What Is Fair Coverage When One Man’s Terrorist Is Another Man’s Hero?

Philip Stone January 7, 2009

On the first day that this writer entered the UPI London bureau in 1971 to take a three-day live copy-editing test to see if he was the “right stuff” for the American news agency the first rule pumped into him by the quiet-spoken, gray-haired editor was that the word “terrorist” was never to appear in UPI copy. “Remember, the copy you are editing is distributed throughout the world, and that readership means one man’s terrorist is another man’s hero”. It’s a rule that remained imprinted in one’s journalistic soul by the printers’ ink running through one’s veins.

In those days the big international story was the Middle East, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and commercial airplanes being hijacked and blown up in the desert; in today’s world 37 years later it’s, well, the Middle East, Palestinians,  rockets fired into Israel, and Israel’s assault on Gaza. It’s a bit hard to fathom that one starts one’s international career and will probably end it with basically the same story.

And yet no matter how carefully one wrote a story, or edited someone else’s copy to try and take any bias out and present facts only, there would always be someone somewhere who would read bias in the copy and fire away complaints.

News organizations learned long ago they are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t – there’s no pleasing everyone – you just have to do the best you can to try to be fair.

Thus, in reaction to our story Tuesday about how Al Jazeera, CNN International and BBC World, have been covering the current Gaza air attacks and ground assault, it was interesting that the majority of comments were complaining about the perceived biases of the various organizations. Perhaps the most representative said, “You didn't mention that xxx coverage of the Gaza conflict has been as unashamedly biased, unbalanced and anti-Israel as it normally is!!”

And if ftm gets comments like that can you imagine what kind of comments a news organization like the New York Times gets. Here are a few representative comments taken from its web site:

Q. Why is The New York Times so anti-Israel? I have stopped buying The Times and I experience joy every time I hear that the old grey lady is in financial trouble. In fact, my happy day is when there are pink slips handed out to your pro-terrorist reporters. The reporter you have in Gaza is a working member of the Hamas propaganda machine. Do you think that this is not going to hurt your paper's reputation? You have lost me as a reader. — Richard Allen

Q. Why did Monday's lead story online state that Israel "Rebuffs Peace Efforts" when in fact Israel has rebuffed calls for a cease-fire while Hamas continues to fire rockets into Israel? Interestingly, on Sunday, The Times was reporting accurately that Israel had rebuffed calls for a cease-fire. Israel has stated all along that "peace efforts" should also focus on the Hamas rockets and that pulling back at this point while the Hamas rockets continue to land in Israel would be foolish. — Gerald Stern, White Plains, N.Y.

Q. When will your newspaper begin to offer a balanced analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Although you are not as bad as The New York Post, you are still pretty bad. — Louis Proyect

Q. In the current Israeli invasion of Gaza, what effort is The New York Times making to consult and cite sharply critical analysts from the Arab world and Europe, as well as the usual Israeli and Washington sources? (I think the coverage has been quite good in giving a sense of the likely unintended consequences, but it is still very limited when compared, say, with London newspapers.) — David Keppel, Bloomington, Ind.

Now the Times is in a rather unique position – it calls itself a national newspaper but its home town has one of the largest, if not the largest Jewish population in the US. So, write stories that show bias against Israel and the newspaper will have plenty of trouble on its hands.

The response to those complaints by Jill Abramson, the Times’ managing editor, deserves wide distribution:

A. With the assault on Hamas dominating the news, it isn't at all surprising that so many questions have come in suggesting that The Times favors one side in the fight. Even in times of cease-fire, stories about the Arab-Israeli conflict consistently provoke a large response from our readers, probably more than any other topic. In the case of this set of questions, I see a backwards vote of confidence in The Times’ reporting, given that every identifiable faction in this fractured collision of peoples and injustices believes so firmly that we are taking a side — someone else's.

We scrupulously avoid taking sides and consider it our responsibility to fully document the motives, histories, politics, and perspectives of everyone in the conflict. When we write about a conflict, we are careful to explain what each side is responding to, since there is usually a chain of actions and reactions that stretches back over time (and in this case over the span of 12 American presidencies). Therefore in the most recent fighting in Gaza, we wrote both of Israel's actions — the air and ground campaigns and the resulting casualties and hardship — but also what provoked them — the sustained firing of rockets by Hamas into Israeli territory and the terror that has inflicted on many Israeli communities. We wrote of the breakdown of the truce between Hamas and Israel, and the grievances on both sides. Hamas continued to fire rockets, which convinced Israel that Hamas would not change its fundamental hostility to Israel's existence. And Hamas expected that its truce might prompt Israel to reconsider its campaign to pressure and discredit Hamas by stifling its economy through closing border crossings and other measures. Long before this latest outbreak, we had written about all these issues, including documenting consistently, over time, the history of rocket attacks on southern Israel.

We often have readers pointing that on any given day, The Times has given prominence to, say, Palestinian suffering and played down Israeli suffering, by putting an article about one side on the front page and not the other, or featuring pictures of one side suffering but not an equivalent number of pictures about the other side's suffering. On the other side, we hear complaints that when just a few Israelis are killed, we give that just as much emphasis as higher numbers of Palestinian casualties. Fairness does not mean exactly equal treatment or play. When casualties are much higher on one side, as they are right now in Gaza, it is likely readers will see more prominent articles about the privations of Gazans. That simply reflects the realities on the ground. But we do not ignore the sufferings of Israelis and readers will continue to read about the plight of Israelis in the line of rocket fire from Hamas.

The Times remains committed to careful observation and reportage so that our readers can get the information they need to draw their own conclusions about what these events mean, and whom they want to hold responsible, in the moment and longer term.

So our coverage of the assault on Hamas includes reporting that Arab leaders, Western world leaders and rights organizations have denounced the Israeli assault on Gaza. It includes descriptions of the deaths and injuries and terror that the Israeli strikes have caused. It also includes the perspective from the Israeli side: that since 2001, more than 10,000 rockets and mortars have been fired from Gaza into Israel, with a continuing if limited toll of deaths, and terror for Israeli civilians.

One can always argue how successfully international news organizations are at reporting news events fairly, but Abramson’s response gives at least one example of how they really do try.

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