-miration for Hezbollah founder MohammadHussein Fadlallah upon his death.

But Levick, whose modest Jerusalemapartment doubles as his ofce, rejectsthe idea that hes part of some well-funded

and well-organized campaign of coercionagainst The Guardian. We support vigorousand open debate about Israel and Jewish-relat-ed issues, including issues of controversy [solong as they fall within the bounds of honest

and fair criticism], he counters. Just like TheGuardian, we engage in the marketplace ofideas. Our only weapons are our words, factsand logic.

The foreign media can criticize Israel andshould, agrees Michelle Whiteman, a lawyer

who runs Honest Reportings operations inQuebec, Canada. Its the nature of a criticismthat holds a clue as to whether journalists doso in good faith. Its not anti-Semitic to criti-cize Israels actions, she stresses. But a sin-

gular preoccupation with those actions and aselective condemnation of them point in thatdirection. Take checkpoints and security bar-

riers. Many countries have them, yet Israelsare often exclusively singled out as a symbolof repression, rather than as a measure of se-

curity.Israel is held to far higher standards than

other countries in the Middle East, a foreigncorrespondent with long experience in the re-gion concedes. Theres a certain expectationby editors to have stories [adhere to] the Da-

vid and Goliath narrative, he explains. ButI dont think its because of anti-Israel bias.They just dont want to look insensitive [to thePalestinians].

But Barry Rubin doesnt believe media bias

is a matter of sensitivity. Those of us whohave seen behind the scenes know how bad it

is, Prof. Rubin, a prolic author and MiddleEast expert, tells The Report. Most editorshave no trouble with complete bias. We havea number of issues at play here sympathy

for the underdog, progressives hostility to theWest, misdirection by the Palestinians.

When you have that, you have conscious,deliberate bias, Rubin, an American-born

Israeli, adds. A lot of journalists have anideological bias and their editors fail to up-

hold journalistic standards. And that isntjust true of Israel; its true of a large num-ber of subjects. In fact, the [biased] mediatreatment of Israel is becoming closer totypical.

Context, balance and even common sense

often take a backseat to agenda journalism,notes Rubin, who argues that the media hasbecome a tool in a political struggle. Theworst offenders, he says, are wire services likeReuters, the Associated Press and AgenceFrance-Presse, which rely on local stringers

and freelance photographers, many of whom

seem to make no bones about playing fastand loose with facts and misrepresentingevents.

Several wire photographers have over theyears been shown to pass off carefully stagedand choreographed Palestinian propaganda

events so-called Pallywood productions as spontaneous happenings. And images domatter. For people who are largely unfamil-iar with the history and current realities ofthe Israeli-Palestinian conict, the issue of

right and wrong gets ltered through selectmedia images.

In some cases, thinly veiled advocacy jour-nalism hides behind a make-work pretense ofobjectivity, as the justness of the Palestiniancause is seen to override common journal-

istic standards of impartiality, balance andeven accuracy. In other cases, simple wish-

ful thinking is at work.[Many] journalists desire for peace often

outweighs the evidence in front of them,

argues blogger Elder of Ziyon, an IT profes-sional who often dissects news articles andop-eds about Israel on his site. Hamassleaders call for the destruction of Israel inArabic literally every day, he says. Yet a

recent piece in The New York Times arguedthat they have accepted the two-state solu-

tion. The reporter didnt have any quote thatproved it, only quotes that he felt implied it.Journalists wishful thinking leads them tobelieve that both sides in the conict havethe same ethics and goals. That assumption

is rarely true.Plosker, however, cautions against crying

wolf all too readily. Some people attribute[all] anti-Israel media bias to outright anti-Semitism, but thats an unsophisticated an-swer to a multifaceted problem, he says.

Occasionally, anti-Semitism does rear itsugly head, but the reality is far more com-

plex. The Palestinian narrative has becomedominant in Western discourse, particularlyin academic and liberal circles. Todays jour-nalists graduated from campuses where the

norm is a postmodern narrative that deniesIsraels rightful historical place in the Mid-dle East.

Thats how the usual red herrings havetaken unshakable hold, especially in op-eds:

Israeli apartheid, ethnic cleansing, andneo-colonialism. Ironically, however, itsIsraeli societys openness, not its racistinsularity, that can work against it, Ploskerstresses. Israel is a free society and journal-ists are at liberty to pursue stories without

hindrance from the state, he says. This ismuch less so in the Palestinian territories,where journalists are more wary of report-ing negative stories about the Palestinians forfear of losing access or, in the worst cases,because of intimidation and threats of vio-

lence.Media bias doesnt just skew views about

Israel; it can have severe real-life conse-quences, Sela insists. The media is a ma-jor battleeld, she says. Negative reports

coming out during the 2006 Lebanon War,for example, affected the parameters that theIDF could operate under in trying to rootout Hezbollah strongholds targeting Israelwith rockets and missiles.

And so, for pro-Israeli media watchers, the

media war carries on. Our existence keepsthe media on notice and ensures a level ofaccountability that would not otherwise ex-ist, Plosker says. Many battles, if left un-fought, would lead to a far worse situation forIsraels image in the media. We cant let thathappen.

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