Supporters and opponents of tonight’s vote engage with Park Slope Co-op members.
(Photo: New York Times)
The Park Slope Food Co-op is set to vote tonight on whether to hold a referendum on boycotting Israeli goods and the New York Times has sunk to a preposterously inconceivable new low with this news report biased propaganda on the proposed Park Slope Co-Op Boycott of Israeli products. What’s missing:
– not a single quote from anyone who supports the boycott
– not a single mention of what is motivating the boycott: Israel’s human rights abuses, theft of land, oppression of Palestinians, and so on
– not a single statement of comparative contextual history, e.g., grassroots boycotts of South Africa that successfully contributed to the end of Apartheid policies
Instead of of neutrality, impartiality, facts, and context, what do we get? A megaphone for hateful, delusional scaremongering:
“I think it has nothing to do with the food,” Mayor Bloomberg said of the boycott. “The issue is there are people who want Israel to be torn apart and everybody to be massacred, and America is not going to let that happen.”
Excuse me? Supporters of nonviolent boycott want Israelis to be massacred?
Not to be outdone, Manhattan borough president Scott M. Stringer called the boycott “an anti-Semitic crusade.” And again, no chance for a response from any co-op members who support the boycott.
Memo to the new Jerusalem Bureau Chief Jodi Rudoren: I hope you read this. I hope you will read Falk and Friel’s Israel-Palestine on the Record: How the New York Times Misreports Conflict in the Middle East. I hope you will turn over a new leaf in the newspaper of mis-record’s coverage.
A superb report by Matthew. The Times article was a joke; if I were still teaching journalism, I could use it as an example of bias.
Why were elected officials even called for their comments in the first place, (unless they belong to the coop)? Next step: start interviewing members of the New York Knicks for their views?
everyone quoted is a potential candidate for mayor. That’s shoddy standards even for the NY Times Israel agenda. The only one who they haven’t quoted running in the race is commissioner Ray Kelly, and not to be forgotten, Anthony Weiner.
Oh please, stop whining. The Times did a long article on this last week.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/24/nyregion/at-park-slope-food-co-op-a-debate-and-disinterest.html
Today’s article is called “Boycott Plan at Food Co-op Is Opposed by City Officials.”
It’s about the reaction of city officials, all of whom oppose this. The Times has no responsibilities to quote boycott supporters unless they are city officials. Clearly, you’ve not been able to win over a single politician, let alone any constituency of people to actually vote for discriminating against Israel, which seems to have the effect of simply annoying the Coop members, who do not understand why their time is being wasted over five products by a few loudmouths with a extreme political agenda.
Did you tweet Jodi Rudoren? I hear she sometimes reads tweets.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg and other hyperventilators are, like proper little well-disciplined Chicken Littles who know which side their political bread is schmaltzed on, crying “The sky is falling, the sky is falling” (“Israel to be torn apart and everybody to be massacred”), and all the fault of those nasty anti-Semites in Park Slope)!
[irony]
“if I were still teaching journalism, I could use it as an example of bias.”…North
Absolutely. And the bias and misrepresentation and ‘incitement’
language like Bloombergs for example, is exactly why I argue against the “nusancing” of descriptions and language regarding Israel’s actions the liberal zionist insist on under the guise it will turn off Jews.
You want to beat back zionism? Then you have to talk about it and describe it in a way that arouses emotions and moral outrage in the average person. The majority of people are aroused to action by their emotions not by reason and intellect.