Jerusalem Post, March 13 -- The coverage of 'al-Aksa Intifada is keeping CAMERA busier than ever. But how effective, or objective, is this media monitoring group? The conflict in the Middle East may be 10,000 km. from home, but for CAMERA - the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America - the confrontation line is as close as the front porch. It is there, with each morning's newspaper, that its daily vigilance begins: a never-ending battle to keep the facts straight and the reporting opinion-free - or at least, its critics say, from its own perspective. As the conflict on the ground has escalated over the last five and a half months, so has CAMERA's activity, and it often finds itself running to keep up with the tremendous volume of coverage that requires attention. "There's a triage process," says Andrea Levin, president and executive director of the Boston-based media- monitoring organization. "On a given day, we say, 'What are the things that look the most egregious, in the most influential newspaper or medium?' We make these judgment calls - what's going to have the most impact, where should we put our energy. But certainly things go by." When the issue is on a particular fact that the CAMERA team has dealt with previously with another news outlet, and they already have the details on hand to make their argument, then the response to a story can be swift - often within hours, according to associate director Alex Safian. But fast-paced events like those that have marked the past six months won't allow them the luxury to respond the way they would always like. "We might have done more in-depth things in the past, but because there's such a huge volume of stories now, we generally have to react much more quickly," says Safian. "If the journalists were doing a story a week on Israel, we perhaps in the past could take four days to prove that the story is false and ought to be corrected. Now there's been so many stories in between, that a journalist's reaction or an editor's reactions, is, 'Oh, that's old news, we can't do it, blah blah blah.' Since they have the power and we're trying to convince them to do something they don't want to do, in a way we have to give in to that. So we have to react very quickly to the stories, as they come out." THE ERRORS caught and corrections requested by CAMERA range from obvious editing mistakes or sloppy reporting to what they see as a biased predisposition by some journalists or news organizations, which is then reflected in the overall coverage of the conflict. Examples of the former might be a report saying "Israel captured Jerusalem in the 1967 war" instead of east Jerusalem; that Ehud Barak was elected "in Israel's first direct election contest for the post of prime minister," instead of the second; that "Israel has released hundreds of prisoners" as part of the Oslo agreement, instead of 7,000; or that it was three children, not two, who were killed in the bus bombing in Gaza in November. These were all corrections that were printed in the publications at fault, from wire services to major dailies. Then there are the bigger issues, and the more influential news outlets, that become the focus of CAMERA's informational and critical campaign among its 40,000 members - 3,000 of whom joined in the last two months - and the public.
Specific issues might include media reporting on Israel's use of "excessive force"; Jerusalem and its history; what the Oslo Accords say; Palestinian claims to the "right of return," or the media's extensive coverage of a topic like Afghanistan's Taliban destroying third- and fifth-century Buddha statues, but ignoring archaeological destruction of Jewish sites on the Temple Mount. Then there are the news outlets themselves, like National Public Radio (which CAMERA staffers jokingly refer to as "National Palestine Radio"), CNN, and The New York Times, all of which have been the subject of newspaper advertisements charging inaccurate or incomplete reporting. One example of the latter, CAMERA charges, was the Times coverage of a hate-mongering speech by a Gazan religious leader, Sheikh Ahmad Abu-Halabaya. In a speech on October 13, Abu-Halabaya had said: "Have no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any country. Fight them, wherever you are. Where ever you meet them, kill them." The Times later reported on the speech, and only quoted: "Whether Likud or Labor, Jews are Jews." Letters were exchanged back and forth between CAMERA and Times news editor Bill Borders. "When challenged, Boarders said they did a search on Abu-Halabaya," says Levin. "He said 'he doesn't seem to be an important figure, and we don't consider hate speech pivotal to events in the region.' "But Halabaya is just symptomatic of a broad problem, and they are saying that they believe the broad problem is not important. And we believe that this is the most fundamental issue. So we have a very important disagreement with the Times on their news judgment and on their view of what is important in the coverage. So on a day-to-day basis, [bureau chief] Deborah Sontag may cover a story and get the micro issues correct; but they are getting the macro issue completely wrong." Sontag declined to comment for this article, as did NPR, but Charles Sennott of the Boston Globe - another newspaper criticized by CAMERA - says the group often focuses on the narrow picture, and is incapable of seeing the bigger picture.
"All of us want to get this story right," Sennott says. "Everyone here I know who is with a major newspaper or with a network news organization is doing their best under extremely difficult conditions, including being shot at, and seeing horrible things in the West Bank, and seeing horrible things at a bombing site. I think CAMERA doesn't understand how much we do to try to see both sides." Part of the problem, says Matt Rees, bureau chief for Time magazine, is the nature of covering such a volatile issue like the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is no surprise that Israel has one of the largest concentration of journalists in the world, with 350 foreign journalists permanently stationed in Israel, and 200 who come temporarily every month. In October, right after "al-Aksa intifada" began, that number surpassed 1,000, though by the next month the number had dropped to 400, and in December was down to fewer than 200. "Most people who come here to cover this situation know that it awakens a lot more fundamental emotions in people who read about it than any other foreign correspondent's position," says Rees. "You can go to pretty much any place else in the world and write things, and it would be less likely to touch a nerve than anything you might write from here." Sennott and Rees agree that media-monitoring groups serve a valuable function, as do similar organizations run by the Palestinians.
"A watchdog group is a good thing, because this is a very complicated place, and I can understand the need for someone who could have the interests of readers in mind in trying to get this story right," says Sennott. "That as a premise is a good thing. But CAMERA has made itself irrelevant by being hypercritical and shrill, and has had the opposite impact: If CAMERA isn't criticizing your work, you're probably not doing your job." REES SAYS he noticed that soon after the intifada began there was a very large degree of organization on both sides in terms of lobbying and advocacy for their respective causes. "I think that that's a good thing," he says. "There's a gut reaction from many journalists that it's automatically bad and somehow sinister that there should be organizations like this, but actually I think it's not the case. I don't have any ax to grind one way or the other in this whole thing. "That may be something that people with more ideological views of what's happening here don't realize, that it's not something one way or the other I would allow my professional values to be influenced by. I'm not biased, they are, it's as simple as that. And there's nothing wrong with that." Rees says he is not referring to CAMERA specifically, but in general to lobbying groups who have focused on the press.
"It's right for people to be biased in the world, when it comes to things that affect them or their people politically," Rees says. "But the assumption that a lot of people make is that I'm the biased one, when it's actually the other way around." Some reporters differentiate between factual corrections from readers and the work done by organizations, which they dismiss out of hand. "I don't pay much attention to their work; in fact I pay almost no attention to their work, and it has exactly zero effect on my work," says Lee Hockstader of The Washington Post. "One always hears about factual errors, not just from any particular group but also from interested readers - in fact, usually from interested readers, who might be pro-Israeli, anti-Israeli, pro-Palestinian, anti-Palestinian. And of course, our interest is to minimize factual errors. But there is no group, or outside interests, that will determine what story I choose to write or how I choose to write it." Critics often charge that organizations like CAMERA and Honest Reporting are not so much an objective monitor of media misinformation, as they are advocacy groups for a right-wing political agenda. Safian is used to such allegations. "If you want to get anywhere with the media, we found you really have to stick to the facts, because if you talk about language choice, their bias, they'll just say, 'we're not biased, you're biased, that's why you think we're biased. We play it down the middle.' "So generally what we do is take up factual issues with them, where you cannot talk about Left or Right, or bias," Safian continues. "Did they get the story right? If they make factual assertions, are they correct? Did they leave out certain important facts? We will go re-interview people that they interview, to find out what was said during an interview, and we might find out - and journalists don't like that very much - what was said and what was not covered." Newspapers, Safian says, don't like to be faulted. "They are thin-skinned as most others. They don't like criticism; they don't like being called to account. They will often try to discredit critics by saying, 'Oh, we don't listen to them." Levin adds that it's not the mistakes, it's the failure to acknowledge them that's the problem. "You make mistakes, fine, everybody makes mistakes," she says. "Just correct them in a professional way. I don't think it diminishes them. I think it enhances their credibility to do that."
%A9 Jerusalem Post