Gray lady has a thorn in her side. Bernard Avishai says (and I tend to agree) that Ethan Bronner shouldn’t be moved from Jerusalem just because his son joined the IDF. But Avishai then quotes Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn in a highminded (and dual-nationalized) struggle to overlook the real problem: his friend Bronner is in the tank. The Merhava Tank. Lysandra Ohrstrom at Huffpo gets this. Swonderful, smarvelous:
You don’t have to be a journalist, editor, or Middle Eastern scholar to find signs of biases in Bronner’s coverage. Nor does one have to examine it microscopically. Just type in his byline in the search box of the Times’ website and glance at the first twenty headlines that appear and it’s obvious where Bronner’s sympathies lie. Almost every substantial story is told from the perspective of Israelis: "Israel Nears Membership in Economic Club," from January 19; "For Israel, Mixed Feelings on Aid Effort," published on January 22; "Israel Prepares Rebuttal to the Goldstone Report," from January 23.
Note to young journalists: This is concrete and precise.
Bronner himself told Hoyt that he "would rather be judged by his work than his biography," so a signs of bias take a look at the latter story on what he characterizes as Israel’s campaign to "dispel the [Goldstone] report’s harsh conclusion — that the death of noncombatants and destruction of civilian infrastructure were part of an official plan to terrorize the Palestinian population."…
Rubble and destruction were the most minor consequences of the war, but you’d never know that from reading Bronner’s account. The Times in general, and Bronner in particular, have a long history of burying the plight of individual Palestinians under the rubble in service of furthering a one-sided narrative of the conflict.
Bronner’s objectivity deserves to be questioned and If his son’s military service is the impetus for readers to look deeper into the news they consumer and the interests driving it, so be it. By pretending to engage in a discussion about journalistic objectivity,[executive editor Bill] Keller and [public editor Clark] Hoyt made it blatantly obvious that readers cannot rely on editors for a balanced news diet.
Beautifully done. The great thing about the Bronner story is that it has opened the door on the Times’ biased coverage. And opened the door on Jewish identity construction in the American Establishment. Oh I love this stuff. Avishai, attacking Times public editor Clark Hoyt for saying that Bronner should leave Jerusalem, writes:
Hoyt is valorizing crude behaviorist ideas masquerading as liberal ones, that we are, really, nothing but bundles of "socialized preferences." What we think is the product of our "demographic." Our claims of fact (about history, society, etc.) are, by extension, an expression of our material "interests," or if we are deeply socialized, "values."
Those are good questions, they are about consciousness/and a writer’s self-awareness; and they touch on the central issues of Jewish identity and Zionism. If I were Bronner’s friend, I’d urge him to write about it, to use the crisis to grow as a writer.
Let’s see, what should an American populist think about all this? Should such a person compare US, Israel, and Palestinian populism? What exactly do US populists get out of this? What exactly is the USA interest here? Also, what exactly is the Western World
interest in this I-P conflict, and in the USA funding of Israel First?
Aren’t article headlines usually added by the newspaper editors?
That’s a fair point, as far as it goes. If you read the referenced articles, the content is completely consistent with the summary provided via the headlines, which is not always the case. Your point also returns to the effectiveness of PW’s call for the hire of an ‘Arab’ to cover Jerusalem. Again, it’s not what s/he would write that’is important, but what bits would pass intact through the editorial blender.
And who hires those editors?
‘As Sulzberger goes…’
Avishai mentions Popper, saying he shows that it can be hard to adhere to the rules of evidence. My impression of Popper is that he thought that any scientific enquiry had to be – or it would not be scientific at all – marked by the fact that the scientist at very least makes predictions that are clearly testable and falsifiable. A Popperian journalist might form hypotheses like ‘Goldstone is rubbish’ but should then ask ‘What might show that this idea is wrong? Are there testimonies that I might believe?’ If he refuses to contemplate changing his mind he is being unscientific, not really caring about the facts.
As one who thinks that Goldstone has a point I’d say that I’d be swayed if any evidence of his ever saying or implying that Zionism was indefensible or that Israelis were in general not to be trusted would sway me. I’d bet that there isn’t any solid evidence to this effect, though it’s harder to bet that there are no stories of questionable truth or no reports that could with a sufficiently hostile glance be interpreted as anti-Israel. An anti-Popperian would say that you get into an indefinite regress of interpretations of evidence and never manage to falsify anything finally, and that it’s all a question of a clash of Kuhnian paradigms or general ways of looking at things.
Kuhn’s view as I remember is that paradigms go through a period of being culturally, perhaps violently, enforced, but the effort behind all this enforcement becomes counterproductive and the paradigm collapses. This is a less rational procedure that the Popperian collapse of a hypothesis under the weight of falsifying evidence. But the paradigm whereby Israel can do no wrong seems to be a prime candidate for eventual collapse, after a lot more cultural enforcement, on both understandings.
Well, at least Jaron at the NY Times (and Time magazine) responds to my messages and admits I made “informed and well argued points”. He’s also friends on facebook with some kind of Israeli rastafarian reggae group for peace, so I have hope for the future
Congrats to EI and to Phil for staying on this exceptionally important story. The Times is flailing about, trying to provide a false intellectualization for Bronner’s Israel-first bias. The comments on the Times website are running 2-to-1 in favor of Bronner being reassigned. The minority is claiming anti-Semitism may be behind the inquisition — whoa, what a surprise.
But reading Keller’s lame-o yet defiant proclamation that they’ll be leaving Bronner right where he is is both stunningly arrogant, and also an indication of the exceptionalism the Times believes it is entitled to in disrgarding a blatant ethical violation.
There is little doubt that Keller would have been equally as knee-jerk supportive of Judith Miller had similar ethics questions been raised about her neo-con fueled dispatches from Iraq before the entire thing exploded in the Times’ face. And how many times did Keller’s predecessor defend Jayson Blair repeatedly and defiantly before proof positive was offered by an outside source.
Kudos to Clark Hoyt for finally tackling a challenging topic (though perhaps he had little choice when “Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a liberal media watchdog group, demanded to know if it was true and, if so, why it did not create an unacceptable conflict of interest for Bronner and The Times.”). But Keller is setting himself up for a comeuppance. This is not going away soon.
Phil is aboslutely right. The Times has to elevate a Palestinian reporter to broaden its coverage — without Bronner editing his reportage. Anything less than that and the newspaper of record will continue to deteriorate as a meaningful source of accurate information.
Here, btw, is a classic Bronner piece where he reviews a couple of pro-Israel books in a very favorable way. One is by Alan Dershowitz–”The Case for Israel”.
No bias here. Dersh is such a fairminded sort it’s no wonder Bronner endorses his book so wholeheartedly–
link
I lost track–I know there was “you suck” and “Arabs” suck and “Israel rocks”–I’d have to go back and see if “everyone sucks” was employed.
“Hoyt is valorizing crude behaviorist ideas masquerading as liberal ones, that we are, really, nothing but bundles of “socialized preferences.” What we think is the product of our “demographic.” Our claims of fact (about history, society, etc.) are, by extension, an expression of our material “interests,” or if we are deeply socialized, “values.”"
Isn’t this claim actually shared by both conservatives AND liberals? Liberals think all conservatives are guilty of thinking this way… which tends to show that liberals share these same thoughts. And we should all think this way. As a zillion people have already said, why not post a Palestinian to the in-charge job whose son is involved in the Palestinian struggle? Perish the thought!!
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