Study Indicts New York Times for Anti-Israel Bias
New York Times journalists are extremely protective of their newspaper’s reputation as the “paper of record.” So when faced with criticism of their reporting or accusations of journalistic bias, they tend to reject it, discrediting their critics as insignificant right-wingers.
Last year, for example, former New York Times correspondent Neil Lewis wrote a lengthy piece for the Columbia Journalism Review on “The Times and the Jews,” discounting criticism of the newspaper’s Palestinian-Israeli coverage as “ill-founded,” “toxic” and “based on misunderstandings of journalism.” He marginalized the critics as likely to come from a small group of Orthodox Jews who support Israeli right-wing policies condemned by the majority of American supporters of Israel. Such critics, he insisted, “can easily find what seem to them errors in emphasis or tone on any individual article.” But any fair analysis should view coverage “as part of a larger thematic narrative.”
Well, the results of just that sort of fair analysis were recently released by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle Eastern Reporting in America (CAMERA). And they provide detailed evidence that exposes the newspaper’s biased coverage and disproves Lewis’ dismissive arguments.
CAMERA is a media-monitoring organization whose 65,000 members represent a wide cross-section of the American public — Jews and non-Jews, secular and orthodox, liberal and conservative — motivated by the desire to see accurate and balanced coverage of Israel and the Middle East. The study, “Indicting Israel: New York Times Coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict,” empirically examines coverage over an extended period of time, July 1-Dec. 31, 2011, and finds a “larger thematic narrative” of continued, embedded indictment of Israel that pervades both the news and commentary sections of the newspaper.
On the news pages, where readers expect objective and balanced reporting, criticism of Israel was cited more than twice as often as criticism of the Palestinians. The Palestinian perspective on the peace process was laid out nearly twice as often as the Israeli perspective. Vandalism by a fringe Israeli group and IDF military defensive strikes were emphasized in numerous articles, often with headlines highlighting Israeli actions, while Palestinian aggression and incitement was downplayed or ignored. Israel’s blockade of Gaza was usually mentioned without context. And Israel’s resort to force aboard a Turkish ship attempting to break the blockade was frequently discussed and faulted without referencing the precipitating attacks on Israeli soldiers by pro- Palestinian activists.
The theme of faulting Israel was amplified on the editorial and op-ed pages to one of Israel as a malignant force in the region. Despite the newspaper’s purported commitment to expose a diversity of opinions, three quarters of all opinion pieces on the conflict were devoted to denouncing Israel’s leaders or policies, while none were devoted to condemning Palestinians. Even Israel’s tolerance toward gays was condemned as a ploy to support human rights abuses against Palestinians.
Consider the following: When a group of Israeli teenagers were arrested in August 2012 for beating an Arab youth unconscious, The New York Times ran two separate front-page, above-fold articles about it. Both articles focused on the negative features of Israeli society that the incident was said to reveal.
Contrast that with the Times’ coverage, 17 months earlier, of an assault by Palestinian teenagers on an Israeli family. The victims, including three young children, were brutally slaughtered in a bloody attack that included slitting the throat of a 3-month old as she lay asleep in her crib. The New York Times chose not to cover that gruesome event on the front page, nor to comment on what the incident reveals about Palestinian society and the pernicious effects of incitement to kill Israelis by the Palestinian leadership.
The above incidents occurred outside CAMERA’s study period but provide a cogent example of how the Times adjusts its focus to reflect a concept of newsworthiness that is shaped by its institutionalized worldview.
It follows a long history of similar distortions, dating back to the1930′s when The New York Times downplayed the Nazi persecution, and later, genocide of European Jews in order to avoid being seen as a “Jewish” newspaper.
While the guard and motives at the Times may have changed, the framing of news events has not. According to the former ombudsman, Arthur Brisbane, the current worldview at The New York Times is one of “political and cultural progressivism” that causes some topics to be treated “more like causes than news subjects.”
CAMERA’s study provides objective documentation that demonstrates exactly how The New York Times’ abandoned journalistic standards to turn coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict into the supposedly “progressive” cause of indicting Israel.
You can purchase “Indicting Israel: New York Times Coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict” here.
Which is why I stopped buying-reading the NYT. It carries its complex of being the “jewish newspaper” over into the public field, notably in printing the likes of R Cohen and D Friedman who are probably aiming for the elite cocktail party circuit where it is a matter of dropping verbal bombs more than truthful expository editorials based on hard cold fact. Nothing is too outrageous ie Friedman’s criticism of Israel ie most recently for installing the Iron Dome system as a hurdle to peace. These guys should walk around with security blankets. I personally would like to see him in the midst of an air raid in let us say Jerusalem where he could be invited by the Israeli left for their usual nonsense. As an anti-zionist paper, (let’s call a spade a spade) the paper harkens back to the Hannah Arendt tradition of escaping in a Mercedes (de rigueur) seconds before the Gestapo come in the front door. The last sentence is an image, but I believe not too far from reality. I am researching a fellow American, Varian Fry, a progressive (for the era 1940s) WASP journalist and true humanist who saved Arendt from certain death in her beloved Germany and got zilch for recognition when the lady was brought to safey in NY. These people make my blood boil!
Dont complain about a bias news source when PJ Media is the biggest right wing bias news source there is. You people crack me up
How absurd, show me ANY media outlet, print, verbal or televised that is NOT slanted! Viewers/listeners tune in knowing where the political lines are drawn. Sadly, there are more democratic/liberal American and Israeli Jews who continue to vote this way because they want to remain true to generations of party affiliation.Neither party represents the “people’s” wants anymore.
FACTS & History the two most common ways to combat the liberal Left who are not smart enough to think for themselves Kindergarden of liberals- hurry mommy is calling for nap time
PJ Media doesn’t have pretensions to be the “first draft of history” or the “paper of record”.
Lefties — why can’t they distinguish between opinion and reporting?
You may complain about PJ but the left leaning mainstream media has so many outlets such as Times, CNN, MSNBC, Huffington, WaPo, Boston Globe, Time and whole list of others that the few right center outfits are outnumbered. And it appears from the article that the Times is definetly slanted in anti Israel bias because the follow the porgressive agenda. If you want a balanced view, perhaps you should look at all sides and you;ll see the vast differance in reporting especially when you are looking at the coverage of Obama, who the left wing MSM got elected.
Thank you for confirming that America’s so-called newspaper of record is as ideologically slanted as a conservative opinion site.
The NYTImes simply echoes long standing views of the State Department, as I suggested here: http://clarespark.com/2009/09/11/oil-politics-and-obamas-view-of-israeli-history/. Sad to think that so many Jewish voters do not study the history of the founding of Israel, and the Cold War context.
Anyone who has to “study” to detect blatant bias at the NYT is probably not qualified to conduct any study.
for a dunce like you to read and see what you have no sense or wit to fathom by yourself
Can anyone name a mainstream media outlet that ISN’T biased against Israel?
Is the Washington Post any better than the NYT? CNN, BBC, al-Reuters, the AP, the LA Times, etc. etc. etc. – almost everything they publish on the Middle-East is nonsense, just propaganda, maybe worse than PRAVDA in the good old days.
They’re not worse than Pravda, they’re just as good. Actually, they’re quite reminiscent of Pravda. Why would anyone pay to read their BS is a mystery.
Our own English-language media is hardly any better, exception made for Arutz 7.
Pick up the Wall Street Journal. I think you will like what you read. Sometimes. And sometimes you won’t agree with it at all. Which is the point. Refreshing, no?
Al jazeera english does a good job at bringing both sides of the argument. Though they are not mainstream.
Yes, it’s certainly one the most objective Qatar-financed media outlets, like Pravda was one of the most objective Soviet-financed media outlet. It means Al-Jazeera English is awful, but not half as awful and toxic as the Arabic version. For instance, in the English channel they won’t give Yousuf al-Qaradawi his own show where he would say Hitler was a punishment from Allah to the Jews and next time in hands of the believers. I guess that makes them objective. Relatively to the NYT perhaps.
r u kidding? aL Jazeera gets their news from wikileaks! Try reading translations of their arabic journals…pure trash!
“Al jazeera english does a good job at bringing both sides of the argument.”
If by “both sides” you mean “kill the Jews now” vs. “kill the Jews later”.
The bias in the media is broader than just anti-Israel.
There is a clear bias in favor of Third World and Eastern peoples and against Western peoples. So given a choice between western-looking English-speaking Israelis and Arab-looking Palestinians, the Western media is going to automatically sympathize with the latter.
It’s not just Israel. There are hit pieces against western corporations that build industries in developing countries and hire the local people. This is condemned as “colonialism.” Of course, there are hit pieces against anything that the U.S. does in developing or undeveloped countries.
This bias has been going on since the 1950s at least, when the Left started to fall in love with “the wisdom of the East.” They discovered Buddhism, they discovered Hinduism and Gandhi, etc. Of course, their participation in the civil rights movement also exposed them to African cultures and AmerIndian cultures, which they found admirable in many ways.
And little by little, they started to side with other cultures against their own.
Israelis are not English speaking — we speak Hebrew, which is our ancestral language, a Semitic language quite similar to Arabic and even more so to Aramaic. Of course, some of us speak English as a second language, but so do some Arabs, because it’s the global lingua franca. A lot of Israelis are also not Western-looking, but to the left even black Jews are White Europeans, even though until not so long ago Jews were persecuted and killed in Europe for being non-Whites. Unfortunately (in the current atmosphere of anti-white racism), many Middle Eastern Jews have white skin, even though they’re not European (in general many Middle Easterners have white skin, particularly in communities predating Arab imperialism — in many of those communities skin colors range from white to dark brown, including blue-eyed blonds and redheads). European Ashkenazi Jews are the descendants of Middle Eastern Jews who immigrated to Europe, some of which married European women. The result is that most Ashkenazi Jews have white skin, though a minority have dark skin. Since most Ashkenazi Jews have white skin and many Middle Eastern Jews also have white skin it turns out the majority of Israelis have white skin, which is quite “condemning” in the anti-white intellectual environment in the West.
As for the kinds of bias you describe, I recommend everyone to examine old Soviet propaganda. The similarities are often striking. Including the perception of Israel. The Soviet line was that America is an evil, racist, imperialist power, and Israel is its extention in the Middle East. This line emerged even before the US and Israel were allies — I encountered it in articles from the 50s. The Soviets spread this lie in the Middle East to incite the Muslim masses against America. The line of the American left today is that America is an evil, racist, imperialist power — it is identical to the Soviet propaganda line. The left also attacks capitalism like the Soviets. So it doesn’t really come from the attraction to Eastern wisdom. A lot of Israelis love India, and Buddhism is also popular relatively to other non-Jewish religions, yet they don’t become anti-Western. The cause is ideological — a combination of socialism and of the extremely successful Soviet subversion projects in the West.
Yes, we used to subscribe to the NYT. Then after years of arguing back and forth–but we really need to know what THEY think!–jwe finally cancelled our subscription. It is not only the extreme bias in the opinion AND regular “news” pages. It was not just the utter predictability of editorial content: Nick Kristol: leaking female parts in Africa; Maureen Dowd: something silly and snarky, probably about men; Paul Krugman: eye-rolling ranting about how we should spend more, more more money. It is also the topics that are completely ignored that turned us off. Really, the people who rely on the Times don’t realize it but THEY are ‘low information voters’ just because so many important topics are deemed ‘not fit to print’ by the NYT. Actually, I sometimes miss the Times because their weekend business section is (interestingly) not particularly biased, in my opinion. Also, the Science section is wonderful. But now that WSJ has Matt Ridley on weekends that helps!
Not paying for lousy service is more important than knowing what they think. If people stop paying for lousy services the lousy services will only have two choices: improve or go out of business.
The media have shown their bias when they have been downplaying the Muslim violence against other religious and ethnic groups such as Sudan, Nigeria etc., and screaming hysterically if a Palestinian is “harmed” at the hands of an Israeli.
They have been most enthusiastic at using Photoshop to distort their reporting of Israel.
Errm, their head honcho in now a former BBC guy. Surely you didn’t expect any different.
Dont be complaining about bias if your reading PJ Media. This one of the biggest right wing bias outlets there is. You people crack me up.
Is bias really the problem or is it pretending not to be biased? What we need is for journalists to honestly spell out where they are coming from and why and how they think this will help us get closer to the truth. I suspect that the reason most are not prepared to do this is because they realize how flimsy their presuppositions are, how superficial their knowledge and how illogical their arguments.
PJ Media doesn’t purport to be akin to the “paper of record” It’s just a voice of sanity in the left-wing verbal world in which we live.
“Bias” is a current vogue-word word meaning something like preference or partiality, which are sins only when dishonestly concealed, as when someone tries to pass himself off as a disinterested judge or reporter. That’s why “bias” is wrong in a NYT news story but not necessarily a PJM opinion piece. Does that help?
Right wing? What the heck does that even mean anymore?
Pro gun
pro life
limited government
lower taxes
less regulation
cutting back on the welfare state
These views are supported by the majority of Americans, so how is it right wing?
It is centrist – middle of the road political thought.
Now, now. Don’t fluff your posting numbers with duplicates. That’s cheating your OFA handler.
I stopped buying the Dallas Morning News because they would run NY Times articles. The MSM has gone over the cliff and there is no news reporting only the spewing of their leftist agenda.
I wish that well-meaning people would stop saying “pro-Palestinian.” “Pro-Palestinian” is nothing more than a circumlocution for anti-Israel and, by implication, antisemitic. It has no discernible independent meaning.
Stan S. does that stand for SS? The Palestinians are Semites! Duh!
Stop being a racist yourself.
The term “anti-Semite” rubs me the wrong way. It made sense when applied to the Nazis, who had bizarre racial schemata at the base of their theology, but it really does not apply in the Middle East of today. It is used because it is a valuable franchise, with people in the west associating “anti-Semites” with German Nazis, but anyone with intellectual curiosity knows that the term invites inquiry into racial theory. Jews are a religious community, not a racial grouping.
Actually, as with many other words, its literal meaning is somewhat different from the meaning imposed by usage and readily understood by anyone not an idiot.
I confess, Stan: I am an idiot. I will not allow publicists to push whatever meaning they want on me. I am an idiot, but I can read. And I am a well-meaning idiot. I just think that “anti-Semitism” is a term that is past its sell-buy date and now does more harm than good.
“Aharon” — the term “antisemitic” was invented because the previous term, “Jew hatred”, was too blunt. It has little to do with “Semitic people”.
New York Zionist Times with plenty of fake left cover from jewish liberals to hide the crimes of warmongering by the Zionist mafia and its politicians, paid for, blackmailed, threatened or plain duped by the Zionist propaganda network.
From participation in criminal activities that have allowed the crimes of 9/11 to be blamed upon dupes and patsies, while the real criminals push for war and more genocide as is what happened with the invasion of Iraq.
You have control of much of the world through deception, enjoy the lies.
Hey, I was a patsy, too!
James J. Thornton wrote a book entitled “The Patsy” about Lee Harvey Oswald. Published by a vanity press, but it’s not bad as counterfactual history goes. Thornton had good contacts in both Dallas and DC.
I know this much: First, the “NAME” Israel is GIVEN Joseph’s seed, not Judah’s, proven by Gen. 48:16. England proves that the Anglo-Saxon nations(England & America) are of Joseph’s seed because their history PROVES IT! However, Judah was given ONLY the MESSIAH(Gen. 49:10), and THEY DIDN’T EXCEPT THAT! If you’re wondering, the REASON that England & America DO NOT KNOW who they are is ONLY BECAUSE the BROKE their PART OF YAHWEH’S COVENANT WITH THEM that came with the NAME “ISRAEL!” However, SIMPLY BY BREAKING THE CORRESPONDING “SABBATHS SIGN”(WEEKLY & ANNUAL) AND IN DOING SO LOST KNOWLEDGE OF THEIR NAME! HOWEVER, YAHWEH’S WILL BE DONE! UP NEXT, BEGINNING UPON A SOON COMING ANNUAL “FEAST OF TRUMPETS”(WAR) WILL BEGIN THE TESTIMONY OF THE TWO-WITNESSES OF REVELATION, CHAPTER 11, WHO SEVERELY WILL PUNISH U.S. FOR THE FOLLOWING 3 1/2 YEARS! ALTHOUGH THEY THEN WILL BE ALLOWED TO BE KILLED BY THE HEAD “ANTI-CHRIST”(MARXIST) OVER U.S., BUT AFTER ONLY 3 1/2 DAYS THEY WILL COME ALIVE AGAIN & ONLY 144,000 Israelite’s, 12,000 from EACH of the 12 tribes, with the tribe of Joseph(Anglo-Saxons) replacing the tribe of DAN(IRISH) as being protected during this 3 1/2 year period of time commonly called “Jacob’s trouble!” That is what really is written about u.s. & WILL BE SOON DONE!
I still read the NY Times. I especially like the Arts and Entertainment section, also the Science and Dining supplements, although the budget cuts at the Times are beginning to affect the soft parts of the paper. But I’ve always thought that the range of opinion on offer there is extraordinarily narrow for a journal that puffs itself up as liberal and open-minded. The editors jealously guard their right to decide what news is fit to print, and they exclude anything that doesn’t reinforce their own biases.
The NYT’s reputation as a newspaper “of record” has always been a figment of their own publicity machine. Their correspondent Walter Duranty famously won the Pulitzer for pushing Stalinist propaganda in the ’30s and defaming those western journalists who tried to reveal the horrible scale of the Soviet democides. I don’t know what lies behind their decision to stab Israel in the back — dislike of Netanyahu? –, but I have learned a lot from reading PJ Media’s commentators as a corrective to the Times’ coverage of the Middle East.
the nyslimes for the past decade has nothing to do with journalism. there are, for exmple, no journalists. pundits and arab stringers feeding in fairy tales about israel abound. once it was the paper of record. all new yorkers (especially Jews) grew up with it and as little children we even learned how to fold it properly to read on the subway. today, this ridiculous and dirty anti-semitic organization is no better than some kkk nutjobs publishing fliers with psychotic race theories and virulent, murderous jew hatreds. after mourning the passing of the real nytimes, supplanted by this nyslimes, i unsubscribed and took the button off my toolbar so i would not have to look at it. ever again.
SHOCKED!! I am shocked the Times is biased.
The New York Slimes has led the Enemy Press since the days of Walter Duranty.
You can get away with any whopper around here. Still, you set some kind of record when you write:
CAMERA is a media-monitoring organization whose 65,000 members represent a wide cross-section of the American public — Jews and non-Jews, secular and orthodox, liberal and conservative — motivated by the desire to see accurate and balanced coverage of Israel and the Middle East.
CAMERA is a pro-Israel pressure group. It’s “desire to see accurate and balanced coverage of Israel”is a transparent lie. In fact it works ceaselessly to silence any criticism of Israeli policies, to remove books it doesn’t like from libraries, to get academics it disagrees with fired, and, famously, to rewrite all the relevant entries in Wikipedia. I guess you also think that Fox News is “Fair and Balanced.”
Hate, hate, hate. That’s all you do.
Hi Rob Crawford, Why do you dignify a neo-Nazi like Jim Harrishmuck with a response? The guy is a vicious anti-Semite. Responding to his ilk is like responding to David Duke or Farrakhan.
That PJ Media offers a platform for pro-Israeli opinion is a known fact. I want to hear what Israelis have to say about the country they live in, about the country they want to raise their families in. What is the problem?
The problem is not the presentation of pro-Israeli ideas. The problem comes when Hollander and CAMERA itself claims that CAMERA is an objective news source when it’s actually a pro-Israeli advocacy group.
Jim Harrishmuck’s a.k.a. Jim Hitlerson’s fundamental problem is, that once someone knows all the objective facts, in full context, regarding the Arab-Jewish conflict, they can’t help but side with the Jews.
Please don’t waste your time and energy on the likes of Jim Harrishmuck. He has venomous opinions on every topic, even ones he knows nothing about. He is simply too ignorant to understand how ignorant he is. However, he thinks he knows everything about everything and thinks he has the solution to all of the world’s problems. The guy is what Thomas Sowell might call a self-anointed messiah. He believes that civilized and successful people and countries are intrinsically evil and he has a vicious hatred of Jews and Israel. His posts are often incoherent ramblings. He evades questions, he tells outright lies and he throws tantrums. Please don’t waste your time and energy on this immature, malignant, narcissistic, attention-starved, anti-Semitic demagogue.
I find it rather amusing that a Nazi propagandist, like Jim Harrishmuck a.k.a. Jim Hitlerson, would accuse anyone of lying. In his blog and elsewhere he spews outright lies about Israel and Jews.
No one mentioned the book Journalistic Fraud by Bob Kohn. He does an amazing job of exposing the NYT methods of slanting stories. It should be required reading for all journalism and counter-insurgency students
The “Committee for Accuracy in Middle Eastern Reporting in America” (CAMERA) is a pro-Israel 501c(3), founded with the express purpose of “promoting balanced and accurate coverage of Israel…” (from THEIR website). Basically anything that reflects badly on Israel ends up in CAMERA’s cross-hairs. Any organization that refuses to reveal their donors should be suspect. Sorry, but I’m an American and American interests, not necessarily Israel’s interests, are of greatest importance.
Oh, and they are selling the “NYT is anti-Israel” monograph on Amazon. So much for public interest…
“Israel’s blockade of Gaza was usually mentioned without context. And Israel’s resort to force aboard a Turkish ship attempting to break the blockade was frequently discussed and faulted without referencing the precipitating attacks on Israeli soldiers by pro- Palestinian activists.”
This is perhaps the worst offense committed by the mainstream media, of which The New York Times is its leader. It would have been A LOT easier to simply sink the ship that was trying to run the blockade rather than board it. It would have been a really Middle Eastern thing to do, and I have no doubt that if it was up to the Egyptian Navy instead of the Israeli Navy, the Egyptian Navy would have sunk that boat.
But the Israelis chose the much, much, more dangerous tactic of boarding a hostile vessel on the high seas in order to preserve life. And what happened? The boarding party was severely attacked by the “peaceful” protesters, who turned out to be heavily armed. So much for trying to deal peacefully with these animals. Anyway, the mainstream media at that time did not highlight the fact that the Israelis tried to SAVE lives by boarding the ship, the mainstream media only focused on the violence that occurred on board the ship. It was very biased reporting and did NOT emphasize the right Israel had to prevent weapons and potential terrorists from entering Gaza by sea. Shows you how far The New York Times has fallen when it sides with terrorists rather than our best ally in the Middle East.
How did the Ny Times describe the 1500 rockets fired into Israel? These are very primitive rockets that do little damage and inflict few casualties. I have one question for the reporter. Did he or she run for cover when the alert was sounded?
What a huge mistake to not provide the study in ebook form for free online. Now the readership will be dramatically cut down.
I have long been disappointed in the one-sided
leftist ideology the NYT has adopted. From what I have
read in some news outlets, the NYT is having financial
repercussions. No wonder the acceptance of financial
support from some sources which help them enable their
slanderous agenda.
Let me see, you have a member of CAMERA writing a piece vouchsafing for the accuracy of a report by CAMERA. Your readers might find it useful to go to SourceWatch for a bit of history about CAMERA.