NY Times-Boston Globe Merger Bad News for Mideast Objectivity

By Richard H. Curtiss

Since a huge percentage of the Americans who pay any attention at all to the news get their information from television, radio newscasts or newspapers without much foreign news input, does it matter that The New York Times has just purchased the Boston Globe? For Americans concerned about objective Middle East coverage, the short answer is "yes."

Those who set America's information agenda get a great deal of it from daily newspapers and journals of opinion. Top policymakers in the U.S. government are no more likely to walk into a morning staff meeting without first glancing through the Washington Post and New York Times than to appear in shorts and sandals.

The editors who put together the television news have, in the course of the day, also looked at The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times and Christian Science Monitor, or pertinent clippings from them. By the end of the day, Pentagon officials going home on the metro, and U.S. ambassadors in the most distant capitals, are reading clipping files that also cover whatever was carried in their areas of concern by the Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, Baltimore Sun, Washington Times, and Miami Herald. The files very likely also will include clippings from Time, Newsweek, USA Today and from additional newspapers in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Minneapolis, New Orleans, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis and elsewhere, depending upon which have their own correspondents in other cities at home and abroad of interest to that reader's agency.

In Congress, legislative staffers are poring over not only all of those journals but others dealing with their employers' legislative specialties, and regional, state and local newspapers pertinent to their employers' re-election prospects. A negative editorial or investigative report, or persistent focus on an issue by a publication from any of these categories, can change the voting pattern of a congress member—for better or for worse.

Most avid readers of all are television and radio news program producers, newspaper editorial writers, talk show hosts, and think tank intellectuals/writers/commentators and lobbyists who, along with more specialized executive and legislative branch officials, peruse the magazines, newsletters and pertinent journals for items relevant to their fields. For those who wonder how the "MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour" selects its guests, the answer is by watching who's written a recent article stating a clear point of view on the topic to be discussed.

Virtually all non-local information carried on television, radio, or less prestigious newspapers originates, in writing, from the wire services, in journals of the kinds described above, or with readers of such journals. The silencing of an independent voice, particularly in an area that, along with the two California's, can claim authorship of far more than its share of the original ideas that eventually are regulated or legislated in Washington or packaged and sold in New York, is regrettable.

Announcement of the $1.1 billion merger agreement emphasized, of course, that the Globe, whose 500,000 daily and 800,000 Sunday circulation makes it the New England leader and one of the top 15 daily newspapers in the U.S., will retain "full editorial autonomy" for five years. Sixty-eight percent of the voting stock of Affiliated Publications, which owns the Globe and a one-third interest in 19 magazines, is owned by two family trusts.

One is composed of heirs of Eban Jordan, who founded the Globe in 1872 and who also founded Jordan Marsh department stores. The other trust is composed of heirs of Charles H. Taylor, who was 27 when he was brought in a year after the Globe's founding to reorganize it.

Both the Taylor and Jordan family trusts expire in 1996. It was to avert the risk of a hostile takeover at that time that Affiliated Publications Chairman William O. Taylor, 60, and his cousin, Affiliated President Benjamin Taylor, 45, sold the Globe to the Times, after unsuccessful negotiations with the Times Mirror Co. of Los Angeles, The Washington Post, the Tribune company of Chicago, and the New house family publishing organization.

A negotiation with The New York Times fell through last winter when members of the Taylor family sought to retain greater control over the Globe than the Times was willing to grant. The success of the renewed negotiations was based on Times concessions over how the Globe would be managed. Under terms of the sale, which still must be approved by stockholders of both companies, the Times will pay 15 percent of the purchase price in cash and exchange all of Affiliated stock for New York Times common shares. This will not dilute control of the Times, however. Voting stock in The New York Times is restricted to members of the Sulzberger family.

The New York Times, America's largest metropolitan and Sunday newspaper, has daily circulation of 1,230,000 and Sunday circulation of 1,812,000. It also owns 31 regional newspapers, 20 magazines, 5 television and radio stations, and a half interest (with The Washington Post) in the International Herald Tribune. Times syndicated columns appear in newspapers throughout the United States.

From Seventh to Fifth Place

The merger will give The New York Times company combined average weekday and Saturday circulation of 2.5 million for all of its dailies, including the Globe. This raises the Times-owned daily newspapers from seventh largest in national circulation over Thompson Newspapers, with 2.1 million, and Dow Jones (Wall Street Journal), with 2.4 million, to fifth place, behind Gannett with 5.9 million, Knight Rider with 3.7 million, New house with 3 million, and Times Mirror with 2.8 million.

For many years, Americans who followed Middle East events closely complained that the only nationally circulated daily newspaper providing objective coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and international and national affairs related to it, was the Christian Science Monitor, published in Boston. After some costly media decisions in the 1980s by its publisher, the First Church of Christ, Scientist, and some unrelated church financial and membership problems, that newspaper no longer speaks out so clearly on Middle East matters.

In very recent years, in the writer's opinion, the consistently liberal Boston Globe has been more outspoken in its criticism of human rights offenses by the Israeli military occupation and some other Israeli policies than the Monitor. Unless the Globe retains a remarkable degree of independence from its owners and its advertisers, the record of The New York Times suggests that both New England voices henceforth will be muted on Middle East matters.

As for The New York Times, the sheer volume of its Middle East coverage is rivaled only by that of America's other daily "newspaper of record," The Washington Post, and perhaps by the Los Angeles Times, which also maintains its own Middle East correspondents. With a very high percentage of Jewish readership in its Manhattan home base, New York Times coverage of Israel is generally more inclusive than that of the Post, while the Post's coverage of the Arab world is at least equal to that of the Times. Their relative fairness and objectivity vary from year to year with changes of editors in the home offices and correspondents abroad.

At the time of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, however, the national pro-Israel establishment was extremely critical of The Washington Post, actually stationing "observers" in the editorial room while coverage was being edited, and organizing an informal but effective boycott of the Post, encouraging Jewish advertisers and subscribers to transfer their business to the Post's fledgling rival, the Washington Times.

What was remarkable was the fact that the Post permitted such blatant editorial intimidation, which, in this writer's opinion, has permanently affected Post coverage not only of Israel but also of activities of Israel's extremely influential lobby and its supporters in the United States. Currently, with editors of Jewish heritage at virtually every relevant level, the Post seems consistently more inhibited in its coverage of Israel than its tiny local competitor, the Washington Times, or than The New York Times.

Ownership of the Post is largely in the hands of heirs to Eugene Meyer, a Jewish businessman-philanthropist who married a Christian woman. Members of the family have displayed a distinct pro-Israel bias for many years. Whether the newspaper's Middle East caution derives from bias by the publishers or editors, fear of renewed advertiser retaliation, or all of the above, the effects are unmistakable.

Locally, frequent pro-Palestinian human rights demonstrations at the White House, State Department and Israeli Embassy are not mentioned by the newspaper. By contrast, the Post does cover other Middle East-oriented demonstrations, such as those against the Rafsanjani government in Iran or in favor of U.S. intervention to halt the genocide in Bosnia.

Nationally, the same inhibition applies. With the publication this year of The Passionate Attachment, an extremely important book about the 45-year U.S.-Israeli relationship by former Under Secretary of State and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations George Ball and his historian son, Douglas Ball, the Post barely reacted, even though the book found its way onto the Post's list of best-sellers in local bookstores.

Instead of approaching another ex-U. S. official to review the book, the Post finally carried a review by a German-born Israeli, Walter Laqueur, whose Zionist bias is beyond dispute. Laqueur barely referred to the book, instead denigrating the authors.

Consistent "Attitudes"

In the case of the New York Times, consistent "attitudes" toward Israel and the Palestinians are easier to describe and document. The Sulzberger family owners are Jewish, and so are a great many senior editors at The New York Times. The Sulzbergers were not Zionists, however, until after the 1967 war. Even now the Times, edited with a readership sophisticated about Israel in mind, generally reflects a viewpoint sympathetic to Israel's Labor Party rather than simply "pro-Israel."

Only five of its columnists, all of them Jewish, have written regularly on Israeli affairs in recent years. Liberal, Boston based Anthony Lewis consistently and effectively criticizes Israeli extremism, whether Likud- or Labor-originated, and supports positions of the Israeli peace parties.

European-based Flora Lewis, who no longer writes a regular column, also criticizes violations of Palestinian rights. Leslie Gelb, a former Carter administration official, who has stopped writing to take a Clinton administration position, was critical of Israel's Likud government but muted his criticism of Israeli policies after Labor returned to power.

Republican William Safire has been a consistent apologist for even the most extreme Likud policies, and declined to vote for former colleague George Bush in the 1992 elections, obviously because of the pressure the Bush administration was putting on Israel. Columnist A. M. Rosenthal, a vigorous opponent of human rights violations in the former Soviet Union and present-day China, maintains no pretext of consistency when it comes to Israel.

What Likud decrees, and whatever any Israeli government does to the Palestinians, he defends. Not without reason, New York Times staffers are said to refer to his "On My Mind" column as "Out of My Mind." What is significant, however, is not columnist Rosenthal's utter disdain for objectivity or consistency where Israel is concerned, but the fact that he was managing editor of the Times for many years—under the Sulzbergers.

Nor in those days did he keep his passion for Israel hidden. Then-New York Times Beirut correspondent Thomas Friedman has described returning to New York prepared to resign over the fact that the Times had toned down an article he wrote criticizing the Israeli bombardment of defenseless Lebanese civilians during Israel's 1982 siege of West Beirut. Instead of engaging him in a shouting match, however, Rosenthal gave him a raise, which Friedman accepted. It is an editor's right to exercise his editorial prerogative, and a reporter should take any raise offered. But, Friedman's account does confirm that Rosenthal did exercise that right on behalf of Israel when he was managing editor, and Rosenthal's present columns confirm what extreme views he holds on the subject.

However, Rosenthal has been replaced as executive editor by Max Frankel. Since the question today is how acquisition of the Globe by the Times will affect future access of the New England public to objective news about the Middle East, two recent examples are pertinent.

On Oct. 8, 1990, 17 Palestinian Muslims were killed outright and 400 others injured during an assault by Israeli border guards and police on worshippers at the Haram Al-Sharif in Jerusalem, one of Islam's holiest sites. The New York Times published the initial Israeli version of events, which claimed falsely that the massacre began with an assault on Jewish worshippers praying at Jerusalem's nearby Western Wall.

Suspicions arose immediately because no Israelis were injured. Subsequently, videotapes taken simultaneously from three different parts of the city conclusively proved the Israeli version, reported at length in The New York Times, to be totally false. The videotapes were shown in Jerusalem to the then-Times Jerusalem correspondents, Joel Brinkley and his Israeli wife, Sabra Chartrand, by Michael Emery, a California professor of journalism. The Times, however, did not retract.

It was only after Emery brought the videotapes to the United States that the unprovoked nature of the Israeli attack was exposed by CBS's "60 Minutes" and, among other publications, by the Village Voice in New York. To this day, the Times has never retracted or corrected its series of erroneous reports. It is a revealing example of how the Times selectively exercises its role as America's principal "newspaper of record," and of why the American public and even U.S. historians are so woefully misinformed on events in the Middle East and their fallout in U.S. political life.

This year, revelations that B'nai B'rith's Anti-Defamation League has employed a paid informer to infiltrate peace activist and Arab-American groups for more than 30 years in San Francisco, that it has in its files information stolen from the San Francisco police department, and that some of that same stolen information had found its way to Israel and to South Africa have been widely publicized in the San Francisco Bay area media.

As the story unfolded, there were further reports that the ADL files contained 12,000 names, 4,000 of them Arab Americans, that ADL surreptitiously had circulated derogatory (and false) information from those files to discredit critics of Israel, and that it had conducted similar activities in seven U.S. cities. The press in Los Angeles, where a raid by federal authorities on ADL offices turned up additional evidence, also has reported the story.

The New York Times, however, which has bureaus in both cities, has reported none of this. Instead it printed an op-ed "dialogue" on ADL's work, including a defense of the organization's name gathering, by its national director, Abraham Foxman.

The Times also printed a feature on the paid ADL informer, Roy Bullock, which depicted him as an antique dealer whose concerns about "anti-Semitism" had involved him with a corrupt San Francisco police officer who had sold stolen files to South Africa, Israel, and, just incidentally, to Bullock for the ADL. The article, without any accompanying news accounts explaining that among those spied upon by the ADL through Bullock or other informers were the Mills College Board of Trustees, directors of public television station KQED, and virtually every Jewish peace group and Arab-American social or political action group in California, would be meaningless to New York Times readers. But it enables the Times to say, quite misleadingly, that it has "covered" the story.

So, does the acquisition of the Boston Globe by The New York Times have an impact on the New England public's access to objective information about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, its effect on U.S. politics, and its significance to America's position in the world? Each independent media voice stilled makes it easier for those remaining, if they have axes to grind, to distort, by selectivity and omission, the current and permanent record. Unfortunately, on the Middle East, the Globe's new owners clearly have axes to grind.

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.