(C) Fairness & Accuracy in Media
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Media Not Doing Justice to Mideast Peace [1]
['Sam Husseini']
Date: 1993-11-01 05:00:00+00:00
As virtually all media outlets celebrated the “magnificent spectacle of peacemaking” in Washington (Newsweek, 9/27/93), leading media voices were often more jubilant than accurate in their reporting. Even as the Israelis and Palestinians were lauded for “emerging from the clutches of history” (Time, 9/13/93), too many journalists clung to past habits of bias in their coverage.
Most of the press showed more interest in the choreography of the signing ceremony than in what the agreement actually said. Thomas Friedman, the New York Times‘ Mideast expert (9/10/93), claimed the parties are “finally acknowledging that they each have an equally valid claim” to the land. Similarly, Time magazine (9/13/93) happily reported that the Palestinians and Israelis “are now free to live with each other, separate but equal.”
In the new agreement, the PLO recognizes the Israeli state, while accepting on behalf of Palestinians only limited autonomy under continued Israeli rule in the impoverished Gaza Strip and the small West Bank town of Jericho. The question of whether Palestinians will ever have a state is left open for future negotiations. This would hardly seem to be an “equal” arrangement. As Edward Said noted in The Nation (9/20/93), the agreement “leaves Palestinians very much the subordinates.”
‘The first acknowledgment’
Some periodicals tried to be even-handed, but got their facts wrong in the process: Time (9/13/93) magazine attempted to show an equivalence of history, claiming that this is “the first acknowledgment by Israelis and Palestinians that they can share the land both call home.” In fact, since 1976, the PLO has backed a string of U.N. resolutions calling for an Israeli and a Palestinian state side by side. In 1984, the Los Angeles Times (5/6/84) quoted PLO head Yasir Arafat as saying, “I would be in favor of a mutual recognition of the two states.” Arafat repeated such a willingness at a 1988 U.N. meeting in Geneva.
But U.S. News & World Report (9/ 13/93) ignored this history, reporting on “the quarrelsome PLO’s newfound willingness to abandon its goal of destroying Israel.” What Arafat has done, in reality, is retreat from his demand that recognition be mutual; Israel only had to recognize the PLO as a representative of the Palestinian people, not the national rights of Palestinians.
The standard media line was to equate the pain of the occupied and the occupier. But some commentators still needed to paint the Arabs as villains. Despite the record of Palestinian willingness to compromise, Fouad Ajami (U.S. News & World Report, 9/27/93) commented of Palestinian leaders, “It was not in them, or in the ways of their culture, to make such a daring leap.”
The question of trust was rarely asked in a balanced fashion. PBS‘s Jim Lehrer repeatedly asked what would happen if, after the Palestinians achieve autonomy, a Palestinian attacks an Israeli (MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, 9/9/93, 9/13/93). But few reporters seemed worried that harm might befall some of the 1 million Palestinians who will still be under occupation outside of Gaza or Jericho.
Time (9/13/93) asked, “Can Palestinians be trusted with a truly independent state?” What other people would that be asked of? Such reporting also overlooks Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s own statement (MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, 9/13/93) that “the Palestinians will never be able to present a military threat to Israel.”
‘Palestinians target civilians’
Newsweek (9/13/93) sprinkled its reporting with quotes from the past, quotes that showed only the rigid side of Arab leaders: Egypt’s Gamal Nasser saying, “We accept no coexistence,” and Arafat proclaiming, “I was ready to fight and die as a martyr.” But Newsweek didn’t bother to recall that Israel’s Golda Meir had claimed ‘There no such thing as the Palestinian people.” Or that Rabin, as defense minister, had ordered a policy of “force, might and beatings” and “breaking the bones” of Palestinians to put down the Palestinian intifada.
Not that news outlets haven’t held Israeli leaders’ feet to the fire. George Will and Cokie Roberts berated Israeli Foreign Minister Peres on This Week With David Brinkley (9/5/93)—for giving the Palestinians too much. Cokie Roberts’ refrain was “the unreliability of Yasir Arafat as a negotiator, as somebody who tells the truth. Is there any reason to trust the man?” Roberts couldn’t come up with any examples of Arafat’s alleged deviousness when questioned by a PLO official. It’s telling that Roberts didn’t pose the same question to the Israeli side, even though some Israeli conservatives are threatening to nullify the agreement when they come back to power.
Similarly, when Rabin pointed out that Israel had achieved peace with Egypt, CNN‘s Frank Sesno (9/12/93) retorted: “But the Palestinians targeted women and children and civilians, unlike Egypt.” Ironically, in July, Israel had been bombing civilian villages in Lebanon in what
Israeli “officials acknowledged was a campaign to reduce dozens of villages and towns to heaps of rubble, creating an uninhabited area” (New York Times, 7/29/93).
‘Opponents of peace’
And while the media do seem to be trying to give Israelis and Palestinians equal air time, only Israelis who opposed the agreement from the right, such as Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu, were generally given a voice. Largely absent was Israeli analysis that might question the accord from another perspective. Prior to the accord, Danny Rubinstein, a prominent Israeli journalist, wrote in the Hebrew paper Ha’aretz (10/23/91) that the U.S. and Israel were proposing “autonomy as in a POW camp where the prisoners are ‘autonomous’ to cook their meals without interference and to organize cultural events.” (See Noam Chomsky, Z, 10/93.)
Meanwhile, Palestinians who opposed the accord have been dubbed “opponents of peace” (e.g., Washington Post, 9/5/93), as if being against this particular agreement means being against peace. National Public Radio‘s Linda Gradstein (9/3/93) mentioned only “Islamic fundamentalist Hezbollah” and “Islamic fundamentalist Hamas” when surveying Arab opposition to the accord.
Even The Nation (9/27/93) editorialized that “extremists on both sides oppose the process” begun by this accord. One Palestinian leader who has worked for peace but has opposed this agreement is Dr. Haidar Abdel-Shafi, the Gaza physician who has headed the Palestinian delegation in peace negotiations since 1991. But he has been largely overlooked. After Abdel-Shafi voiced his displeasure about the accord, the Ottawa Citizen, a Canadian daily, commented (9/3/93) that “Abdel-Shafi isn’t a missionary for the rejectionists’ arguments. He is a respected Palestinian leader who is questioning a deal which was worked out in secret.” But few U.S. news outlets made any mention of Abdel-Shafi since the accord was made public in late August.
‘Superimpose government’
The virtual blackout of Abdel-Shafi also meant that his calls for more Palestinian democracy went mainly unheard, as did the demands by many to convene the Palestinian parliament, the Palestine National Council.
Indeed, much of the press seemed wary of Palestinian democracy. Rather than ask how much support the PLO has in the Gaza Strip, ABC‘s Peter Jennings (9/13/93) reported that “the PLO will have to superimpose some sort of legitimate government” in Gaza. Newsweek
(9/13/93) reported more bluntly that “the PLO will have to suppress popular fundamentalist parties while it supposedly plans for free elections next year.”
Fouad Ajami told the New York Times (9/10/93) that “for years, generations of Arabs were told that there can be no democracy, because of the struggle with Israel.” Ajami’s enthusiasm for democracy is newly minted: At a fundraiser for Israeli settlers last year, he declared, “I’ve never really wanted democracy in any Arab or Muslim country.” (See Extra!, 10–11/92.)
And while Time (9/13/93) lauded Israel’s “reverence for democracy,” the New York Times (9/9/93) reported that Rabin didn’t want to rely on the votes of four Palestinian lawmakers in the Israeli Knesset to pass the accord, because doing so “could deprive him of the authority to assert that the people are behind him.” This is a vision of democracy wherein some people don’t count as part of “the people.”
‘From pariah to statesman’
Just as Saddam Hussein and Manuel Noriega were suddenly demonized, by the time the accord was signed, Arafat was suddenly humanized as a “statesman” and a “peacemaker.” In a strange reversal, the youth of the intifada, previously depicted as victims of oppression, were now
treated as probable terrorists. A Herblock cartoon (Washington Post, 9/15/93) depicted them as using the stones from a monument to peace to cause trouble.
A Christian Science Monitor (9/20/93) headline announced that Arafat had moved “From World Pariah to Statesman,” reporting that he was “long dismissed as an international outcast.” The article ignored the fact that the U.N. General Assembly, on a vote of 154 to two, moved to Geneva in 1988 to hear Arafat when the U.S. would not allow him in the country.
It was rare to see any questioning of Arafat that did not come from a rightist Israeli perspective. One independent analysis was provided by Nubar Hovsepian in Newsday (9/5/93), under the headline “Will Arafat Become the Israelis’ Enforcer?” Hovsepian raised several issues that most of the press has ignored: the future of refugees outside Palestine; the status of the 10,000–15,000 Palestinian political prisoners who remain in Israeli prisons; the question of the PLO’s legitimacy in the Occupied Territories and the fairness of future elections; the sovereignty over land and control over water resources, which are retained by Israel; the fact that Israeli military withdrawal will be very limited. As the accord is implemented, the press would do well to keep an eye on such issues.
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