NYT public editor Clark Hoyt on the near-impossible task of being seen by both sides to be reporting fairly on the painful happenings in the Gaza Strip.
BOMBS and rockets are flying between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza, and once again, The Times is caught in a familiar crossfire, accused from all sides of unfair and inaccurate coverage.
“To describe The Times’s reporting as inadequate and favorable to Israel is an understatement,” said Hugh Sansom of Brooklyn. Dorit Sauer Raskin of Manhattan saw it in an entirely different light. “Why do you not print any articles of the suffering of the people in Israel?” she asked. “Where are the pro-Israel articles?”
Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, responded last week on the newspaper’s Web site to similar complaints. She said the paper is scrupulously careful to describe the motives, histories, politics and perspectives of everyone in the conflict, allowing readers to decide who is right or wrong. “I see a backwards vote of confidence in The Times’s 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,” Abramson said.
It can be risky for editors and reporters to think that if everyone in a dispute is angry with them, then they must be doing something right. Sometimes they are so wrong the anger is justified. But in the case of the complex, intractable struggle between Israel and the Palestinians, even the best, most evenhanded reporting will not satisfy those passionately on one side or the other.
David K. Shipler, a former Times correspondent who won a Pulitzer Prize for his book “Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land,” said in an interview that each side firmly believes it is the victim in the struggle. “Any fair-minded coverage has to shatter that paradigm,” he said. “Both sides are both victims and perpetrators at the same time.”
But the readers I am hearing from are not ready to accept that notion. Supporters of Israel want coverage that stresses the terror caused by Hamas rockets fired ever deeper into Israeli territory, and are offended at so many pictures of Palestinian casualties. Supporters of the Palestinians want the coverage to focus on the suffering caused by Israel’s bombs and missiles, and on the economic sanctions and border closings that isolated Gaza before the latest fighting began.
The intensity of the criticism is no surprise. “It isn’t just a war,” said Nicholas Lemann, dean of the graduate school of journalism at Columbia University. “It’s a media war. Public opinions outside the region are very important, and they’re shaped by the press coverage.”
I would note that the NYT and other news organizations are barred by Israel from placing their own correspondents in Gaza itself. They rely heavily (almost exclusively?) on coverage from their Palestinian stringers for reportage from inside the conflict zone.
I would also make the point that an error, in an of itself, doesn't constitute bias.
The public editing team looked into some readers' claims, and found them to be in error.
Hoyt did conclude, perhaps not surprisingly, with:
Though the most vociferous supporters of Israel and the Palestinians do not agree, I think The Times, largely barred from the battlefield and reporting amid the chaos of war, has tried its best to do a fair, balanced and complete job — and has largely succeeded.