On July 13, five days after Israel had launched Operation Protective Edge to shield its citizens from hundreds of missile strikes launched from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, Jodi Rudoren of the New York Times wrote the following lead summing up the war to that point:
JERUSALEM — So much here seems so broken right now: the peace process, the moral compass. The Palestinian reconciliation pact is in tatters. The Israeli police force is having a crisis of public confidence. Houses of suspected Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip have been pulverized into piles of debris by Israeli airstrikes. Red alerts signaling long-range rockets from Gaza have canceled cultural events in Jerusalem and disrupted a wedding in a Tel Aviv suburb.
After hundreds of missile strikes on Israel’s cities, volleys that have made bomb shelters the temporary living quarters for thousands of residents in Israel’s south, and panicked adults and children alike from Ashdod to Haifa, Rudoren summarizes the entire Hamas terror campaign by reducing the missiles and their code red alerts to inconveniences that postpone cultural events and disrupt weddings. In Rudoren’s view, it seems, the indiscriminate launching of missiles against a civilian population is the equivalent of a heavy snowstorm that forces the delay of a museum outing and spoils a bride’s big day.
Israel supporters near and far are used to this kind of media bias — especially from the New York Times — but the problem only seems to be getting worse. And with the onset of Operation Protective Edge, readers worldwide were faced once again with the persistent media bias that turns Israelis into the unquestioned aggressors and Palestinians into the hapless victims.
But the truth is far more complex, and a number of pro-Israel media watchdog organizations have emerged to actively take on reportorial bias and force media organizations to account. These organizations have certainly made progress, in many cases forcing editors to revise stories and media organizations to conduct internal investigations, but the so-called “narrative” of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is still decidedly in Israel’s disfavor.
There are many reasons for reportorial bias, but a major contributing factor is an ideological conflict with the policies of the State of Israel. Journalists are famously more liberal than conservative, and those that enter the profession often hold left-of center liberal views. Top newspapers like the New York Times recruit their reporters from the finest universities, institutions where the State of Israel is treated as a pariah and its supporters vilified. This learned bias can’t help but seep into the news coverage.
“The worst reporting comes from a particular liberal/left-wing bias inherent in many media organizations that tend to hire their reporters and staff from a particularly narrow background,” says Simon Plosker, managing editor of Honest Reporting, an Israeli-based media watchdog. “This is particularly the case in the BBC, which falsely claims to seek ‘balance,’ while the New York Times and the Guardian make no bones about their political and editorial slants.”
Boston-based CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting) recently conducted a six-month study of New York Times coverage in which it found that the newspaper consistently downplayed Israeli views and amplified, or even promoted, Palestinian perspectives. “Month after month, the newspaper obscured Palestinian attacks and Israeli deaths, diverting readers’attention instead to Palestinian casualties and acts of nonlethal vandalism by Israelis.”
A further source of bias stems from a lack of education about the complex beat of the Middle East. Many of the reporters assigned to cover the Israel-Palestine conflict are known as “parachute journalists,” or those who have been assigned limited duty in a country where they might not fully understand all the players and issues. Faced with a deficit of information, these journalists look to others to guide them, and in turn end up depending on fellow journalists from large media outlets like the Times or broadcasters like the BBC.
“For the most part, these journalists have a pack mentality,” Plosker says. “They stay in the same hotels and report from the same places. Subsequently, there is a lot of information swapping. They all impact each other.”
Those media companies that can’t afford to send their own reporter to the region rely on wire services like Reuters and AP, which work closely with Palestinian sources to obtain their information, especially in the Gaza Strip.
In the case of photographers, the problem is even worse. Many of the professional photographers use Palestinians to assist them in their jobs, and the ensuing relationship is known to create a bias on the part of the reporter. “The photographers are incredibly important,” says Plosker. “You can’t compare a photo of a small crater where a rocket hit and the images of Palestinian women and children being injured or killed. The images are what’s hurting Israel.”
On the other hand, Plosker contends there has been a marked improvement in coverage in some areas, and that in general, he has found a lower level of media outrage directed against Israel during Operation Protective Edge than in previous operations, such as 2012’s Cast Lead or 2008’s Pillar of Defense. The reasons vary. For one, compared to the chaos and violence occurring elsewhere in the Middle East, what is happening in Gaza has lost some of its impact. There is also a much more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of how Hamas operates and the extent to which it is willing to go to secure its objectives. As well, the fact that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu accepted an Egyptian
ceasefire proposal during the second week of the conflict — while Hamas didn’t — clarified for most objective observers that Israel isn’t the party escalating the war.
Further, Plosker credits this decrease in hostility to a fundamental change in the way Israel handles the media. During its 2012 Operation Cast Lead, for security reasons Israel did not allow journalists into Gaza. Today, they are allowed access and are witnessing firsthand what is happening there, rather than relying on footage from Al Jazeera and Hamas. Subsequently, there have been much fewer instances of staging of events by Palestinians than in the past.