The venerable media watchdog Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting is asking the question many of us are wondering – Does NYT’s Top Israel Reporter Have a Son in the IDF?:
What the Times needs to ask itself is whether it expects that its bureau chief has the normal human feelings about matters of life or death concerning one’s child.
Might he feel hostility, for example, when interviewing members of organizations who were trying to kill his son? When the IDF goes into battle, might he be rooting for the side for which his son is risking his life? Certainly such issues would be taken very seriously if a Times reporter had a child who belonged to a military force that was engaged in hostilities with the IDF; indeed, there’s little doubt that a reporter in that position would not be allowed to continue to cover the Mideast conflict.
Having a conflict of interest, it should be stressed, is not the same thing as producing slanted journalism; rather, it means that a journalist has outside motivations that are strongly at odds with his or her journalistic responsibilities. That a journalist has been "scrupulously fair" in the past does not excuse an ongoing conflict of interest; journalists should not be placed in a position where they have to ignore the well-being of their family in order to do their job, nor should readers be expected to trust that they can do so.
That said, Bronner’s reporting has been repeatedly criticized by FAIR for what would appear to be a bias toward the Israeli government.
FAIR is asking people to ask the New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt to look into whether Bronner has a child in the Israeli military, and, if so, why this is not seen as an unacceptable conflict of interest. Hoyt’s email address is public@nytimes.com.
This is a fair inquiry as Adam’s article suggests, if not directly implies. Prior Times Jerusalem bureau chiefs include James Bennet (now editor of The Atlantic), and Thomas Friedman (now the über-columnist as to shaping U.S. opinion about Israel). Bronner holds a fairly prominent and important gig.
Here’s a recent Bronner report about the Israeli’s latest response to the Goldstone Report:
link to nytimes.com
Bronner does abide by his header in that all his selected details list specific Israeli governmental-approved responses to vague Goldstone general allegations–minus any
of the Goldstone factual context. This gives the general thrust of the article
as Israel is merely defending itself from biased claims against it.
I’m not aware of any Bronner report similarly treating the Goldstone Report when it first came out, that is, essentially listing and quoting a bunch of pro-Goldstone Report advocates, while off-setting that list of support with a vague acknowledgment that Israel spokesmen beg to differ.
Considering Bronner’s gig is a significant chair influencing American public opinion
leaders, hence the future of American foreign policy relative to Israel, I find Bronner appears to me a sly hasbara agent.
I’d like to hear from anyone who thinks differently, and why specifically in terms of the content of Bronner’s reporting.
heads up, on sunday i attended a forum where an associate of FAIR was speaking about media in the middle east. i started an email exchange with him and alerted him to this blog (amazingly he hadn’t heard of it). maybe, just maybe..this report came about because of mondoweiss.
Annie, can you give us a nutshell summary of your impression of what the FAIR associate thinks “about media in the middle east”?
sorry to take so long to get back to you citizen, in a nutshell be said the reason the reporting was so screwed was that most msm reporters today get their talking pts from officials in washington or tel aviv instead of actually doing any investigating. he was very cool and seemed to be totally on board.
So what makes his son being in the IDF a conflict of interest? Is the New York Times interested in killing his son and he is interested in keeping his son alive?
Perhaps more generally, as a member of the tribe, I expect he is interested in ALL of the Jewish sons surviving. Is this a conflict of interest? If so, why should the NYT Bureau have any Jew in charge?
This “conflict of interest” stuff is dangerous.
Bronner has been writing about the Israeli reaction to the Goldstone Report- after he conspicuously failed to write about the report when it first came out. Since the Goldstone Report is an examination of whether the IDF has committed human rights violations and war crimes in Gaza, its a conflict of interest for a reporter with a son in the IDF to cover anything to do with the Report or the Israeli reaction to the Report. And its a major lapse in ethics not to disclose that conflict of interest, and another lapse in ethics for the NYT not to assign another reporter without a personal connection to the IDF to report on anything to do with the IDF, which means anything to do with the attack on Gaza, or on the occupation for that matter. There are plenty of reporters, Jewish and otherwise, without such a conflict.
Its as if a company were under investigation for possible criminal activity and the reporter covering the story had a son who worked for the company. It wouldn’t be allowed.
We aren’t talking about “Jewish sons surviving”. We are talking about a man writing about (or refusing to write about) allegations that might have a negative impact on his son’s advancement in the IDF.
Exactly, and we are talking about moulding USA public opinion; since the USA basically enables Israeli activity impacting the whole world, and so especially world opinion of the USA, we should all know about Bronner’s innate conflict of interest.
The world really is bigger than a Jewish son in the IDF. At least, if you are not a
Zionist.
” Is the New York Times interested in killing his son and he is interested in keeping his son alive? ” This is a classic strawman. The issue is not whether the New York Times is interested in killing Bronner’s son (they are not) or does he want to keep is son alive (he does.) The issue is whether a reasonable person has grounds for questioning Bronner’s objectivity regarding Israeli matters because of his Israeli spouse and his having a son who serves in the IDF. At the very least, any reporting by Broner should have a disclaimer noting Broner’s Israeli connections.
“So what makes his son being in the IDF a conflict of interest?”
What I want to know is why is Bronner’s son in the IDF and not the US Marines? This country is, after all, at war on two fronts. In time of war, shouldn’t one’s primary loyalty be to one’s own country first?
The New York Times has now confirmed to us that Jerusalem Bureau Chief Ethan Bronner’s son has recently entered the Israeli army.
Despite this extremely serious conflict of interest, Times Foreign Editor Susan Chira is refusing to remove him from his post. This is an egregious violation of journalistic ethics and must not be allowed to go through unremarked.
According to the Times’ ethics guidelines, even a bumpersticker on a family car or a “daughter in a high-profile job” could be grounds for a conflict of interest.
According to Times’ policy, “In cases where newsroom management considers the problem serious, the staff member may have to withdraw from certain coverage. Sometimes an assignment may have to be modified or a beat changed.”
This is one of those times.
Please contact the New York Times ombudsman Clark Hoyt asking for the removal of Ethan Bronner and requesting that the Times pursue ethical, accurate, unbiased journalism:
Clark Hoyt,
Readers Representative
E-mail: public@nytimes.com
Phone: (212) 556-7652
Mr. Clark Hoyt,
Ethan Bronner’s son is in the Israeli military. This is a clear conflict of interest for Ethan as Jerusalem Bureau Chief. Please stop making an exception to your ethics rules when it comes to anything related to Israel.
I would like to see more Palestinian Americans covering the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
I look forward to your response.
Sincerely,
Dan Kelly
NYT’s Bronner has such high standards to live up to”
Stalin’s Apologist: Walter Duranty, the New York Times’s Man in Moscow
link to thefreelibrary.com
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There might be an argument for compiling a full listing all the relatives of NYT staff involved in the IDF one way or another.
Mondoweiss has certainly “named names” in regards to people in media and their connections to Israel and Israeli-related organizations, if not the IDF specifically. I think that is one of the most important endeavors of this site.
Ethan Bronner now works from, and lives in, Jerusalem, although he also has a home in Pelham, NY. He has had his current job (Jerusalem Bureau Chief) since March 2008.
But he has been based in Jerusalem previously:
He worked for The Boston Globe from 1985 until 1997, where he started on general assignment and urban affairs. He went on to be the paper’s Supreme Court and legal affairs correspondent in Washington, D.C. and then its Middle East correspondent, based in Jerusalem.
Another website puts Bronner’s dilemma in stark perspective.
I don’t know what it’s like to have children, but if a close member of my family joined the U.S. military — or any government agency or private company — my natural, human reaction would be to develop some kind of sympathy, if not affinity, for the organization. If someone criticized the organization, I might, instead of joining in the excoriation, come up with lines of defense, if not to shield the entire group, then at least to excuse or explain my relative’s role.
It would take restraint for a journalist to prevent any tinge of that bias from invading their writing. It would take significantly more effort to make sure the bias wasn’t subtly affecting less-controllable but related aspects of their job: developing human sources, choosing their reading, deciding which stories to cover in the first place. I doubt that I would be as inclined as I was before to seek out stories that would damage my relative’s organization. And on the other hand, there would also be a risk that I might overcompensate by seeking out stories I normally would not, simply to prove that I could, in fact, overcome the appearance of a conflict and criticize my relative’s business.
Silverstein and others have raised hypothetical comparisons to point out the conflict of interest inherent in Bronner’s having a child who belongs to the army of one of the nations involved in a conflict he must write about every day. What if a reporter’s son belonged to Hizballah, or if Bronner was a business reporter whose son worked at a Wall Street firm? Would business-reporter Bronner or the man with the son in Hizballah be allowed to keep their positions?
Evan Hill link to themajlis.org
From another Bronner article, on West Bank settlers
link to themajlis.org
Bronner reports:
Some settlers have engaged in, and vow more of, what they call “Price Tag,” meaning that any time Israeli security forces move against settlement outposts, the settlers exact a price from Palestinians, mostly by burning Palestinian fields and orchards or by blocking roads.
And there’s more. Since the 2005 “expulsion” from Gaza, the settlers have turned more toward “ancient Jewish texts and rabbinical pronouncements,” Bronner says. They live by the motto “God is king.” They don’t recognize Palestine. Bronner’s purpose is to focus on the settlers, so he doesn’t note it, but the parallels to Islamic revivalist movements are just too obvious here.
Bronner has never mentioned the regular cooperation and protection that the IDF give to the settlers’ attacks on Palestinian farmers, which means that the august people who read the New York Times have no idea of the secret land clearance of Palestinians that is happening daily.
link to alethonews.wordpress.com
My email to public@nytimes.com:
Having a son in the IDF, may make Ethan Bronner uniquely qualified to cover Israel’s response to the Goldstone report. Does the Times have any plans to, at some future date, assign anyone to report on the Goldstone report itself?
Not bad, Les. .