‘NYT’ reporter’s appeal to editor: young Jews raising money for IDF are ‘just like your daughter’

Here is an intriguing story about mainstream journalistic culture and the extent to which pro-Israel attitudes are simply imbedded among reporters.

At a recent journalistic forum, a reporter for the New York Times said that to sell a story about a court case involving young Jewish professionals raising money for the Israeli Defense Forces last year, he appealed to the top editor of the paper: “These people are just like your daughter.” 

The Times ended up doing four stories on the case. And in these stories, as you will see below, reporter Michael Cieply echoed the young professionals’ view that the bum’s-rush they got from the owner of the Shangri-La hotel in Santa Monica reflected anti-Semitism– when the evidence he reported was that she objected to their pro-Israel banner and leaflets.

In fairness to the Times, the jury sided with the plaintiffs and found anti-Semitism; but the point remains: The Times is equating objections to Israeli conduct with prejudice against Jews.

I caught the story on CSPAN the other day. On March 12, Cieply, who covers Hollywood for the New York Times, was a panelist in a discussion called “You Can’t Fight Infotainment” at Arizona State University‘s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism. At 36:30, he said the internet has created a “giant vacuum” in news coverage of real events that don’t show up on the web. He gave as an example a court case off his beat in the Santa Monica branch of Los Angeles County court system last year.

There was a stunning case in which about 20 young Jewish professionals filed a law suit for anti-Semitism against the Shangri-La Hotel, out of which they had been thrown by the owner on a Sunday afternoon, who they alleged, was afraid that — she was Pakistani– that her Pakistani family was going to pull funding if they found out that that there were 20 Jews raising money at a pool party– which was authorized by the hotel staff– for the IDF. OK, and so she came in and threw them all out and they said, what the hell, and filed this suit.

It’s interesting that Cieply didn’t even explain to the audience what IDF stands for– Israel Defense Forces. Probably in Hollywood, everyone knows that. Haim Saban raises money for the IDF. So does Barbra Streisand.

Anyway, Cieply went on that his wife, who grew up in Santa Monica, pushed him to cover the story: “Get the hell down there and find out, I want to know. Did this happen in Santa Monica?” And Cieply was intrigued himself:

I wonder who’s right and who’s wrong. What really happened in here. What did she really say. Which one’s crazy. Which one did it? What are these young professionals like? Do they got a chip on their shoulder or are they for real?….  So uninvited I dropped in, I started sitting in the courthouse in what turned out to be a three week trial. I kept dodging my duties but running in there and listening to the testimony. And it was awesome, it was amazing. And the jury found against the owner and with good reason– after she had testified. There was not one reporter of any level in that trial. There was no local reporter, there was no AP reporter. There was nothing.

So that if my wife hadn’t chased me into that– and I filed to the executive editor of our paper. Because I had to go all the way over her head. ‘Jill these people are just like your daughter, maybe we really ought to think about running it.’ ‘Oh yeah that’s right, we’re going to run it.’ So we stuffed it in the paper.

Jill is a reference to Jill Abramson, the executive editor of the New York Times. I knew her and her husband in college, and I can’t believe that their child would be the kind of person who would raise money for the Israel Defense Forces. I sent Cieply’s comments along to Abramson. She passed my note to Cieply, and he wrote me yesterday to walk back his remarks [full email below]:

I… somewhat garbled the chain of events that led to the stories we ran. I didn’t have any direct conversation with Jill about the stories, and her daughter certainly never entered into it—on the latter score, I was simply making an abstract, demographic point, and could have as readily referenced my own son.

I wrote back to Cieply to say that, whatever the sequence and the demographics, what is irritating is that his coverage of the case completely conflated anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism: “It never seems to have occurred to you for one second that someone who finds the IDF objectionable might have some real basis for that concern. Now maybe it’s in the water out there– because Haim Saban and Barbra Streisand are having fundraisers for the same army, but–“

Cieply didn’t respond. But here are some excerpts from his stories, focusing on a civil rights suit alleging anti-Semitism on the part of Shangri-La owner Tehmina Adaya. The jury found that there was anti-Semitism, and awarded the plaintiffs $1.6 million. But note that throughout the coverage, Adaya’s objections seem to have been to pro-Israel propaganda.

Cieply summarized the case:

In 2010, Ms. Adaya, who is a Pakistani-born Muslim, ordered the closing of a poolside event sponsored by Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces, but she eventually allowed the group to stay after insisting that signs and literature identifying its purpose be removed. In testimony by a former employee and others, she was said to have given the order with an obscenity aimed at the Jews in attendance and to have said that her family members would cut off her financing if they learned of the gathering.

One story relates the testimony of the promoter of the event, Scott Paletz:

“It had to end, it had to end,” Mr. Paletz recalled the [Shangri-La] employee telling him. “If Ms. Adaya’s investors,” who are Muslims, found out about the pro-Israeli event, “they would cut her off,” Mr. Paletz testified being told. Another employee, said Mr. Paletz, told him that holding the event at the Shangri-La “was like bringing the Bloods and the Crips together.” The order to end the event, Mr. Paletz said, had been accompanied by a particularly harsh epithet ordering the Jews out of the hotel.

“Being that I’m Jewish, it absolutely shocked me,” Mr. Paletz testified. “I felt really small.”

And this from Adaya’s testimony:

Ms. Adaya was occasionally flustered when fumbling for details, but she was emphatic in denying the central charge: that she had ordered the Jews to close their prearranged event, for fear that her family, who are Muslims, would cut off her financing.

“I did not, how could I?” she said at one point. “My family knows I have so many Jewish friends.”

Other testimony through the week painted a different picture of Ms. Adaya’s behavior when she showed up at one of the hotel’s poolside cabanas that Sunday to watch on television as Spain played the Netherlands in a World Cup soccer final match.

“Oh, my God,” she supposedly said on discovering the gathering, complete with a banner or two and some promotional leaflets, according to the deposition testimony of a former employee, which was read in court on Thursday.

Ms. Adaya clearly did not regard the claims — which could lead not only to monetary damages, but also a lasting blot on her hotel — as routine.

Then this later on in August: Owner of Shangri-La to make amends to Jewish groups:

Ms. Adaya said she was donating $3,600 each to the Koby Mandell Foundation, which aids families of terror victims in remembrance of 13-year-old Israeli who was killed by terrorists, and to the Zahal Disabled Veterans Organization, which assists disabled Israeli veterans.

She also extended an invitation to “leaders of the Jewish and pro-Israel community” to attend a private event to be hosted by the Shangri-La in cooperation with the Zionist Organization of America within the next 12 months.

Here’s Cieply’s email to me:

 

Understand you’ve been in touch with Jill Abramson about my description of the dynamics behind our Shangri-La Hotel coverage, during a Zocalo event earlier this month. Please know that my remarks, part of an extemporaneous conversation, somewhat garbled the chain of events that led to the stories we ran. I didn’t have any direct conversation with Jill about the stories, and her daughter certainly never entered into it—on the latter score, I was simply making an abstract, demographic point, and could have as readily referenced my own son. The basic beats behind the coverage were these:

–There had been some attention given to the Shangri-La case before the trial, notably in the Jewish Journal.

–I became aware of the trial from my wife, who’d heard about it through a friend.

–It struck me as being newsworthy, but was off my regular beat, which is generally confined to the film business.

–I dropped in on the trial when it opened, felt there was story to be covered, and, after getting an okay from the bureau chief here, went out of my normal chain of command to ask the paper’s National Editor whether he was interested in a story.

–He was, and I wrote a piece that was published on August 5, 2012.

–Though I never spoke with Jill, she dropped me a brief note acknowledging the story.

–That acknowledgment helped persuade my own editors, on the Media desk, to let me finish covering the trial over the next several weeks.

–My basic point at Zocalo stands: Through the trial’s key moments, including reading of the verdicts, there were few or no other press people on hand: Only our editors’ willingness to invest in first-hand reporting cleared the way for direct observation of the testimony by plaintiff and defendants, and rendering of the verdicts.

 

Hope that helps to clarify the sequence of events, and I’m sorry for having been less than clear at Zocalo. In a public conversation about unanticipated subjects, it isn’t always easy to remember the exact chain of events.