Media Bias and the Middle East

by Daniel E. Levenson, ALM

October 10, 2010

The level of trust that the American public has had in institutions such as the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, National Public Radio and other major news sources has waxed and waned at different  times in our history, but I would say that we are presently at a low point. I think we are at a low point both in terms of the overall quality of the news and level of professionalism found within journalism, as well as in terms of the degree to which the American public feels it can consistently trust even mainstream media outlets to provide reliable, objective information about world events.

There are any number of different topic areas in which I think the media has dropped the ball over the last decade, but perhaps one of the most troubling is in the coverage of events in the Middle East, and I am not speaking here only of matters relating to Israel and the Palestinians, but of broader problems in the region, including the incredibly repressive nature of the majority of the governments and their deplorable records when it comes to human rights. A full exploration of the gross human rights violations which seem to be an integral part of maintaining political power in places like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Gaza is beyond the scope of what I am trying to communicate here, but suffice it to say that from Iran to North Africa there has been a tremendous level of ethnic, religious and political violence which I feel often gets ignored in favor of other stories coming out of the Middle East, namely those having to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

I am not saying that the conflict is not news-worthy, or that it should be ignored – far from it, in fact – but I do think that when the mainstream media covers the Middle East there are two troubling trends which can be discerned in that coverage. The first is that so many important stories relating to human rights abuses stemming from religious, ideological and ethnic conflicts  in the broader region go unreported (such as the on-going conflicts between the Kurds and Iran and Turkey). The second is that when stories relating to Israel are reported, the reporting is often biased or skewed against Israel.

I want to add an important qualifier here about my last statement – I think that often such biases do not  reflect malice on the part of reporters, editors, TV producers and publishers. In fact, I am inclined to believe that more often than not, what is being reflected is a bad combination of ignorance on the part of the news producers, in conjunction with their desire to boil things down to their most basic elements, thus creating easily comprehensible sound bytes which can be marketed to their audience, people they most likely assume to have quite limited attention spans.

I, for one, like to think that the American public is not as dumb as many would have us believe. I think it is possible to provide context to news consumers and to create news reports that take into account context and nuance, but for some reason very few journalists seem interested in doing this. Or perhaps more accurately, very few publishers and network executives seem to be willing to allow them to do so.

This weekend I spent part of my Sunday at an event at Boston University called “War By Other Means: The Global Campaign to Delegitimize Israel,”  which was organized by the media watch-dog group CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America). The event drew hundreds of attendees who came to listen to various speakers discuss the various ways that Israel’s detractors are using the media, the United Nations and Non-Governmental Organizations as weapons to delegitimize the Jewish State. Of course this is not only a problem within the United States or North America, but in the global media as well. I was particularly struck (and nauseated) by one presentation, which included clips from an Arab news program in which the presenter showed film taken by the Nazis of the massacre of Jews, while in his voice-over he blamed the Jews for the Holocaust and suggested that the Jews had also played a role in the final defeat of Germany by convincing Hitler to attempt his invasion of Russia in the winter. Such disgusting and patently absurd notions aside, the most chilling part of the broadcast came when the host of the show indicated that he hoped one day that the Arabs would be able to finish what Hitler had started.

Of course we see nothing quite this extreme in the Western media, but it does offer a glimpse into the mindset of the media in the Arab world, and I think contributes in general to a media climate that is hostile toward Israel. Here in America we are more often subjected to inaccurate or biased reporting (as we saw with the flotialla incident and the 2006 Lebanon War), but as I noted in a piece about the firing of former CNN anchor Rick Sanchez, on the Jewish Boston website last week, one need only look at the comments made in response to articles about his firing to see that there are many people in America who fully believe a wide range of ignorant and hateful things about Jews and the Jewish community.

I think it time for us to work to restore a sense of propriety and professionalism in journalism, and especially when it comes to reporting on Israel and the Middle East. The slipping standards of both how stories are reported, and the level of what one CAMERA presenter rightly called  “hate speech” that mainstream media outlets are now making room for, under the guise of “talkbacks” and “reader comments,” is sickening in the short term and dangerous in the long term. Groups such as CAMERA are clearly responding to this trend, but this is not enough, we need to do more. As news consumers we need to be more discerning about which sources of information we rely upon, and when there are clear instances of bias, we need to be willing to speak out. Nothing less than our full-throated opposition to such biases  will stem the tide of Anti-Semitism and Anti-Israel rhetoric which seems to be increasing in prevalence and volume in the media.

Copyright Daniel E. Levenson 2010.