Letters to the Editor
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"Ethics" in the abstract -
"Now [Dvorkin is] teaching Journalistic Ethics at Georgetown?
"-- David Essex"
He is!? Must have stolen them. Better he teach the substance of the subject of the poem "The Hollow Men".
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NPR on the Isreal-Arab Conflict --
The standard NPR structuring of news about the Israel-Arab/Arab-Israel conflict is this:
A story that it a bit critical of Israel; a story -- for "balance" -- showing how fair and magnanimous Israel is; a negative story about Palestinians, at the minimum reflecting how "'They just refuse to learn!' from all the do-gooder outsiders who are trying so hard to help them." [Sob, sob, poor me . . .]
One need not be an adult to know that the last thing heard is the first thing remembered.
And if there's relative calm for a few months or weeks, and suddenly Israel attacks and obliterates some anonymous private dwelling in Palestine, it is reported that "Israel killed a Palestinian terrorist leader . . . ."
And who gathered, and identified, the remaining bits of DNA as being those of a "terrorist"? Israel. And who on NPR reported, at minimum, that the identifiction of the killed as being a "terrorist" is arbitary unless and until verified independently by a party not having a dog in the fight?
And some still blame the victim of the rapist for the rape. And NPR never points out that label of the person killed was applied by the killer. NPR never asks if perhaps just maybe as rare long-shot the killer just might have a built-in "blame the victim" bias, therefore might not actually -- at most innocent -- know whether the person killed was in fact a terrorist.
And if Palestinians retaliate, the fact that it is a retaliatory, not initiating, attack, is omitted -- we want in those cases to eliminate the "bias" that is the actual fact.
Then we get the bad news yet again about the horrendous injustices inflicted by Palestinian terrorists within their own territory [a person who lives in a "territory" is ipso facto a "terrorist" -- got that?] upon a hapless group of Israeli military who coincidentally happened to be innocently passing by --
"Today, in the Middle East, the Arab-Israeli conflict continued unabated: a two-year-old Palestinian terrorist was blown to bits when by accident he prematurely exploded the suicide-diaper he was wearing.
"And we hear from the terrorized victim of another Palestinian terrorist attack elsewhere in the Palestinian territory: 'Can you believe it!? A little terrorist, only just learning to walk, actually threw a pebble at my US-built Abrams tank! It's too bad she's dead, but Israel has a right to defend itself. Holocaust! Holocaust!'"
*Sidenote: And before the Israel-can-do-no-wrong bigots rev up their anti-brown-people (and others) ad hominem hate-machine in order to sidestep/avoid this critique, shove it: my surname is Sephardic -- another people you despise, in this instance because not sufficiently "pure-blood," and for that "reason" keep in second-/third-class subjugation within Israel itself. And have sufficient self-love to be able, unlike the self-hating, not to lie against all "others" who are not self-annointed as "the Chosen People".
And am well aware of your self-deceiving efforts to ignore the obvious WWII implication of that tribalist bigot's supremacism.
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National "Palestinian" Radio was coined for a reason
If the Ombudsman couldn't see the bias then he wasn't paying attention. I never knew there was an organization. My husband coined that term in our house. I kept saying they had to tell both sides, then I heard a travesty of "both sides" on NPR and it got worse for a while. What made me angry? They interviewed a wealthy Israeli teenager living in an enclave and a very poor Palestinian as their idea of "balance". The mis-match in their fears and experience was wide and made the Palestinians out to be martyrs while Israelis were the bad guys. NPR did that often during the conflict. I started noticing that if a single Palestinian child died NPR did a long report, while a whole busload of Israel people, including children would get blown up and it would be a 2 second report...not balanced.
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CAMERA's Response
Nobody likes to be criticized. And that obviously includes NPR and its former ombudsman.
But the extent of Mr. Dvorkin's hostility toward CAMERA -- for example, his bizarre attempt to hold us responsible for the behavior of “some seriously disturbed people” -- is still a bit surprising. After all, Daniel Okrent, a former ombudsman (public editor) at the New York Times, which CAMERA critiqued a number of times, nonetheless wrote that CAMERA offers "respectful appraisal" rather than "vituperation and threat."
A few things should be said to clear the record. First, we're based in Boston, not in Cambridge as Mr. Dvorkin claimed. The Passover bombing did not occur in 2003, but rather in 2002. Thirty Israelis were killed, not forty. And that attack was not the first time Israelis were murdered in a specifically Jewish (as opposed to Israeli) context. Just weeks before, a suicide bomber attacking a bar mitzva celebration killed 10 Israelis.
The broader points Mr. Dvorkin makes about CAMERA are equally specious.
For example, the assertion that our "criticisms were occasionally right, but only occasionally" is belied by the list of 16 times NPR broadcast corrections after we brought factual errors it brought to editors’ attention. That list can be found on our website here: www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=10&x_outlet=28
It's also belied by data. Our conclusion that NPR has demonstrated consistent bias against Israel is not just some capricious feeling we had. It’s backed up by detailed, empirical studies posted on our website here:
www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=4&x_outlet=28&x_article=917
A more detailed rejoinder to Mr. Dvorkin's piece will shortly be posted on the front page of our website, www.camera.org
Gilead Ini
Senior Research Analyst
CAMERA
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Point of Clarification
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