Once again, the New York Times's public editor has taken the paper's Jerusalem bureau chief, Ethan Bronner, to the woodshed for conflict of interest. This time, Bronner was caught (by the tireless Max Blumenthal) getting paid to give speeches by a public relations firm linked to the Israeli right. The public editor, Arthur Brisbane, found that Bronner did not disclose the relationship to his superiors because he said he misunderstood the Times's ethics guidelines.
Brisbane notes that his predecessor, Clark Hoyt, had already recommended that Bronner be reassigned because his son was serving in the Israeli military at the same time he was purportedly objectively covering the conflict.
Brisbane questions this latest conflict of interest, but still mollycoddles Bronner, trying to find excuses for his conduct. Most annoying were these 2 sentences:
Mr. Bronner was pointed in arguing that the attack by Mr. Blumenthal, who writes critically of Israel's dealings with the Palestinians, was ideologically motivated and designed to discredit Mr. Bronner. Mr. Blumenthal's piece may well have been influenced by an animus toward Mr. Bronner's reportage for The Times.
These 2 sentences are worth re-reading. Max Blumenthal, a courageous reporter who makes no secret of his human concern for Palestinians, is somehow guilty of "animus." But Ethan Bronner, whose New York Times salary and expense account are apparently insufficient for his needs, breaks his paper's policy on conflict of interest, keeps his superiors in the dark, and feels no need to apologize.
On paper, The Times has strict standards for its reporters. They are not, for instance, allowed to sign petitions, wear campaign buttons, or attend demonstrations in their capacity as citizens. Emma Goldman, the great anarchist/feminist, once said, "First we have to teach the ruling class to live up to their values, before we even try and teach them ours."
So: does Ethan Bronner get 3 strikes?
Bronner is going to get strikes infinity because ethics is not in the lexicon of the NYTimes when it comes to Palestine and Israel.
no.
RE: “So: does Ethan Bronner get 3 strikes?” ~ James North
MY COMMENT: Cut the New York Times a little slack. After all, it has that swank new skyscraper designed by Renzo Piano to pay for. Consequently, it can’t risk antagonizing its readers and/or advertisers by firing a reporter who gives them what they want to read rather than the unvarnished truth (which would engender way too much cognitive dissonance*).
Under these circumstances (and with Murdoch “The Malefactor” breathing down its neck), the New York Times can’t afford to get its knickers in a wad over something as “quaint”** as journalistic ethics.
* DEFENSE MECHANISMS & COGNITIVE DISSONANCE – link to mondoweiss.net
** quaint, like the Geneva Conventions (and habeas corpus)!
Most annoying were these 2 sentences:
To me that feels like an exact quotation from private conversation, a cozy tête-á-tête between the two.
Strictly there is something else. Does this mean there is no separation between advertisement and content, that is articles, in the NT? For me that was the core message of Max work:
I think the NT should inform it’s advertisers that they can buy articles too, or a planned combination of both?
1. His ([delinquent Bronner's]) son is out of IDF already? And has ”returned” to the US?
2. NYT: Mr. Bronner [delinquent] faced criticism previously when his son joined the Israeli military — no sir. Not for joining per se. Only after the son had done so (?how long?), and it was disclosed by others, while Ethan Bronner wrote in NYT.
3. Funniest reading: The He did not tell his editors about … paragraph. So Bronner is a delinquent.
By the way Ethan Bronner, if nothing was wrong, you didn’t need to “severe” ties with Lone Star.
So Ethan Bronner says: “I didn’t know”.
That translates into an international German saying (used abroad only).
I still see that noxious Judith Miller on Faux News from time-to-time and NYTimes has their Bronner … the Lobby is rubbing out noses in their influence we don’t even need to try to hide our people they are telling us
Max Blumenthal’s investigative work is worth its weight in gold.
Ethan Bronner’s investigative work is worth its weight in bullshit.
The NYT machine, in the 2nd generation internet age, is about to be eclipsed. The only thing holding it together at this point is lack of a cohesive, reliable, trustworthy on-line replacement. Sites like Huffington Post, The Daily Beast and so on have attempted new models, only to veer off into being something closer to the National Enquirer than the NYT. Eventually, a new model will actually work and gain enough credibility to make many newspapers, even in their slimmed down versions, untenable.
So a supposedly valued reporter is unable to understand his paper’s ethical guidelines. Really? Let’s be more generous, and say, judging by his actions not his excuses, that he doesn’t understand ethics, of a professional or personal nature. If he can’t see and declare a clear conflict of interest, a compromised situation which precludes readers taking his words on trust, the impossibility of independent, objective reporting given his involvement in what he is ostensibly ‘reporting’ on, then he is clearly unfit for the job. If he cannot understand some simple ethical guidelines (obviously a post facto excuse) then how can he have any hope to negotiate the more complex ethical minefield of reporting from Israel to a right wing newspaper? He has rendered himself incompetent by this feeble excuse, and trying to blame the messenger, when he should have told his employers anyway, makes it even worse. If the NYT is to have any credibility, a dubious claim at best, then it cannot hang on to such flagrantly compromised, dishonest people like this. Perhaps the NYT should pay attention and act according to its own ethical guidelines, and sack the liar.
Of course, the real issue is not appearance of bias but the bias.
This is the description in the current NYT of the circumstances in which IDF killed a Palestinian villager: “A dozen Israeli settlers from a nearby outpost had arrived to pray on land at the edge of the village, an act that the Palestinian villagers viewed as a provocation. Hundreds of people marched toward the settlers, some with Palestinian flags, and Israeli troops intervened.”
In other countries, it was described as “50 settlers invaded the village and broke windows with stones”. Which is a bit more than “something that can be viewed as provocation”.
With reporting like that, a question arises if this is sloppy, or biased in a systematic way. Many Israeli automatically take reports of IDF as more trustworthy than reports from Palestinians, and given the record, this is not justified (IMHO IDF occasionally makes true statements, and Palestinians occasionally exaggerate). A reporter who is an eyewitness can either give credence to one side, given totality of the circumstances (like past reports of settlers coming to the land at the edge of Palestinian villages, simply to pray, versus reports of more militant behavior), or report both versions.
If son of Mr. Bronner volunteered to IDF, obviously the problem is not what an independent adult is doing, but a reasonable supposition that in the household of Bronners IDF is kept in high regard, more credible than Palestinian. Refuting that supposing takes more than just checking that younger Mr. Bronner completed his service.
As a customer of NYT, it is of secondary importance if the product is shoddy because of incompetence, ideological bias or outright bribery. NYT internal investigation found that probably there was no outright bribery, or not much of it. Just few thousand bucks from some extremists. “Quality assurance” would go over the reporting itself,
yes, blumenthal needs a lecture on objectivity from the duplicitous bronner. i don’t give a rat’s @ss if blumenthal is motivated by a perceived slight at the hands of bronner dating back to the third-grade. since you’re a ‘real’ journalist, bronner, why did you stick to the facts? or is it that the facts are sticking to you?
What many newspaper and mainstream media consumers don’t realise is that old-fashioned reporting and journalism is actually confined to a very few independent, foolhardy, painstaking people – like Fisk, Hersh and a few others. Most journalists are intermediaries whose job is to transmit information gathered from a variety of ‘official’ sources: governments, news organisations, PR firms, think tanks and many dubious ‘foundations’, ‘institutes’ and all the other faux organisations. Most of them have neither the means or the will to question or verify what they are fed, which is why it is relatively easy for well-funded front organisations to seed the media with their biased and misleading concoctions of ‘facts’. Bronner is only one of these, though particularly blatant in his obvious bias. Reporters like Fisk and Hersh do the real hard work of getting out, on the ground, and talking to as many people as possible. This kind of journalism is hard work, painstaking and can take a long time. It therefore consumes a lot of resources, which most papers and TV stations are keen to avoid (although they are more disposed to shower columnists and opinion writers with celebrity money – and these people don’t even bother to get out of their homes, just write a highly biased piece free of facts or evidence). Bronner and his ilk just check with the IDF and various Israeli sources who feed them the stories they print – much easier, and if you are biased anyway, why bother investigating further? That is why the eyewitness accounts of bloggers and independent sources are invaluable, and have given us a truer and fairer picture than most of these overpaid hacks.
since you’re a ‘real’ journalist, bronner, why did you stick to the facts? or is it that the facts are sticking to you?
dope. should say why don’t you stick to the . . . etc. etc. my bad.
Ethan Bronner just doesn’t quit in his sotto voce smear campaign against the Palestinians. From the more than 2.5 million Palestinian residents of the West Bank, please note the viewpoint of the single Palestinian civilian he chooses to spotlight in his latest story, from yesterday’s New York Times (emphasis mine):
Does this reporter have an agenda?
Not only is Bronner’s willingness to moonlight for a West Bank firm doing PR work for Israel an indication of bias, but his bias is reflected in his writing, as in this Times article republished in SFGate:
“Every year in mid-May many Palestinians mark what they call the nakba, or catastrophe, the anniversary of Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948 and the start of a war in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians lost their homes through expulsion and flight” (“Palestinians hit Israel with wave of protests,” SFGate, May 16, 2011)
link to sfgate.com. In this sentence he inaccurately calls the nakba an anniversary (a day), rather than an event lasting more than a year. He inaccurately puts the focus on the Palestinians’ reaction to Israel’s declaration of independence rather than on the Palestinians’ experience of ethnic cleansing. He ignores the expulsions and flight of some 370,000 Palestinians that occurred during the civil war preceding the declaration of independence and makes it seem that the expulsions and flight were the result of war rather than a campaign that went alongside the wars. His sentence both belittles and ignores the Palestinian experience.