Is NPR's coverage of Israel biased?

Great Debates
21

.?ªE?re close to accusing me of bias. You’d better have some evidence to back that up, bub…
Reading line by line is often the only way to understand what is being said. I recommend it.

[/quote]

believe it or not, my evidence comes from reading , line by line, your responses to other posters’ comments.

Straw man. In fact, the straw-manniest straw man that ever came outta straw-man-ville.

I apologize for the hijack, but for the record, are you stating that Israel has acted to deny the creation of a Palestinian state? A simple yes or no will suffice.

22

I thought Strawmanville burned down when the fire department went on strike, saying “No pay raise? Next thing you know, they’ll replace us all with jackbooted NAZI SLAVES!”

23

That’s not evidence, it’s a claim that evidence exists. Let’s see your line-by-line analysis and argument that shows my bias. I promise not to claim your mind is closed for doing it, even though you accused me of closed mindedness for my line-by-line analysis.

bizzwire
I’m sorry, but didn’t the United Nations resolution which created the state of Israel also create the state of Palestine? The only people standing in the way of Palestinian statehood are the Palestinians.

nog
Right, and the only thing ever standing the way of American Indians enforcing their treaty rights was and is themselves, too. Just open your mind, just a tiny crack, and ask if it’s just barely possible that overwhelming Israeli military might could have something to with there being no Palestinian state

Really? Perhaps we should be clear about your latest accusation:

I humbly apologize if I seemed to be ignoring and misrepresenting your argument. Please present your argument in a clear fashion, and I expect it will be more open to clear argument.

I appreciate your politenes with respect to the question, but I decline to answer. And the notion that the question admits (requires) a simple answer makes this a false dilemma. Would you care to answer it that way yourself? I’ll start a thread on the topic and we’ll see how simple the answers get. And, I agree that the questions bears no relevance to the question of whether the coverage is biased or not.

FTR, I believe both Israelis and Palestinians ought to have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as well as the freedom from fear, at a bare minimum. And I believe neither Israelis nor Palestinians fully possess these rights at the current time.

24

OK. Fair enough.

My major bone of contention was your assertion (or my interpretation) that a Palestinian state does not exist due to overwhelming Israeli military strength.

It’s as if Israel sprang, armed to the teeth, as a regional uber-power with the passing of the UN resolution creating both Palestine and Israel. You totally exclude the proximate causes for Israel’s military might from the formula.

This is why I accused you of bias. To put the blame totally on Israel for the stillborn Palestinian state without adressing the issue of why Israel feels the need to maintain such a military force is, I feel, disingenuous to say the least.

Bizz

25

By a happy coincidence, I happened to hear the Executive Director of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) speak this evening. Her talk didn’t focus on NPR, but she did mention that NPR was particularly uncooperative. She said that even Peter Jennings, who is quite unsympathetic to Israel, would nevertheless respond when factual errors were pointed out. However, she said NPR was uniquely uncooperative. Also, she pointed out that NPR has a legal obligation to present balanced reporting. Looking at CAMERA’s web site, here are some of their complaints.

Here is a more recent articles at CAMERA’s site about Israel coverage on NPR. An article from 2001 is called National Public Radio – All Bias, All the Time It’s short and worth reading. I won’t summarize here, since this post is already long.

26

CAMERA appears to be simply one more “If it doesn’t favor our side, it’s biased” influence groups. I saw nothing on their site that demonstrated that we could get corroboration from independent sources for their claims. Do you have any references that could substantiate their accusations from a neutral perspective?

27

According to the Executive Director, CAMERA focuses on things that can be corroborated – factual errors and very major imbalance in coverage. She said they don’t go after mere editorial slants or anything subtle. Their shtick is to choose a few things where the story is clearly wrong. Then they campaign implacably until they get a correction.

If you go to their main page and put “NPR” into their search engine, you’ll get a whole bunch of specific complaints. We could check them one by one, and see whether or not they are corroborated. Is that the kind of thing you’re looking for?

28

Yeah, I suppose.

I noticed, however, that they made a big deal about Tery Gross using “tit-for-tat” regarding reprisal attacks by Israel. This strikes me as the sort of thing that the Catholic League does, drowning the few legitimate serious complaints against anti-Catholic bias in a sea of “we don’t like that language.”

Similarly, the complaint that no Jewish leaders were described as “moderates” in the summer of 2002: well what “moderate” has had any position of authority in the Jewish cabinet in the last couple of years?

It would be interesting to see some exact NPR reports contrasted against some “neutral” reports and then see the exact complaint and the exact NPR response.

29

This is a recent complaint by CAMERA against NPR.

This appears to be a clear-cut error by NPR.

CAMERA goes on to complain that Gradstein’s report [ol][li] Failed to label Palestinian official Saeb Erakat as a “hard-liner”[]“Gradstein also claimed the move to bar Tibi was criticized across the Israeli political spectrum, but she failed to mention that, in fact, some extremely prominent Israelis supported the effort.” However, the article says that some prominent Israelis did support barring Tibi, such as peace activist leader, who said [/li][quote]
“We are talking here about people who publicly align themselves with the enemy,” he said. “For example, going to Damascus during a war — Israel and Syria are in a state of war. Mr. Bishara went to Damascus. For me, that’s enough. I think that Israel needs to defend itself against citizens who align themselves with the enemy. To my way of thinking, this is like being a traitor.” (Montreal Gazette, Jan 2, 2003)
[/quote]
[li]Gradstein gave undue prominence to refusal to serve, even though service is very popular. The only guest she interviewed was Peretz Kidron, who she described merely as belonging to a movement “which encourages refusal.” However, CAMERA says Gradstein failed to tell the listener that Kidron is a fringe extremist who has long advocated the dismemberment of Israel.[]Finally, there is CAMERA’s frustration that NPR fails to correct their errors. [/li][quote]
]While journalistic ethics would require NPR to immediately correct Gradstein’s gaffes, and even to reprimand the reporter, the network’s predilection in such cases is instead to stall and stonewall.
[/quote]
[/ol]tomndebb and other posters: These accusations are objective. Do you want to check them out for accuracy?

30

Well, the accussation against Peretz Kidron, that he believes in the dismemebrement of Israel seems to come from the fact that he believes that all Israeli soldiers should refuse to serve in the West Bank and Gaza Strip which is hardly the same thing. CAMERA accusing Kidron of extremism is a bit like the pot calling the kettle black.

31

No, the first objection is objective. I have not been able to get the interview to play, so it may or may not be an accurate account of what was broadcast. It may well be accurate. The remaining objections, however, are very much in the vein of “She called our boy a hardliner without calling their boy a hardliner” and “She should not have interviewed so-and-so because we feel he’s a kook.”

If I can get my RealPlayer working, today, I’ll try to listen to the interview, (I’m not paying six bucks for a transcript).

32

OK. I am having no better luck getting my outdated RealPlayer to work than getting the SDMB to work for most of the day.

For the sake of discussion, I will stipulate that the original complaint by CAMERA is acurate–that Gradstein substituted Israeli extremism for Sandler’s Arab-Israeli extremism. Of course, we don’t know but that Sandler changed what he said when confronted with the club of CAMERA threatening to “expose” his statements, (he had not challenged Gradstein’s report, but waited until CAMERA contacted him), and we don’t know the context of the discussion between Gradstein and Sandler to know whether he made statements that Gradstein misapprehended or that were not clear in the context of a back-and-forth discussion, and we don’t know whether Gradstein put together a report that combined Sandler’s comments with those of someone else with a slightly different but converging view that was inadvertantly dropped during the normal “shoehorn it into x minutes” editing that always occurs in any broadcast report, but for the sake of discussion, we’ll say that Gradstein misquoted Sandler.

If true, this was clearly a case of bad reporting.

However, the Sandler portion of the 1,030 word CAMERA article took up only 242 words. The remaining 4/5ths of the piece clearly falls into the “she didn’t say what we want to hear” category and it pretty clearly refutes the claim presented that

In fact, the article you have cited is very much the sort of thing that irritates me about the Catholic League, in that they find a single error that possibly indicates bias and they then blow it all out of proportion by asserting a lot of extraneous “facts” that are nothing more than their own preferences for viewing the world.

NPR may, indeed, have an anti-Israel slant (although my impression over the last couple of years is that it has an anti-Sharon, not anti-Israel, slant). I’m afraid that CAMERA’s overblown horror that the stories are not biased in their favor does not persuade me of that contention.

33

I am pretty pro-Israeli (in a US liberal kind of way), and I recognize bias in NPR journalism like I recognize bias in all journalism.

Bias is a relative matter, and most American press sources are so overtly pro-Israel that anything a little less so seems automatically pro-Palestinian. Sure, NPR often puts things differently than I would, and sure they attempt to find both sides of the story even for what I consider naked acts of aggression. News, in general, is pretty hit-or-miss, and they are just trying to do their part to cover all of the bases.

I’ll be worried when they start calling terrorist bombing “martyrdom operations.” Until then, it is our job to recognize that the occupation continues and even expands. Sharon has not moved one inch from when he took office two and a half years ago, even though it is clear that he can’t stop terrorism altogether. No small positive moves by the Palestinians are rewarded. Arafat has been rendered irrelevant but few moves have followed in order to ensure a moderate successor. Both the Palestinian and Israeli economies are in shambles. Israel has crushed any Palestinian security apparatus, for what it was worth. The IDF has had cases of alleged human rights violations, and to my knowledge no one has been brought to blame. Recognizing these factors, acknowledging that they do nothing to reduce terrorism, and stating that in some cases they actually serve to increase it is not pro-Palestinian or anti-Israeli. To my mind, NPR has not been guilty of anything beyond what the Israeli Left states every day.