by ROBERT JENSON
The New York Times’ public editor wrestled this week with conflict-of-interest charges sparked by the revelation that Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner’s son had joined the Israeli army. The executive editor of the paper responded with a sensible defense of the paper’s decision to keep Bronner in that position.
Although it had the appearance of a spirited exchange, the “debate” was a tired old diversion that keeps us from facing more important questions, not just about the Israel/Palestine conflict but about U.S. journalists’ coverage of the world. As is typical in mainstream journalists’ discussions of journalistic neutrality and objectivity, the focus on an individual obscures more important questions about the institutions for which individuals work and the powerful forces that shape those institutions’ picture of the world.
The question posed by the Times officials is framed in the narrowest terms: Could Bronner maintain his neutrality and objectivity given those family circumstances, or was that indirect connection to one side of the war “still too close for comfort,” in public editor Clark Hoyt’s words. In his Sunday column, Hoyt described Bronner as a “superb reporter” but concluded that the paper should reassign him to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. Executive editor Bill Keller argued that such a policy would disqualify many reporters from assignments that draw on their specialized knowledge and diminish the quality of the reporting in the paper, and concluded there is no reason to reassign Bronner.
The problems with the coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict in the Times, and virtually every other corporate-commercial news outlet in the United States, are not the result of biases of specific reporters, though individual reporters may indeed have allegiances to one side of an issue. The mainstream media have a conflict of interest at a deeper level — they are unwilling to break with the conventional wisdom about the conflict that dominates in the United States, especially among U.S. policymakers. U.S. news coverage of the conflict relentlessly presents the news within this Israeli narrative, primarily because powerful forces in this country find that narrative useful for U.S. strategic interests in the region, and U.S. journalists tend to fall in line with that view.
As one well-known mainstream reporter once grudgingly admitted to students at my university, American journalism tends to “follow the flag.” In this case the U.S. flag is planted firmly on the Israeli side of the conflict.
If that strikes you as harsh, try a thought experiment. Imagine the controversy that might arise if a Muslim-American or Arab-American correspondent married to a Palestinian had a child who joined Hamas or some other Palestinian political/military organization. Does anyone think the executive editor of the paper would defend the reporter so vigorously?
At the very least, the reporter would be expected to disavow any sympathy for Hamas and denounce the group’s use of terrorism. Even if the correspondent offered such denunciations, a reassignment would be likely.
Is Bronner being asked to make such statements? Is he being asked to denounce Israeli terrorism?
No, because the Israeli narrative — the one that U.S. policymakers endorse — does not acknowledge that systematic violence against Palestinian civilians to advance Israeli political goals is, in fact, terrorism. Independent reports, of which the U.N.’s “Goldstone Report” is simply the latest, make it clear that such violence is a consistent feature of Israeli policy, but in this Israeli/U.S. narrative, such violence is presented as self-defense. So, Bronner can’t be asked to denounce a reality that the narrative does not recognize.
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