Several folks have sent along a sharp interview in Haaretz of Clyde Haberman, a veteran correspondent for The New York Times who left the paper in December, in which Haberman tells Chemi Shalev that Jewish reporters are increasingly being replaced by Asians in the trenches of journalism.
But I’ve focused on Haberman’s comments about the Times. First, he says that the Times should assign non-Jews to report from Jerusalem.
“Throughout my career,” he says, “I’ve had my fair share of “you’re an idiot” letters, but many more letters of praise as well. Israel is the only assignment I ever had in which in four years I never once got a letter that said “nice job.” If I would have gotten one, I would have had it embossed and put it on a wall, like a business does with the first dollar bill it makes.”
This, he says, is the lot of most New York Times’ reporters in Israel, as well as other prominent American journalists who have agreed to an Israel posting. I ask whether sending a Jewish reporter is hence a good or bad idea. “All other things being equal,” he replies, “it is probably better to send a non-Jew rather than a Jew – just as I would probably prefer to send a non-Indian to India. It’s better to avoid that extra component.”
But when I point out that a majority of the Times’ representatives in Israel in the past 30 years have, in fact, been Jewish, Haberman says: “You may be surprised to learn that there aren’t as many correspondents clamoring for the job as Israelis would like to think. Every Times person in Israel has been subjected to non-stop assault. People realize that it entails a lot of scrutiny, grief and verbal abuse.”
I’d point out that Haberman, who is Jewish, is counting Jews. By my count, the last three correspondents in Jerusalem have been Jewish. Though Alison Weir of the Council for the National Interest says that the last five have been Jewish– “a member of the family,” in her pointed phrasing. Because of such concerns, years ago, in its non-Zionist days, the Times used to insist that non-Jews be assigned to Jerusalem. Also note that Max Blumenthal, while not counting Jews, said that the Times bureau is thoroughly inside the Zionist narrative.
Here’s the second bit from Haberman, where he says that the noisy critics of the Times coverage are all Israel-supporting Jews who call the Times correspondents self-hating Jews. Haberman is clearly out of date here. Jodi Rudoren and Ethan Bronner before her have been attacked from the left, from Palestinian solidarity types, as much as they are attacked from the pro-Israel side. But Haberman’s comments point up an issue we’ve landed on: The Times is old guard, and it is extremely responsive to rightwing critics. Haberman:
“We’ve had decades of correspondents that, no matter how different they’ve been one from the other, no matter how talented they are or how many Pulitzer Prizes they have to their name, always end up being accused of being either anti-Semites or self-hating Jews. At some point, this seeps into the DNA of the newspaper: This is what you can expect if you go there – to have your integrity hurled back in your face every single day.”
And things are probably much worse now, Haberman concedes, because of internet and emails and the ability to instantly respond and protest. Not only that, he adds, but Muslims and Arabs, in general, and Palestinians, in particular, have also adopted “the same ‘beat the newspaper over the head’ format that Jewish groups have come to perfect.”
After a while it became clear to me, he adds drily, “that if I didn’t want to be accused of hating Israel, I should start every story with: ‘50 years after 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, Israel yesterday did one thing or the other.’”
Curiously, Shalev doesnt touch on Haberman’s most famous moment at the Times, a fabrication that got him fired in ’66, as a kid, when everyone still read The Sun Also Rises. Some things are hard to live down.
So, (somewhat reading between the lines, or outright fantasizing by this commenter) we are asked to believe that pro-Israel, anti-Palestine reporting is a result, in significant part, of a culture that oppresses honest reporters. OK, I believe it providing one keeps firmly in mind the “in part”.
I can understand that reporting on Israel from INSIDE could be a tough job, and greasing the wheels by being sycophantic would be a big help for mental health of reporters. (BTW: how was it for reporters reporting from INSIDE Moscow, Burma, Columbia, China?)
But Israel publishes a lot of stuff, even on-line. A reporter could do what the CIA is said to do a lot of — while sitting OUTSIDE, read what’s in the local press to learn what’s going on. And the “analyst” (i.e., newspaper reader) could then reprint/quote sensibly whilst still living in (relative) comfort in NYC.
So, they don’t do this, and I think the pressure on reporters (while I don’t doubt it for a moment) comes also from management.
Let me repeat that: NYT management could create honest reporting of I/P today, even as it could have created honest reporting of the holocaust in 1940s (which, I’ve read, it did not do at the time). But it chooses not to. And it allows the INSIDE reporters to limit their reporting to sucking up to Israeli-Jewish (and/or AIPAC) sensibilities.
And as we know, being called an antisemite these days mostly means that you’ve offended the sensibilities of an Israeli Jew or an AIPAC-type.
Asians are replacing Jews in everything.
Worry not Phil. The Jewish rise in 20th century had very specific causes and conditions have changed. Your excitement at a certain time in your life about that and anxiety now are also themselves products of a (waning) time and place.
Ya think?
There are Jews who are so obsessed with looking good in the eye of the “goy”, that they go to the extremes with their liberalism and moral grandstanding. They approach Israel like they approach no other issue in the world and feel the more they attack Israel the more creditability they earn in the circles they think they are included in but ultimately find out they are not because they are also seen as being Jewish.
Sound familiar Philip? It’s in their DNA Philip and there is little you can do about it.
( Clarification: by goy I am referring to those who would do damage to Jews)
There is an ethnic anxiety running through the entire interview. Kind of like Lee Siegel writing an Op-Ed, laden with doom, at the WSJ that Asians are now the new Jews(and this time we don’t merely say so with flattery, this time we actually mean it, and we’re deeply fearful of it).
Yet most of the Asians actually reaching the levels of editorship happen to be in the progressive media, like at the Nation or self-starters like the Jacobin magazine. The Independent(UK) got its first Indian editor a month ago or so.
The NYT is still seen as a Jewish paper and for good reason. The Zionist narrative at the Times is still very strong. I read a statistic last year that 90% of all front-page stories in the MSM were written by white journalists on average. The NYT’s number was even higher, I think it was north of 95%.
Sulzberger is ostensibly a Christian but is nonetheless a cultural Jew of his generation. I’m sure he’d count himself as Jewish in the Pew study and he would probably strongly support Zionism if given the question.