Weekly Jewish Press Targets Tom Brokaw

By Kurt Holden

For years, whenever John Chancellor dared to target Israel on one of his "NBC Nightly News" commentaries, anchorman Tom Brokaw somehow managed to look like he wasn't listening. So while commentators for the nation's network of Jewish weeklies fired hostile barbs at Peter Jennings of ABC, Mike Wallace of CBS, and John Chancellor of NBC, Brokaw stayed "above the fray." Until one day this summer.

On that day, New York lawyer David Kirshenbaum was on his way to lunch near Rockefeller Plaza in New York when he spied Brokaw. Kirshenbaum fell into step with Brokaw and for 10 minutes pleaded the case for leniency for former U.S. navy counter-intelligence specialist and admitted spy for Israel Jonathan Jay Pollard. Brokaw made it clear he was not interested in rehashing the well-aired case, but Kirshenbaum persisted.

Finally, Brokaw let his impatience show. "Listen, pal," Brokaw said, according to Kirshenbaum. "Do you know what your trouble is? Your trouble is that you're more loyal to Israel than to the United States."

Now Kirshenbaum has two causes, leniency for Pollard and the opposite for Brokaw. And, with Chancellor no longer on "NBC Nightly News," apologists for Israel have a new club with which to hit NBC.

"Maybe it explains why Pollard cannot get a fair shake out of the media—due to deep-seated feelings like this," Kirshenbaum told the Washington Jewish Week , which gave the story a half page in its Sept. 15 issue. The weekly quoted Brokaw as responding that his was an off-hand remark delivered without acrimony.

"It did not ever in my mind intellectually, psychologically or emotionally translate into religious bias of some kind," Brokaw told Washington Jewish Week, and "to conclude otherwise is simply unfair and terribly wrong." He said Kirshenbaum had been "polite but enormously persistent."

Not all of the usual critics of "anti-Israel bias" were willing to enlist in an anti-Brokaw campaign. Usually-shrill Andrea Levin, president of the Committee on Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), said her group, which is a hyper-sensitive pro-Israel media monitoring organization, has never had major complaints about Brokaw's reporting on the Middle East.

Dr. Michael Berenbaum, director of the Research Institute of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, said he was "not terribly troubled by Brokaw's remark—or by the charge of dual loyalty altogether...What Brokaw was doing—inelegantly, maybe—was telling him to buzz off."

Kirshenbaum, however, remained adamant. "Brokaw was insensitive," he charged in a follow-up interview with Washington Jewish Week writer Sheryl Silverman. "When someone spits at you, you can't pretend it's raining."

Suit Protesting Allegation Of Maxwell-Mossad Link Dropped

One of the most tantalizing news items of the year was buried deep inside the Washington Post 's Aug. 19 Style section under the coyly uninformative headline: "Hersh Wins Apology from British Papers." Persistent readers had to burrow 19 lines into the story to learn that it began with Pulitzer Prize-winning American investigative reporter Seymour Hersh's charge in his book The Samson Option that the late London Daily Mirror publisher Robert Maxwell and Mirror foreign editor Nicholas Davies had links to Mossad, Israel's shadowy foreign intelligence agency.

Maxwell and the Mirror Group sued Hersh and his British publisher, Faber & Faber, Ltd. over the charges. Less than two weeks later, however, Maxwell's body was found floating in the sea near the Canary Islands, where he had been traveling in his yacht, seemingly alone except for the crew.

The manner in which the Czech-born British publishing tycoon's body was spirited away for burial in Israel after a perfunctory autopsy by Spanish authorities ignited widespread speculation over whether Maxwell, who was in the midst of high-profile negotiations to purchase the New York Daily News at the time, was murdered, committed suicide, or slipped off the deck of the luxurious yacht accidentally or after a heart attack.

Subsequently, the Mirror published a series of articles attacking Hersh and the book. This time Hersh sued. In an August statement read in a London courtroom, attorneys for the Mirror Group said the Mirror's attacks on Hersh and his publisher "were completely without foundation and ought never to have been made." The statement acknowledged that Hersh "would never write anything which he did not believe to be true and that he was in this instance fully justified in writing what he did."

Hersh's charges against Davies were that he had revealed to Mossad the London whereabouts of Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli convert to Christianity who had disclosed details of Israel's nuclear weapons program to the newspaper. Mossad agents subsequently seized Vanunu and smuggled him to Israel where he is serving a life sentence in solitary confinement.

Hersh did not define the nature of Mossad's links to Maxwell, who was expanding his international publishing empire into the United States at the time Hersh made his charge. When Maxwell's expensive bid to purchase the Daily News, the only non-Jewish-owned major daily in New York City, collapsed after his death, the newspaper eventually was purchased by Morton Zuckerman, a real estate magnate who already owns U.S. News and World Report and the Atlantic Monthly, and whose pro-Israel sympathies are at least as pronounced as were Maxwell's.

Israel Still Censors Correspondents

Washington Post correspondent David Hoffman, leaving after three years in Israel, wrote a reminder in his newspaper's July 23 edition that foreign correspondents in Israel, as well as all Israeli media, still are subject to the military censorship that began in the 1950s. The military censor circulates to the media a list of topics upon which all reports are subject to censorship. Journalists submit their reports on these topics to the military censor's office, which is open around the clock, seven days a week. The reports are approved, banned, or approved with deletions.

The regulations apply to radio, television, newspapers, magazines, books, academic journals, and reports filed by foreign correspondents, like Hoffman, writing from Israel. Under an agreement with the Israeli government, Israeli editors may protest censorship decisions to a board created for that purpose, but not to the Israeli courts. Media that violate the rules may be closed by the government.

Some of the topics calling for scrutiny are not surprising. They include anything about Israeli defense industries, the Mossad external intelligence service and the Shin Bet internal security service, Israel's nuclear program, and Israeli purchases of fuel abroad and the movement of oil tankers in Israeli ports.

"I am not working against the newspapers here in Israel," chief military censor Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Shani told Hoffman. "I am working only against the intelligence of the enemy."

However, some of the other restricted topics belie that statement. Israelis have never been told about the use by Israel Defense Forces of anti-tank missiles against Palestinian fugitives this year, although thousands of Palestinians in the affected neighborhoods saw and heard the assaults. Nor can Israelis learn about the country's security budget, training accidents, road fatalities involving members of the armed forces, or even anything about foreign loans to the government of Israel. This is one reason most Israelis now tune in to foreign radio or telecasts to learn what is happening in their own country. It also acts as a brake on reporting by foreign correspondents like Hoffman. The Israeli government cannot close down the foreign media using their reports, but it can neglect to invite such correspondents to briefings or meetings with Israeli officials, and it can quietly cut off their access to government inspired "leaks" through which much news originates, and with which journalists can be rewarded or punished.

"The Israeli media as a whole does not have a real notion of freedom of the press and what its real role should be," Moshe Negbi, legal affairs commentator for the leading Hebrew-language daily Ma'ariv, told Hoffman. "They still think they...have to fight a common enemy. They don't understand that this is their job in a democracy—to fight the government, not help the government...The censor acts as prosecutor, judge and executioner at the same time. I think the whole notion of a military officer having the power to shut down a newspaper—you cannot believe that it exists in a democracy."

Hoffman will be replaced in Israel this fall by Barton Gellman, who is Jewish and who says he has "had an interest in the Middle East since high school." Washington Post Cairo correspondent Caryle Murphy also is scheduled for replacement this year by John Lancaster who, with Gellman, has been covering the Pentagon for the Post. The Post 's third Middle East correspondent is Nora Boustany, a former resident of Beirut who now is based in Amman.

Lebanon To License Broadcast Media

As the newly installed Palestinian National Authority hastily backed away from Yasser Arafat's sudden banning of two pro-Jordan newspapers published in Jerusalem with promises to license publications expressing a variety of views, a furor began over licensing of Lebanon's free-wheeling electronic media.

Earlier this year Lebanon, with a population of three million, had 58 private television stations and some 200 radio stations, many of which were operated by the political and militia leaders who rose to prominence during the country's 16-year civil war. Then, on Feb. 27, sensationalized TV coverage of the bombing of a Maronite Christian church north of Beirut in which 11 people were killed and some 50 others injured prompted Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri to ban all political broadcasting.

This forced most stations to replace their news broadcasts with entertainment programs. Hariri even closed his own Future TV for three days, at a cost of $200,000 in advertising revenues, after its program directors inadvertently violated his order by carrying one of his own speeches calling for continued resistance to Israel by Islamic military forces.

The ban was lifted on July 29 by parliament, but legislators now are considering a draft law to regulate the broadcast media with licenses assigning frequencies and mandating content guidelines. Government officials told Los Angeles Times correspondent Kim Murphy that only about five of the country's television stations will be able to meet the new standards.

The licensing arrangements have attracted little criticism from journalists or the public, which fears sensationalized reporting could re-ignite the warfare that consumed the country for 16 years. Print journalists also hope the change will return to the press some advertising revenues, 80 percent of which go to television.

Lebanese newspapers cannot be closed without a court trial. Journalists are subject to imprisonment only if they attack the president or publish material judged likely to incite sectarian conflict.

Veteran editor-publisher and former Lebanese ambassador to the U.N. Ghassan Tueni told correspondent Murphy that those most affected by the government attempt to rein in the free-wheeling press are not Lebanon's professional journalists. Instead, they are the former militia leaders turned politicians who have used the media to advance their personal political agendas.

France Bans Five Islamic Publications

France has banned three Arabic- and two French-language Islamic publications because of "their violently anti-Western and anti-French tone and the call to terrorism they contain." The ban was issued Aug. 6 on the same day that a radical Islamist group threatened reprisals against France unless it freed 17 Muslim leaders arrested in France after an Aug. 3 attack on a diplomatic compound in Algiers.

The French Interior Ministry also has ordered French regional officials to be "vigilant for Islamic terrorism and for anything that "could serve as support for Islamic terrorists."

Lest We Forget: Bush and the Media

Washington Report editors have maintained since 1992 that former President George Bush's tremendous drop in the polls, leading to the defeat of his 1992 re-election campaign, was due less to weaknesses in his own campaign or strengths in the Clinton campaign than to the Perot factor and to an unprecedented gang-up of the mainstream U.S. media against Bush.

In a Sept. 9 televised interview plugging her autobiography, the former president's wife, Barbara Bush, reminded ABC interviewer Barbara Walters just how overwhelming that press pile-on became. Polls taken at the time showed 80 percent of the press supported Bill Clinton. The mass crossover to Clinton even included Republican columnist William Safire. The former White House speech writer for Richard Nixon and vigorous defender of Ronald Reagan had become a persistent critic of Bush's handling of Israel.

Ironically, it was the determination by Bush and his secretary of state, James Baker, to link U.S. government loan guarantees to Israel to Israeli cooperation in the peace process that brought down the hard-line Likud government of Yitzhak Shamir. This, in turn, led to the election of the present Labor government in Israel, which has made possible the two major foreign policy triumphs of the Clinton administration—the White House handshakes of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and King Hussein of Jordan. Although exit polls at the time showed 85 percent of American Jews voted for Clinton, largely in protest over the Bush Middle East policy, polls now show between 77 and 88 percent of American Jews support the resulting peace agreements. (See "Public Opinion" below.)

Kurt Holden, a former film producer, divides his time between the U.S. and the Mideast.