Soccer Dad

Dan Okrent on the Times coverage of Israel

Daniel Okrent gives a lengthy defense of his paper's coverage of Israel. Ultimately, though, I find it dissatisfying.
Sure it's hard to please everyone. But here's the key for me:

The paper's seeming reluctance, for instance, to report evidence of incitement to racial or religious hatred derives in part, I believe, from a subconscious effort to stick to the noninflammatory middle and to keep things civil, even when civility leaked out of the conflict long ago.

But the issue of incitement is key to the problem here. Israel struck a grand bargain with the PLO, in return for lifting its designation of the PLO as a terrorist organization, the PLO would agree to make peace with Israel and only use negotiations to determine its future status.
The problem was that since the first day that the Oslo Accords were signed Arafat and the PA showed no sign of interest in the commitments he signed to. Terror attacks against Israelis increased immediately and Arafat made no attempt to stop them.
With the ceding of territories to Arafat and the PA, Arafat would plead political weakness to be excused from his obligations. And he turned the territories under his control into breeding grounds for terrorists. This included turning a blind eye to the efforts of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It also meant using many of the institutions of civil society - the education system, publicly supported clergy, the public broadcasting system and the print media - to breed a kind of antisemitism unseen since the days of Hitler.
This incitement was one of the untold stories of the post-Oslo era. Alas its reporting has been left to the likes of Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace, Palestinian Media Watch, and the Middle East Media Research Institute. As luck would have it, Okrent might characterize all three of these organization as "partisan." But that's a copout. These organizations are documenting their work. To ignore this work is to ignore an important part of the conflict.
It may be easier to assume that this is just a political disagreement that can be solved by both sides being reasonable. But that just isn't the case. One side needs to change its outlook for there to be any hope of peace.
Consider a simple test. If you predicted in 1993 that in twelve years Ariel Sharon, Prime Minister of Israel, would be planning to remove Jews from Gaza who would have believed you? And if you predicted that Arafat would go to his grave eleven years later without a state because he refused to give up terror who would have believed you?
More people would have believed the second to be true. Which begs the question where has the greater changed taken place? And if so, is ignoring history and incitement really helping people understand the situation better? Of is it failing to provide an adequate context to the situation?
Last week I gave the Times qualified praise for "Israel, on Its Own, Is Shaping the Borders of the West Bank" and Okrent points to a controversy over that article.

It does not cede definitive authority to other organizations and sources. Last Tuesday, "Israel, on Its Own, Is Shaping the Borders of the West Bank," by Steven Erlanger, angered Michael Brown for its unelaborated statement that Palestinians "argue that all Israeli settlements beyond the green line are illegal." The Times, Brown believes, is obligated to note that "it's not just the Palestinians who say it's illegal, but U.N. Security Council resolutions."

The Times feels that it's not "ced[ing] definitive authority to other organizations and sources" and quotes a critic of Israel as proof. Okrent follows up with this from a former Middle East correspondent:

Ethan Bronner, the paper's deputy foreign editor, counters:"We view ourselves as neutral and unbound by such judgments. We cite them, but we do not live by them." He adds, "In 1975, when the U.N. General Assembly labeled Zionism as racism, would it have been logical for The Times to repeat that description as fact from then on? Obviously not. We take note of official views, but we don't adopt them as our own."

But if there was another view as to the legality of the settlements, it wasn't presented clearly in the Erlanger article. So despite the complaints of Michael Brown the partisan Palestinian claim stands unchallenged. So the Times is ceding its authority to a partisan source. There's no other way to read that.
Okrent strives mightily here to justify his paper's stance. But alas it comes up short.
UPDATE: DovBear finds the defense convincing.
UPDATE: Elder of Ziyon points out a very recent example where the Times's reporting comes up short.
UPDATE: Blogdigger returned a link to Donald Luskin's blog who referenced Mediacrity's criticism of the self-contradictory nature of the Okrent column.
UPDATED: Bloghead links to the NY Jewish Week's analysis of the Okrent column and then, like me, focuses on Okrent's diffidence when it comes to incitement:

Incitement to racial and religious hatred is an essential part of the story; you may even argue that it is the key, or one of the keys, to the whole story, and it's quite a statement for a paper to admit that they will not report on this because they find it too distasteful. It seems that Okrent and by extension the NYT is confusing dispassionate reporting, to which I have no objection, with refusing to report on passion -- which is something completely different.

Crossposted on Israpundit and Soccer Dad.

Posted by SoccerDad at April 26, 2005 5:30 AM