Shame on the NY Times

[sdimbert]

Many of you have probably heard of this issue already.

On Sept 30[sup]th[/sup], the NY Times ran a photograph showing what appeared to be an Israeli Soldier viciously beating a Palastinian boy.

As it turns out, the soldier in the photograph was protecting the boy, a young American Jewish student, from the Palastinian Arabs that had pulled him from a taxi and beaten him with rocks.

The Times ran a correction on October 4[sup]th[/sup] that was, in my opinion, woefully inadequate; in fact, it was irresponsible and possibly belies some rather horrifying biases on the part of one of America’s most popular publications.

The whole story has been published to the web by a friend of mine named Avi, who runs a website for Jewish Youth Professionals.

Please… follow the link, read the truth, and respond.

[Necros]

Now, hold your horses a bit here. The New York Times didn’t take that picture. They didn’t necessarily know the photographer who took the picture. The AP took the picture and sent it out over the wire. There is no mention of who came up with the cutline, or who provided the information the cutline was based on, if, in fact, the Times wrote it.

I think your ire is a bit misdirected. You should probably be upset with the AP photog who snapped the shot, and then relayed the info to his editors. But it’s a fair spot more difficult to criticize a reporter who is taking pictures in the field, with tanks on one side, and rock-throwing protestors on the other. Sometimes they get things wrong.

I’d be more concerned about the misidentification of old Jerusalem as the Temple Mount. What’s up with that? Another simple mistake, perhaps, but confusing nonethelesss. Did the reporter know where the heck he was in the Middle East? It would have made as much sense to say he was in the Sinai.

As far as the correction, seems pretty standard to me. Corrections are, as a rule, short, to-the-point, and with as little self-deprecation as possible.

[sdimbert]

Necros,

**
Now, hold your horses a bit here. The New York Times didn’t take that picture…

I think your ire is a bit misdirected.
**

At least one person disagrees with you, and he happens to write for the NY Post:

…Even in its comparatively restrained one-column display on page A6 of last Saturday’s Times, the picture packed an emotional wallop. The caption was simple but telling: “An Israeli policeman and a wounded Palestinian yesterday.”

The Boston Globe, which is owned by the Times, also picked up the Associated Press photo. The Globe ran the picture across its front page last Saturday. And it ran in color - the blood streaming bright red.

Other papers running the photo included the Daily News, the Houston Chronicle, the Raleigh News and Observer, the Record in Bergen County, N.J., and the Portland Oregonian. Most captions referred to a “screaming Israeli policeman standing over a wounded Palestinian youth.”

The message was unmistakable: Brutal Israeli soldiers are running amok, indiscriminately clubbing defenseless young Palestinians into submission…

<snip snip>

Thanks to a constant media barrage, the automatic assumption these days is that only cold, callous Israelis commit such atrocities and that only Palestinian Arabs are the victims in the Middle East.

Left uncorrected, photos like this reinforce such images. And even when corrections are made, few people pay attention. (Both the Times and AP ran corrections yesterday.)

Remember the searing UPI photo of the Palestinian baby girl whose arms had been blown off by Israelis during the 1982 Lebanon war? President Reagan was so moved that he clipped the photo and put it on his desk; an aide related that “that picture of the baby with arms burned has more impact on him than 50 position papers.” (Reading that, Prime Minister Menachem Begin put a photo on his desk: the famous shot of the terrified Jewish youngster, arms raised in surrender, in the Warsaw Ghetto.)

But as Ze’ev Chafets noted in “Double Vision,” his account of the myriad media distortion of Lebanon: “Israeli physicians who saw the photo realized that no infant whose arms had been recently amputated would be bandaged and displayed by a nurse as this one was done.” A search discovered that the boy (not a girl) “had not lost any limbs. He had a broken arm, from which he was recovering.”

UPI eventually published a correction - but few of the papers and TV stations that carried the photo did likewise. “By this time,” noted Chafets, “millions had seen the photo and been impressed by its dramatic caption.”

The current Arab rioting against Israelis has seen several such symbolic incidents - the most powerful of which was the footage of the 12-year-old shot dead in a crossfire between Palestinians and Israelis.

Even that story is hardly as black and white as has been portrayed. In the case of Tuvia Grossman, however, there is no dispute: A Jewish youth was brutally beaten by Arabs; others have been shot at with powerful rifles. That, and that alone, explains the Israeli military effort to stop the violence.

But those who saw this photo will come to another - wrong - conclusion. “People see a picture of a youth and they think that it’s a Palestinian being beaten by Israelis,” says Grossman. "It changes their worldview and makes them think that Israelis are beating up the Arabs. It was totally the opposite.

“To say that he was beating me - the world must be notified about how this is not true.”

But will anyone listen?

E-mail: efettmann@nypost.com

[sdimbert]

The point I need to make is that the NYT made a terrible error here. You mean to tell me that they do not stand behind the accuracy of the content of their paper?

Do you think the famous “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline resulted in a three-line correction buried on page 12 of the next week’s edition?

The nature of this error calls for more substantive correction. It also awakens us all to a bias the that exists, both in the media and, as a result, in the public.

[Necros]

sdimbert said:

At least one person disagrees with you, and he happens to write for the NY Post.

Yes, I read that article before I responded to you (what, you think I don’t do research? :)). And I kept looking, and looking, and looking, for an explanation of why that caption came out wrong. I never found it. My guess is that Post op-ed schmo doesn’t know either. In fact, if I believed everything an op-ed writer put down on paper, I’d be a lot more gullible, angry and paranoid.

Mr. Fettmann, like many of his ilk, is guilty of the same thing the picture is: Trying to elicit a visceral reaction from readers without a full understanding of the facts and circumstances surrounding the issue. And, not to mention that the Post is a “competitor” of the Times, so his opinion should probably be taken with a grain of salt. Regardless, he doesn’t have any more facts about how the picture got taken than does your friend’s website.

The point I need to make is that the NYT made a terrible error here. You mean to tell me that they do not stand behind the accuracy of the content of their paper?

No, it is definitely the responsibility of the last person out the door to turn off the lights. I’m just saying that while the Times does have a certain duty to check facts, things coming off the AP wire are generally considered to be reasonably well-documented. In this case they weren’t. Is it the Times who should be held accountable? Partly. But for making an error, not for perpetrating a huge media conspiracy, as you seem to imply.

Do you think the famous “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline resulted in a three-line correction buried on page 12 of the next week’s edition?

Honestly? Probably. If they ran a correction at all.

The nature of this error calls for more substantive correction. It also awakens us all to a bias the that exists, both in the media and, as a result, in the public.

Well, I’m not sure that this is something we need to be “awakened” to, as we should assume all media is biased already, but again, I disagree. They made a mistake. They admitted it. I don’t believe they did it out of some ill-will. And singling out the Times alone for criticism is just wrong.

[sdimbert]

Just for the sake of closure, the following is from an article the Times published on Oct 7 (I am quoting it because they make you pay to read the online edition):

A picture of Tuvia Grossman, his head bloodied and sitting in front of the approaching police officer, was taken by an Israeli photographer for Zoom 77, an Israeli agency, and sent that Friday, Sept. 29, to The A.P. in Jerusalem with a garbled Hebrew caption that misidentified Mr. Grossman as an Israeli ambulance medic.

The A.P., which had received many pictures of injured Palestinians that day, did not clarify the garbled caption but sent the picture to subscribers with a caption based on the erroneous assumption that Mr. Grossman was a Palestinian. It also misidentified the site, first as the Temple Mount and later as another site in the Old City.

Many newspapers published the picture and erroneous captions based on The A.P.'s information. The New York Times misidentified Mr. Grossman in last Saturday’s issue as a Palestinian and in some copies misidentified the site as the Temple Mount. In a correction on Wednesday, The Times noted that the wounded man was Tuvia Grossman, a student from Chicago, but — using erroneous information from The A.P. — mistakenly said the site of the attack was in the Old City.
*

[labdude]

*Originally posted by sdimbert *
**
The nature of this error calls for more substantive correction. It also awakens us all to a bias the that exists, both in the media and, as a result, in the public. **

Are you really trying to say that the american media has a anti-jewish bias?? If you are then that’s crazy, but maybe I misunderstood.

[BobT]

*Originally posted by sdimbert *
**The point I need to make is that the NYT made a terrible error here. You mean to tell me that they do not stand behind the accuracy of the content of their paper?

Do you think the famous “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline resulted in a three-line correction buried on page 12 of the next week’s edition?

The nature of this error calls for more substantive correction. It also awakens us all to a bias the that exists, both in the media and, as a result, in the public. **

Going off on a tangent here but “Dewey Defeats Truman” was in the Chicago Tribune. It only appeared in very few early editions of the paper and the Tribune tried to pull all of the copies off of the street as fast as they could.

According to a story in a recent American Heritage, the Tribune didn’t even own a copy of the paper until very recently when an executive bought one off of eBay.

You can now resume your NY Times bashing.

[edwino]

*Originally posted by labdude *
**
Are you really trying to say that the american media has a anti-jewish bias?? If you are then that’s crazy, but maybe I misunderstood. **

I don’t think there is much of an anti-Jewish bias. I think of it more of an anti-guys-with-guns-rather-than-stones bias. I think that in general, in the US, we root for the underdog. It is kind of an American Tradition. I think that means that automatically if one guy throws a stone and another guy shoots back at him, the guy doing the shooting is automatically wrong.

Another thing is that in the US, we pass quick judgement without knowing the whole story. It is the “soundbiting” of our culture. When we see a 12 year old kid shot to death on TV, not only can we all agree that it is a terrible incident (no matter what provoked it), but vilify the other side.

The picture in the NY Times is a side effect of all of this. A picture of an Israeli soldier shouting and someone bleeding automatically in today’s day and age turns into a big, bad Israeli soldier beating up a defenseless Palestinian.

I feel the media should be evenhanded and report all sides equally. So, when the NY Times and many other papers in the nation paste up this picture on their front pages, a 1 line apology on page 12 does not suffice. I would expect the same if a front page picture of an Israeli mob stoning Palestinians got mislabeled as Palestinians rioting against Israelis.

[Danielinthewolvesden]

sdim is right, the NYT should have posted a correction on the same page where the story originally ran, plus a small note in the “corrections” section. They like BIG stories TOO much, and “Isreali Policeman beats Palestinian” is a big story, “Policeman protects citizen” is not.