by Brendan O'Neill
Published: May 23 2002 www.tompaine.com

"It is time to deliver a message to The New York Times," said U.S. Rabbi Haskell Lookstein at the end of last year, "a way to let its editors and owners know we are upset and taking action."

Lookstein accused The New York Times of having a "persistent bias against Israel" in its Middle Eastern coverage, claiming that its reporting on the Arab-Israeli conflict today is "just as deplorable as its coverage of the Holocaust was years ago." A "boycott should start immediately," said Lookstein, calling on New York Jews to stop buying the Times, cancel their subscriptions, and send a "symbolic" message to "irresponsible editors everywhere."

But on April 12, 2002, the U.S. media group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting accused The New York Times of being consistently pro-Israel. "By its headline choice, the Times suggested that the deaths of 23 Israelis ... are more important than the deaths of 100 Palestinians," said FAIR, after analysing the paper's Middle East headlines and finding that Israeli deaths were likely to get an A1 (big) headline, while Palestinian deaths tended to get a sub (not so big) headline.

Then on May 6, 2002, web periodical The Idler accused The New York Times of publishing "Palestinian propaganda." "Reporting [has] focused heavily on Palestinian suffering while continually minimising the personal toll on Israelis," said The Idler, claiming that "the number and prominence of news stories and photographs regularly cast Palestinians as blameless victims of Israeli aggression."

In April 2002, another U.S. commentator accused The New York Times of being a propaganda machine for Israel. "In a time of crisis, [Ariel] Sharon has chosen an unusual way to communicate with the USA.... He uses New York Times columnist and ideological soulmate William Safire as a press secretary," wrote the Boston Globe media correspondent, accusing Safire of "serving as an unabashed propaganda outlet for the hardline Israeli leader."

It isn't only The New York Times that is facing clashing accusations of being both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine. "1000 Los Angeles Times readers have launched a one-day boycott of the U.S. newspaper, accusing it of being biased against Israel," reported BBC Online on April 18, 2002. "There's a feeling in the community that the [LA] Times has been one-sided and biased in its reporting about the Middle East," said a Los Angeles-based doctor. "And people in the Jewish community want to express their anger."

Yet a study of LA Times coverage of the Palestinian intifada published last year by the U.S.-based group Palestine Media Watch claimed to find "a marked imbalance in favour of Israel and against the Palestinians." PMW studied LA Times op-ed columns on the Middle East and discovered that 55 percent of them were pro-Israeli and only 20 percent pro-Palestinian (the rest were 'balanced') -- with PMW claiming that the LA Times "permit[s] pro-Israel columnists to use language and arguments that can properly be charaterised as extreme."

On May 5, 2002 the American Jewish Committee said that while The Washington Post's Middle Eastern coverage had "gotten better with time," some of its past reporting has been "bad beyond belief. There was simply no effort whatsoever to use Israeli sources, balance Palestinian narratives with Israeli perspectives, or even check the validity of certain reports."

But in the same week, another media group claimed, "[T]here is no question whatsoever that The Washington Post's editorial position has always been anti-Palestinian, and the Post's op-ed page has been an echo chamber of anti-Palestinian views with minimal effort to show the other side of the story." MORE

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