I have been of course following all the absurd defenses and excuse-making from Jeffrey Goldberg, Ron Kampeas, Andrew Sullivan, Joe Klein, etc for Ethan Bronner and the New York Times, as well as your recent comments. They insist that there is no bias in Bronner’s reporting and that his son’s service in the occupation army presents no conflict of interest. Here are the issues they seem to avoid:
-The New York Times has a long history of appointing reporters who are Jewish and/or Israeli to the Jerusalem bureau – Friedman, Sontag, Erlanger, Bronner, Kershner (etc. correct me if I am wrong on any of these). Whether Jewish or not they tend to live as middle class Israelis do, in West Jerusalem (like Bronner in an ethnically cleansed Palestinian neighborhood) or perhaps Tel Aviv, but never in Ramallah, Nazareth, Gaza or Hebron. So they have a structural identification with Israeli Jews — the privileged segment of the population living between the Med and the Jordan River.
Now let me be clear that I do NOT assume that being Jewish, or even having family ties to Israel, or being Israeli, automatically results in bias. Amira Hass of Haaretz is an excellent reporter. She’s an Israeli Jew whose parents were Holocaust survivors. Deborah Sontag of the New York Times was one of the best reporters on the conflict ever - she was there during the second Intifada. So was Suzanne Goldenberg of The Guardian. So anyone who says that being Jewish automatically leads to pro-Israel bias is wrong. So on this point those criticizing and defending Bronner and the NYT should find a lot of common ground.
But here’s the issue that sticks. Is the NYT really defending some sort of universal principle? Can anyone seriously imagine that if it had been revealed that Bronner’s son had joined the Izzedin al-Qassam Brigades (the military wing of Hamas), we would be hearing these sorts of defenses? Of course one reason is it’s so hard to imagine is because the New York Times has never had a Palestinian, Palestinian-American or Arab-American reporter of stature report on the conflict.
Yes, recently they have had Taghreed El-Khodary in Gaza — who some like (Weiss for instance), but others (such as As’ad AbuKhalil) have strongly criticized. But here is a crucial point: El-Khodary is allowed to report only on Palestinians. Neither she nor any other Arab reporter is allowed to report on Israeli Jews. While Jews/Americans may report on Palestinians, the converse is not true. Why is this? It must be — I assume — because there is an inherent, perhaps unacknowledged assumption that an Arab/Palestinian is or will be automatically biased against Israelis/Jews. Whereas, we are supposed to accept that in no case is a Jewish reporter who identifies with Israel biased even when his son has joined an occupation army that is raiding Palestinian refugee camps and communities dozens of times per week. Seriously?
To what can we attribute this double-standard? I am afraid it smacks of racism.
I also have a long memory — Back in 1995, NPR fired Maureen Meehan because it was claimed she had not adequately disclosed that her husband had worked as an adviser to the Palestinian Authority. Of course we did not have blogs in those days, but I still do not remember an outpouring in her defense from the mainstream media. Hmmm. I wonder why?
The other day I did a post on "Status, Radicalism & Happiness" that argued that many lefties who left the bourgeois track during the Vietnam era have had rich lives. I mentioned "my neighbor growing up in Baltimore. He got into the SDS at Harvard, and ended up dropping out and picking sugar cane for years in Cuba. Now he writes mysteries." Henry Norr in Berkeley knew who I meant. He sent the post along to Dick Cluster; and Dicky as I know him wrote to me that my facts were wobbly but my lesson isn’t.
I agree what you and your wife say, and feel free to use me as example. But actually, just to not-give-myself-airs: I was in SDS at Harvard, definitely, but alas graduated from the place (best I can claim is that I was on probation for a Dow Chemical sit-in — you can imagine my father Ray telling me on phone that he understood what we’d done but to try not to get kicked out in my last year because of the $$$ he’d invested), and spent only 2 months cutting cane in Cuba, in between stints working on "underground" newspaper Old Mole. Mysteries yes, though more recently Spanish-English translation, history, and also a couple of non-mystery novels without publishers. And teaching and advising half-time at UMass Boston, the commuter branch of UMass.
Who knows what it was I was on track to be if the movement hadn’t intervened???? My sense is like yours, though: that most of us from elite colleges, Jews and non-Jews, who got off that track ended up being able to rejoin it, though more often on some slow-freight line rather than fast-track, and with better social/service/political goals. I did stay in touch with Cuba and in the early-mid ’90s stumbled on a chance to go back there and work for (off-and-on) four years ‘92-’96, with Cuban teachers of English, and my kid to go to high school there 2 semesters, and my partner Nancy live and work there much of that time too; so now we have Cuban more-or-less extended family we go back and visit (and by a long and curious and very Cuban chain of events, one of those old mystery novels got published in Cuban translation a couple years ago).
Here’s a link to a social history of Havana written w/ Cuban writer/editor friend. And here is link to something short that I wrote recently about the Venceremos Brigade etc (for the mag of the "David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies" at Harvard of all things — which is edited by someone who was also on the VB). [Weiss excerpts:]
In the spring of 1961, as a 14-year-old in Baltimore, Maryland, interested in current events, I read in the New York Times about Cubans fighting for freedom at a place called the Bay of Pigs, against a dictatorship that had hijacked a popular revolution. When the forces of good failed to triumph at the Bay of Pigs, I was shocked. A classmate of mine—a precocious member of the Young Socialist Alliance— told me that the operation had been run by the CIA. I could not believe. Hadn’t Adlai Stevenson denied this at the United Nations? Hadn’t the New York Times and other media reported the invasion was a spontaneous action by freedom-loving Cubans?
… In the years between 1961 and 1969, the Viet Nam war had taught us that what the mainstream media and our government officials said about our country’s foreign policy might not only be mistaken, but might even be a cynical and conscious effort to mislead us in both senses of the word.
