If You Thought Mideast Coverage Was Improving, You Were “Manipulated”

By Richard H. Curtiss

Until recently we had heard nothing but praise for a one-hour television program aired by ABC in December entitled “Peter Jennings: Jerusalem Stories.” Anchorman Jennings let members of the holy city’s three religious communities speak for themselves and, in the case of Jerusalem’s Christian clergy and community, perform for themselves. The ABC cameras showed extraordinary scenes of nearly hysterical Palestinian and other Christians seeking to push their way past gruff Palestinian Christian guards into crowded or closed Christian shrines.

Oddly, some of those who ended up speaking on camera for the other Jerusalem communities were not those originally scheduled by the producers. When Jennings broke off an interview in the home of a Muslim resident of Jerusalem to watch a passing procession of religious Jews, a woman leading the parade tried to prevent the ABC crew from filming the noisy Jewish demonstrators. Jennings declined to stop, pointing out that the event was taking place in a public street.

As one word led to another, it turned out the demonstration leader was the wife of the ultra-religious rabbi Jennings was to interview later in the day. The rabbi then cancelled the interview. A young pre-school teacher and settler from Brooklyn, Avraham Yarmuth, involuntarily stepped into the gap by angrily pursuing the ABC crew after they left the Jewish demonstration, calling Jennings a “slime bucket,” and then engaging in a lively and revealing interview.

When asked by Jennings why the Muslim he had been interviewing, whose family had lived in Jerusalem for 800 years, should not be permitted to live in the city, Yarmuth responded: “With all due respect, he lost a war. Now it is our right to say to him, ‘Bye! You have no rights here anymore!’”

Something similar happened as Jennings sought to resume the filmed interview with the same Muslim resident, Ali Klebbo, while walking through the Haram al Sharif. Muslim attendants outside the two mosques on the site insisted that the sound be turned off, thus cutting off an eloquent statement of the Muslim case.

“So we had lost the interview with the rabbi because we’d had our cameras with a Muslim, Ali Klebbo, near the Jewish synagogue and now we couldn’t interview Ali Klebbo because we had been seen talking to a member of the synagogue,” summarized Jennings coolly. “So much for the history lessons today.”

Now it turns out that instead of being a telling visual and audio record of the acrimony that obstructs a settlement both in Jerusalem and in Israel/Palestine as a whole, the ABC special was “brilliant TV manipulation.” We wouldn’t have known that had it not been for the ever alert Washington Jewish Week, which devoted its Jan. 2 lead editorial to the following judgment on the program.

“It was brilliant—not as journalism, but as state-of-the-art TV manipulation,” the Washington Jewish Week pronounced. “Attractively shot, subtly edited, ‘Jerusalem Stories’ contrived to denigrate Israel’s claim to its capital while listening attentively to Jewish, Muslim and Christian beliefs about the city.”

For those like the writer who saw the program for themselves and concluded that the only denigrating was self-denigration by the participants, self-appointed American Jewish thought police lined up to maintain otherwise.

Andrea Levin of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), which places hard-line, Likud-oriented paid advertisements in pro-Israel magazines and Jewish weekly newspapers, called the program “extremely insidious” because the Israelis interviewed were newly arrived from Europe or the United States while “in contrast, the Arabs all are of ancient lineage.” Since most people interested in anything Levin has to say must be uncomfortably aware that very few Muslim or Christian Palestinians are “newly arrived,” and very few Israeli Jews are not, she prudently shifted to attacking the messenger: Jennings.

“We’ve been following him for years and he’s had to make various corrections,” she told staff writer Eric Greenberg of the New York Jewish Week. “I think he basically has a deep sympathy for the Arab side.”

This writer might put it a little differently after spending years as a press attaché in U.S. embassies throughout the Middle East. We’ve observed that, in contrast to their editors, virtually all journalists from the U.S., or anywhere else for that matter, who have covered the Middle East for more than a few months become deeply concerned that the shocking story of the dispossession of the Palestinians is so little known outside the Middle East. Jenning’s only problem is that, unlike most media commentators, including Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw, who have never lived there, he knows whereof he speaks.

Abraham Foxman, national president of B’nai B’rith’s Anti-Defamation League, also complained that Jennings interviewed “well-educated modern and politically moderate Arab Muslims and Christians” while the majority of his Jewish interviewees were “ultra-Orthodox Jews, angry American Jews and right-wing ideologues [so] in the end the program leaves the viewers with the false impression that Israel is trying to kick out Jerusalem’s Arab residents.”

Exactly.

Et tu, Washington Post?

It seems that ABC is not the only medium giving Israel a bad name. The Washington Jewish Week, ever in a state of arousal, maintained in a Jan. 9 editorial that “the long delay in signing the negotiated accord on Hebron is not Israel’s fault. Now The New York Times has caught on, in editorials and news analyses. The Washington Post, for some reason, lags behind.” Further, a letter in the same issue of the WJW from an official of the Zionist Organization of America claimed that “the Arabists at the Washington Post are at it again.”

Well, maybe the difference between the Times and the Post results from ethnic or religious differences in the ownership and editorial direction of America’s two newspapers of record. The New York Times is unabashedly family-owned, and only members of the Jewish Sulzberger family can hold voting stock.

The principal owner of The Washington Post is Katherine Graham. She is the daughter of long-time owner Eugene Meyer, who was Jewish, but her mother wasn’t Jewish. The Post’s publisher is Donald Graham, son of Katherine Graham and a non-Jewish father. So, obviously they’re not really Jewish. But does that make them “Arabists,” meaning people who speak the language, have studied the culture and have lived in the area?

Perhaps, instead, the problem lies with Post editors. According to the masthead they are executive editor Leonard Downie Jr., managing editor Robert Kaiser, deputy managing editor Milton Coleman, editorial page editor Meg Greenfield and deputy editorial page editor Stephen Rosenfeld. From the names they all seem safely Jewish, but that shows how tricky the media can be. Milton Coleman is African-American.

In fact, he’s the very Washington Post reporter who, back in 1984, revealed that Jesse Jackson, in a working session with fellow African Americans, unguardedly referred to New York City as “hymie town.” But since by then Jesse Jackson had personally met with Yasser Arafat, which was not yet politically correct, discrediting him doesn’t sound like what a typical “Arabist” would set out do to.

So maybe it’s the Post’s correspondent in Israel, Barton Gellman, who is the “Arabist.” Although he’s been there for only a year and a half, he knew a lot about Israel even before he arrived, hit the ground running and has been writing informative and often deeply revealing pieces. He’s hardly been “slow to catch on” and besides, he’s Jewish.

Guess we’ll have to look to Andrea Levin and Abe Foxman down at the thought police precinct house for an explanation of what’s wrong with Washington Post coverage.

In fact, things get worse as you read further into the Washington Jewish Week, a newspaper we would never accuse of not “catching on” to what its readers want to see in print, regardless of what its editors and writers really think. In the winter edition of its quarterly supplement by and for teen-agers called “Fresh Ink” we learn that in Middle East coverage by Newsweek magazine, “the Israeli government often comes off looking like bloodthirsty oppressors bent on destroying the helpless Palestinians” and that “without the other side of the story, the perception is that Newsweek’s goal is to portray the Palestinians as poor, innocent defenseless saints persecuted by the murderous Israelis.”

Well, Newsweek has the same ownership as the Washington Post, so what can you expect? Maybe a few calls from advertisers will help them “catch on.”

We recall vividly how well it worked in 1982, when the Post waxed almost as indignant as Ronald Reagan about Menachem Begin’s invasion of Lebanon. But then, after national Jewish leaders contacted Post management and actually were invited to spend a day in the newsroom to see how the newspaper is put together, and the Jewish weeklies began touting the daily Washington Times to their readers as a politically correct alternative, the Post became so determinedly bland about the Middle East that those same leaders were able to get back to their regular job of policing The New York Times.

Is it possible that some day America’s two “newspapers of record” might both get fed up at the same time and produce a Jewish Milton Coleman to tell us what really is said when members of the Council of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations call publishers of The New York Times or The Washington Post to discuss their coverage of the Middle East? Or what happens to the department store advertising they both depend upon if they don’t say “yessir” when they get those calls? Naaaa.