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Jewish World Review Oct. 14, 2003 / 17 Tishrei, 5764 The Cult of Objectivity
By
Jonathan S. Tobin
Hypocrisy on 'terrorism' gives lie to media's self-image
http://www.jewishworldreview.com |
The headline across the front page of The New York Times on what was for
Jews, their Day of Atonement, told its readers all they needed to know about the
Arab-Israeli conflict. "Israel Attacks What It Calls a Terrorist Camp in
Syria," the gray lady screamed on Monday, Oct. 6.
The editors of the Times are entitled to express their opinion (as they did
the following day, when their editorial page condemned both the attack and
President Bush for rightly saying that Israel had a right to defend herself), but
the principles of objective journalism should have prevented them from
inserting it into a headline.
WHO'S A TERRORIST?
Virtually ever major American newspaper, including the Times and the Inquirer
have decided, as a matter of policy, that members of Palestinian terrorist
groups — such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade — should
be called "militants," rather than "terrorists." Nor should, we are told,
the organizations that claim credit for massacres, such as last week's bombing
in Haifa that took the lives of 19 Israelis, be referred to as terrorist groups.
Doesn't this fly in the face of accurate reporting and common sense? Journali
sts answer that "terrorism is an "emotive" term that compromises their
objectivity. This was hard enough to defend before Sept. 11, 2001, but the aftermath of
that event has further exposed the hypocrisy in their approach to covering
terrorism.
Why? Because virtually all of the newspapers and broadcast networks that
refuse to call Palestinian killers of Israelis terrorists have no compunction
about calling the 9/11 murderers terrorists.
How do journalists get away with this double standard? They employ sophistry,
obfuscation, and what Christine Chinlund, the ombudsman of The Boston Globe,
admits is "hairsplitting."
Chinlund and Michael Getler, her counterpart at The Washington Post, have
both recently penned articles explaining this policy and deriding their critics
as "partisans" of Israel who don't understand journalism or the Middle East.
Chinlund asserts that to "tag Hamas, for example, as a terrorist organization
is to ignore its far more complex role in the Middle East drama." Getler
chimes in by quoting the Post's style manual as saying that "we should not
resolve the argument over whether Hamas is a terrorist organization."
Huh? To even entertain the notion that there is a debate about whether a
group that targets innocent civilians for death is a terrorist organization is
itself an act of partisanship that gives murderers an unearned legitimacy.
HAMAS BY ANY OTHER NAME
And what, we might ask, is Hamas known for in Israel, or anywhere else,
except as the slaughterers of innocents?
Getler goes further and betrays his paper's bias by asserting America's
innocence in contrast to Palestinian resistance to a "humiliating Israeli
occupation." Yet isn't Getler's reference to Israel and its actions itself an
acceptance of a slanted view of reality that takes the Palestinian point of view and
rejects that of Israel?
In other words, according to Getler and those who agree with him, Israelis
deserve to be blown up in cafes and buses, but Americans do not deserve to be
killed.
So much for objectivity.
Far more honest was the Orlando Sentinel's Manning Pym, who meekly admitted
that "the horse is out of the barn on the labeling of Al Qaeda." He
understands his readers would be outraged by the paper's calling the 9/11 killers
"militants," as it does to those who kill Jews in Israel. From this frame of
reference, when it comes to their reporting of Al Qaeda and Hamas, American
journalists are merely provincial rather than biased.
Ironically, one of the few who dispute this nonsense works for The New York
Post, a paper whose news pages are notorious for their lack of objectivity.
Post columnist Eric Fettman recently asserted that the media's take on
terrorism is a pretense that suggested "terrorism doesn't really exist and that
words aren't important. They are, and using the word 'terrorist' is not unfairly
taking sides — it's acknowledging the reality of a genuine and dangerous
ongoing threat."
He's right. Hypocrisy over terrorism gives the lie to the cult of objectivity
that animates so much of the American media's puffed-up self-image. Those who
defend the double standard have no honest answers for their critics.
They will tell you that "yellow journalism" is confined these days to
tabloids like the Post, but the truth is that bias is just as virulent at the Times
and at its lesser cousins, like the Inquirer. That this is so is an ongoing
scandal that American journalists ignore at the peril of their profession's
standing with the public.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in Washington and in the media consider "must reading." Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
JWR contributor Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent.
Let him know what you think by clicking here. In June, Mr. Tobin won first places honors in the American
Jewish Press Association's Louis Rapaport Award for Excellence in Commentary as
well as the Philadelphia Press Association's Media Award for top weekly
columnist. Both competitions were for articles written in the year 2002.
© 2003, Jonathan S. Tobin
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