Several updates from the National Public Radio front:
• Last week, just a day after I sent a complaint to Fresh Air and NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard about the misleading account of the origins of the siege of Gaza presented by Terry Gross’s guest Lawrence Wright, a correction of sorts appeared on the network’s corrections page. As several commenters here predicted, the correction is minimal: "Our guest misstated the year of Hamas’ election victory. The elections were held in January 2006, not June 2007." (Wright actually just said 2007 – it’s not clear why the correction mentions June.)
What’s not pointed out, of course, is the real problem with Wright’s answer to Gross’s question about how and why the blockade began: misdating the election helped him construct a false narrative that presents the siege as Israel’s response to a steady stream of challenges from the Palestinians – most notably the capture of soldier Gilad Shalit – rather than collective punishment, beginning before the capture of Shalit, for Hamas’s victory in an election universally deemed free and fair.
No one from Fresh Air replied to me directly, but Shepard passed along a response she got from Danny Miller, the program’s co-executive producer, apparently after she passed along a copy of my message. In part, it said "we feel that the interview presented a balanced perspective from an informed journalist, who expressed his empathy for the difficulties faced by both the residents of Gaza and of Israel." I suppose that last sentence is Miller’s response to my argument that Gaza expert Sara Roy or someone actually living under the siege would been a better source than a journalist who has spent three weeks in Gaza.
• A couple of days later, NPR posted a correction to another error I pointed out, this one in a Morning Edition report on May 31, the morning after Israel’s attack on the Freedom Flotilla. In that piece freelancer Sheera Frankel said:
There have been five ships that have made their way into the Gaza Strip. And the last ship was the only one to have been stopped. That was during Operation Cast Lead here, a year and a half ago. That boat was successfully turned away by the Israeli navy with a minimal amount of damage to the ship, and no injuries to the people onboard.
I pointed out that the Israelis had blocked not one but three boats dispatched by the Free Gaza Movement before last month’s flotilla; that the last one was not during Operation Cast Lead but six months afterwards, on June 30, 2009; that that ship, the Spirit of Humanity, was not "turned away" but boarded, taken over, and dragged into the Israeli port of Ashdod, where the 21 human rights workers aboard were imprisoned; and that the Dignity, the boat Frenkel apparently had in mind when she mentioned "minimal" damage, was actually rammed three times by the Israeli navy and suffered heavy damage. (See it for yourself in a report by CNN journalist Karl Penhaul, who was aboard the ship at the time.)
I also noted that in Frenkel’s discussion of the recent flotilla, the only cargo she mentioned was cement – not a word on the wheelchairs, crutches, dental equipment, soccer balls, crayons, chocolates, and other goods banned by Israel. (Frenkel actually reported, without even a hint of skepticism, that "Israel says that the cement can also be used by militants to try and stage attacks on Israel.")
So, out of all this, what did NPR correct? "Our report failed to mention a July 2009 attempt to breach the blockade of Gaza. We should have said the boats that have attempted to arrive since Operation Cast Lead were all turned away by the Israeli navy."
In this instance in particular, I suppose I could be accused, with some justification, of nitpicking. But to me it seems worthwhile to do what I can to call out NPR’s errors, in hopes a) that these corrections will – at least for the handful of people who pay attention to such things – help to puncture the illusion that the network is an authoritative source, and b) that they might eventually embarrass the network’s reporters and editors into working harder to get the story right. As I wrote in my message to Shepard about Frenkel’s report, "I don’t expect your reporters to know all this stuff (though it’s not hard to discover if they tried), but why in heaven’s name don’t you instruct them to interview people who do know it? There are plenty of them in Israel, and the US and European organizers are easily accessible."
Shepard, by the way, mentioned this complaint, along with a variety of others about NPR’s coverage of the flotilla, in a June 18 posting on her blog.
• Earlier this month, Shepard also addressed NPR’s repeated misreporting of the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, an issue I had previously explored here. In her post she acknowledges that the network has been getting it wrong, lays out the actual facts, recommends that the network use an estimate of "nearly 500,000" settlers, and even offers a reasonable explanation of the issue’s significance:
Numbers matter for journalistic accuracy and credibility – and, in this particular case, for an internationally important practical reason.
Israeli settlements in both the West Bank and East Jerusalem have been a central issue in every attempt to negotiate a long-term peace agreement in the Middle East.
Palestinians claim that for decades the Israeli government has been building settlements, and encouraging Israelis to move into them, to create "facts on the ground" that will block any peace deal from turning the West Bank and any part of East Jerusalem over to the Palestinians.
Israel doesn’t officially acknowledge this as a motivation for the settlements. But many settlers (backed by powerful political allies in most recent governments) say their presence guarantees permanent Israeli control of the land – and so more settlers equals more certainty for this goal.
In fact, since the settler population grows by 4-6 percent a year, it is by now almost certainly more than, not nearly, 500,000. NPR’s editors may have recognized as much: in a correction they have now added to the transcript of the story that prompted my complaint on the subject, they put the total at "about 500,000," a formulation more accurate than what Shepard proposed, and one that might be usable for another couple of years.
All in all, if NPR uses that figure from now on – until new official figures become available – it’s a minor victory for the cause of truth.
Nevertheless, I found Shepard’s piece infuriating, because she focuses exclusively on the CIA and therefore, in effect, absolves her NPR colleagues of all responsibility. Look at the title: "CIA Gets Numbers Wrong on Jewish Settlers." If that’s not explicit enough, check the second sentence: "NPR was wrong simply because the source it used – the much-respected CIA ‘World Factbook’ – is wrong on that point and has been for several years."
In reality, NPR was not wrong "simply" because the World Factbook was – NPR’s reporters and editors should have known better. Among the clues they somehow failed to notice or chose to ignore:
– the very large contradictions among the various estimates they themselves have used in various stories in recent years;
– the sharp variance between the CIA numbers and those used in other media they presumably consider reputable, including the New York Times and the Israeli press;
– the fact that the CIA’s numbers weren’t changing f rom year to year, even when the whole world (at least outside NPR) knows that the settlements are constantly expanding.
– the numerous citations on the settler population that I sent them myself when they ran a story a year ago putting the settler population at 250,000 (a figure even lower than the World Factbook’s) – even though they themselves eventually posted a correction, presumably after doing some research of their own to confirm what I reported, that put the number at 460,000 to 480,000.
My other issue with Shepard’s column on the settler population is a more personal one. In the piece she mentions that I "demanded a correction" and quotes from my e-mail message: "How can NPR possibly have so much trouble getting straight the basic facts about the Israeli occupation of Palestine?" What she didn’t say was that I also supplied her with virtually all the facts she mentions and sources she used in her post, including figuring out and documenting the problem with the CIA World Factbook – directly by e-mail, then by publishing them here on Mondoweiss and sending her the link. Her only original contribution was getting quotes from NPR’s editors, the CIA, and the U.S. Census Bureau.
She even put "compiled by Alicia Shepard" under a graphic composed of excerpts from different editions of the CIA World Factbook. Granted, she assembled the screenshots and added yellow highlighting, but I had sent her the links to each of those editions.
Now, my goal in sending her the information was to get NPR to get things right, not to give me credit. On the other hand, I didn’t expect Shepard to take the credit for herself. I would have thought that an ombudsman, of all people, would be more scrupulous about such things – especially one who, according to her bio on the NPR site, used to write for the American Journalism Review on media ethics and now teaches a graduate course in that subject.
I pointed some of this out in an e-mail to Shepard after her post appeared, and she promptly apologized and added a comment under the piece that began "I neglected to give a big shout out to Henry Norr…" That was nice of her, but the comment is on a different page from Shepard’s post, buried roughly in the middle of 78 others, most of them from the same person, on a separate page . I thanked her but suggested that a footnote or postscript appended to her original column, including a link to my previously published Mondoweiss piece on the same subject, would be more appropriate. She declined.
A special irony here is that just the week before she published that post, she did one called "When Is It Plagiarism?" about a May 5 Morning Edition segment by film critic Beth Accomando on horror movies with plots that revolve around cell phones failing just as the killer nears. It seems that virtually everything in Accomando’s piece, including the conceptual categories and some obscure references, also appears in "No Signal (and other cellular drama)," a video montage on the same subject that film fan and blogger Rich Juzwiak posted back in September 2009 to YouTube, where it has enjoyed well over 300,000 views.
Shepard’s verdict on that case: "The NPR piece wasn’t direct plagiarism as much as it was a case of NPR failing to give enough credit to Juzwiak." I’m not sure I agree with the first part of that – neither does Juzwiak – but the second part is surely right. As Shepard noted in her belated "shout out" to me, "I suggested in a previous post to be generous with attribution and I should have followed my own advice."
Meanwhile, the following note now appears on the CIA World Factbook’s online pages on Israel and the West Bank:
note: the population estimates previously published on this site for the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights are under review, please check back in the future for revised estimates. (July 2010 est.)
Maybe after the spooks finish counting the settlers, they could start studying punctuation…
