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.

By using the phrase "what it calls," the Times left no doubt about its opinion of the credibility of the claim, and the rights and wrongs of the conflict. The same article could have been headlined something that was actually neutral about the story, like "Israel Attacks Syrian Base" or "Palestinian Base," or it just could have called it a "camp," as did the unusually sober Philadelphia Inquirer on the same day. That would leave readers to make up their own minds.

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?

That the Times would provide us with such a blatant example of the lack of objectivity in Middle East reporting is interesting, given that there is a lively debate going on in the news business over how journalists should label the sort of people who hang out at what Israelis call "a terrorist camp."

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

Both newspapers are prepared to call specific Hamas attacks "terrorist" attacks, but insist that to attach this label to the group or its members would be wrong. Such a rickety standard is hard enough to defend, but their position is complicated by their approach to the "terrorist" Al Qaeda network. Chinlund defends this practice because "the definition of Al Qaeda in the Unit ed States is almost solely based on the 9/11 attacks," making it an "allowable exception."

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.