April/May 1992, Page 39, 40, 89, 90

Media Watch

Cutting Bush Down to Size: How Israel Gets Its Way in the U.S. Media

By Richard H. Curtiss

Three years ago, while I was vacationing in a Southern city, my staff arranged for me to go to four local radio stations for interviews. The last one I visited was an African-American owned station in its own new building.

It was to be a one-hour call-in show, and the host and I agreed that I would give detailed answers to his question until the calls started coming in, at which point I would keep my answers short. Within 15 minutes I could see through the glass separating the studio from the control room that someone was jumping from one phone to another.

The host, however, kept right on asking questions. When one or two calls finally were put through, the host made no effort to speed up long-drawn-out caller questions, and when I gave short answers the host asked follow-up question himself.

Bewildered, when the show was over I told the host that I had tried to speed up my answers so that he could put through more of the calls I could see they were getting.

"I'll tell you why we didn't put those calls through," a disembodied voice boomed into the studio. A moment later the person I had seen answering phones in the control room stepped into the room. A hearty smiling man, he introduced himself as the station's owner.

"Those calls," he explained, "were from my biggest advertisers. They all called, one after another, threatening to pull all their advertising if I didn't take you off the air."

I looked around at the spotless equipment in the brand-new building. "You should have done it," I said. "I don't want you to lose your station on my account."

He threw back his head and laughed. "Don't worry about me," he said. "We have one of the oldest Jewish communities in the United States and it does a lot of good things here, but most of the big advertisers who just called live in one suburb and they sometimes lose touch with the rest of the city.

"My people have been here just as long, there are a lot more of them, and they all listen to this station. Advertisers who pull their advertising away from this station for even a week or two will lost a lot of business. If they pulled it for longer, I'd advise our listeners to start shopping somewhere else, and some of the people who just threatened me would be out of business within a year.

"They all know it, but sometimes they forget. Tune in as you drive back to your hotel, and listen to what I say." As i drove away he came on the air personally and invited representatives of his city's Jewish community to visit his station to discuss the Middle East on the air for the same amount of time I had just been given. Then, he said, after each viewpoint had had equal time, he would arrange a follow-up one-hour program at which both a Jewish community representative and I would be invited to appear, by telephone, together.

The two follow-up programs took place, and I've been invited to appear on that station again. The point of this story, however, is that I have not been invited to speak again by any of the other three stations, all white-owned and operated and all presumably in hot competition with each other for the same audiences and advertising.

I have no doubt that the other three stations also were threatened that if anyone with my viewpoint appeared again, they would lose their big advertisers. Their silence, in contrast to the receptiveness of the one radio station owner who had a monopoly on his audience, speaks volumes about why it has been so difficult to hear both sides of the Arab-Israeli dispute anywhere in the United States.

Besides advertising pressure, there is audience pressure. Ask Peter Jennings of ABC's "World News Tonight," which gets the highest audience ratings of the three competing evening network news shows. The target of regular criticism in the weekly Jewish press around the United States, he spent many years covering the Middle East from ABC's London bureau, and was married for a time to a Lebanese woman. His understanding of Middle East issues shows, and it gets him hate mail from highly partisan pro-Israel viewers.

Ask John Chancellor, the commentator on NBC's evening news program, who was a lot more outspoken on Mideast matters before he, too, became the target of unfavorable publicity in the Jewish weekly press. Such a campaign generates a lot of unfavorable audience mail and advertising pressure.

For anyone who doubts that such audience pressure exists, here's the partial text of a letter from Dr. T.L. Rome of New York City, published in the Feb. 28, 1992 edition of The Jewish Week of Queens, NY:

"Choosing John Chancellor to be a moderator on a discussion involving Israel raises the question about the 92nd Street Y's selection of speakers and moderators when Israel is or could be a topic of discussion. In addition to Chancellor, this Y has presented Peter Jennings (by far the most anti-Israel anchor), Rita Houser. . . Milton Viorst. . . and Anthony Lewis of The New York Times. In view of its. . . being the recipient of Jewish communal funds, it is more than overdue to request an accounting from the Y about its sponsoring of people hostile to Israel."

It will be interesting to see who are the speakers in next year's 92nd Street Young Men's Hebrew Association programs. A reader might say, however, that that's only the sort of irresponsible stuff you find printed in letters to the editor columns. It's not from the newspaper itself.

True, so here's a quote from the same issue of the same newspaper by regular columnist Rabbi Emanuel Rackman, chancellor of Bar Ilan University in Israel. His premise in that week's column is that Israel "liberated" the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 and, therefore, calling them "occupied territories" is "a big lie." Rackman suggests that "entirely accurate names for the lands in question would be 'disputed territories.'"

To ensure that this term is picked up promptly by the U.S. media, Rackman advises his readers: "I suggest, to begin with, a test case for future action against newscasters. If, on public TV, the lie is still used, the time has to come to withhold financial support and resign from membership. Letters to Bush and congressmen are of little avail in comparison with the loss of funds. All public television needs to do to retain its devotees is to announce that hereafter the lie will not be uttered again."

So much for the First Amendment when it comes to U.S. media discussion of the Mideast. There are, however, special cases.

So Much for the First Amendment

The chairman and principal shareholder of CBS is Lawrence Tisch, whose principal charities are Israeli charities. CBS newscasts adopt a perceptibly more pro-Israel, anti-Arab tone than ABC or NBC newscasts and, staffers will tell you frankly, it's based upon raw fear-of Lawrence Tisch. The same fear is generated by openly pro-Israel publisher Mort Zuckerman of U.S. News and World Report, and fanatically pro-Israel publisher Martin Peretz of The New Republic. Sub-editors of either publication seeking a career change can get it by injecting more balance into their Middle East coverage.

If there is advertising, audience and executive suite pressure, however, how does one explain the fact that Peter Jennings is still there, or the remarkably unbiased coverage of CBS's "Sixty Minutes"?

The answer is "star quality." If Peter Jennings were fired, he could go to any other network and take his top audience ratings with him. Anyone hesitates before killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

The same is ture of "60 Minutes." It is the most widely viewed serious news program in the United States. That is important for the CBS network, whose other news programs generally have lower audience ratings than those of ABC and NBC. Mike Wallace and Morley Safar, the Jewish "star reporters" on "60 Minutes," could take themselves and their audiences to another network if they suffered too much executive suite pressure.

There are more subtle pressures, however. In one widely discussed incident, Don Hewitt, the Jewish producer of "60 Minutes," walked out of a Manhattan dinner party after ABC's Barbara Walters, also Jewish, viciously criticized his program's coverage of the Haram Al-Sharif massacre, in which 17 Palestinian Muslims were killed and hundreds wounded in and around the two mosques on the site by Israeli police and border guard bullets on Oct. 8, 1990.

The 20-minute "60 Minutes" segment was based upon amateur videotapes taken from three separate points in Jerusalem that proved that the initial Israeli version of events leading up to the massacre was totally false. Nevertheless, "60 Minutes" was the only program on U.S. television and Long Island's Newsday was the only major U.S. newspaper to report the correct version of events, until some months later when an inquiry into the massacre by an Israeli government commission confirmed it.

It is interesting to speculate on whether the Israeli government inquiry would have been held at all if those two mainstream American media had not told the American public a version of events that totally contradicted the versions put out by both of America's "newspapers of record," The New York Times and The Washington Post.

It also is noteworthy that both of the then-resident New York Times correspondents in Jerusalem, Joel Brinkley and his wife, Sabra Chartrand, were shown the three amateur videotapes by Prof. Michael Emery of California State University at Northridge, before he prepared the story for Newsday. Neither chose to report it and, to this day, neither has acknowledged that their several reports on the subject, claiming that the massacre grew out of a "stone-throwing attack" by Muslims on Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall, were totally eroneous.

Obviously if such biased coverage is possible in The New York Times and The Washington Post, both of them relatively secure financially, it is equally possible in any newspaper in the United States. And it is much more complicated than the influence of pro-Israel Jewish advertisers on small radio stations, Jewish executive suite pressure on a major network or newsmagazines, Jewish ownership of The New York Times, or Jewish editors of The Washington Post.

Unseen Hands at Many Levels

In fact, the extraordinarily skewed Middle East coverage of virtually every large newspaper in the United States is the result of unseen hands at many levels. Thomas Friedman, a dedicated Zionist and self-defined "Middle East fanatic" before he was assigned to cover the Middle East for The New York Times, has described how deeply disturbed he became at the headlines, the placement and the editing of the copy he transmitted to the Times from West Beirut during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

When Times editors struck out the word "indiscriminate" from his description of the rocketing, bombing and shelling of West Beirut by Israeli aircraft, gunboats and artillery ringing the city, he returned to New York prepared to resign over the toning down of his copy. Marching in for a showdown with then-managing editor A.M. Rosenthal, instead of an argument he got a raise.

So he didn't quit, but went back to reporting from Beirut, then Jerusalem, and now from the U.S. State Department. Readers can judge his fairness for themselves. I, personally, would call him a journalistic "spinner," who is objective four days out of five. When, however, he is faced by two or three versions of a complex story, he seems almost compulsively to choose the one that puts the best spin on the story for Israel. Strangely, I have little doubt, personally, he loathes Israel's present government just as much as does any American who follows its activities closely.

Since Mr. Friedman got his raise, Mr. Rosenthal has retired as the managing editor of America's premier newspaper of record, and become an editorial page columnist. His "On My Mind" column, not-so-affectionately known to Times staffers as "out of my mind," displays three times a week for any doubters just how extreme are his views on the Middle East.

One of Rosenthal's former Times favorites, religion editor Ari Goldman, was quoted in the Feb. 28 Detroit Jewish News as saying of Rosenthal, "when he walks through the news room, there's a chill for a thrill," even though the 69-year-old Rosenthal no longer has the authority to promote, browbeat or dismiss editorial employees. It's therefore not hard to imagine the "chilling effect" on balanced reporting about the Middle East of a managing editor who generated such fear among his editorial staff, and who now demonstrates in his column his passion for Israel and against everything Arab.

As a regular reader of both papers, I find New York Times coverage of Middle East subjects, particularly of Israel itself, often more balanced that that of The Washington Post. The latter provides classic examples of what many unseen hands can do to blunt the impact of relatively balanced reports like those of Jackson Diehl, the Post's current Jerusalem correspondent.

A piece about events in Israel and the occupied territories on a given day describing stone-throwing demonstrations in the West Bank, the death at the hands of Israeli police of one or two Gaza teenagers, and a fatal knife attack on an Israeli civilian or soldier in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv might be headlined simply "Arab Terrorists Kill Israeli."

That's not a media conspiracy. It's just one biased copyreader doing his bit for Israel. Even more blatant is the contrast in placement of stories that put Arabs or Israelis in a bad light. Utterances of Libya's flamboyant and bizarre Muammar Qaddafi often get front page or other prominent placement. The same applies to Iraq's tyrannical ruler, Saddam Hussain.

Recent moves to extend popular participation in government in Egypt or to free the press totally in Yemen have received very little U.S. media attention, however. Nor has the successful campaign by Saudi Arabia, backed by other oil-producing Arab states of the Gulf, to bring down the price of oil to pre-Gulf war levels, although this has contributed more than any other single factor in helping the United States recover from the Gulf war-induced recession.

Suggestions from the Home Office

I vividly remember from my 11 years as American Embassy press attache in Ankara, Baghdad, Damascus and Beirut that, as new Middle East correspondents for U.S. newspapers began to hone in on the source of virtually all U.S. problems in the area-the unresolved Palestinian-Israeli dispute-they would begin to get suggestions from the home office that they were getting repetitive and stale. They should do more traveling, to Morocco, Oman or Iran, perhaps, to get a "fresher viewpoint." Those very few who didn't get the message usually got a transfer.

If a combination of publisher, editor, copyreader, reporter, advertiser and reader bias results, inexorably, in playing up bad news and playing down good news about the Arabs, the reverse is true of news about Israel. Little appears in the mainstream U.S. press about the emotional debate currently raging among American Jews about whether or not to "go public" with their anger over Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's choice of "settlements over immigrants," although it has brought down Israel's government, halted the long-awaited influx of Jewish emigrants from the former Soviet Union, and derailed the loan guarantees Israel seeks from the United States.

The American public is barely aware of many things that are the subject of bitter debate among Israelis. One such topic is the use of torture to extract confessions from Palestinians arrested for "terrorist" activities which can range from raising a Palestinian flag to writing nationalistic graffiti on walls to stoning the cars of West Bank Jewish settlers.

Torture was practiced against Arab citizens and non-citizens by Israeli occupation authorities from 1967 to 1977, stopped for six years by Prime Minister Menachem Begin and resumed after his 1983 retirement.

It continues to this day. The torture was confirmed by the Israeli government's Landau Commission, which then gave it legal sanction by authorizing use of "mild physical coercion" in interrogation and suggesting that the resulting confessions can be used as valid evidence in court. The Commission also recommended that past convictions based solely upon those coerced (and, therefore, often false) confessions be upheld.

These are the police and judicial methods that have been used against Jews ever since the Spanish Inquisition. They are the subject of widespread discussion in the Hebrew-language press in Israel. However, hardly a word of these medieval practices reaches the U.S. public through its mainstream media. This is despite the fact that Israel is by far the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid, which is supposed to be withheld from countries that consistently condone human rights violations.

Coupled with the Israel lobby's tight, and thoroughly documented, hold on Congress, the relatively spontaneous and voluntary blackout of news critical of Israel by the mainstream American media has resulted in an appalling level of ignorance. When Israel violated U.S. conditions for use of American weapons by dropping cluster bombs on Palestinian refugee camps in 1982, the U.S. press should have called for a congressional investigation. It did not, and although the U.S. quietly halted further shipments of U.S. cluster bombs, Israel obtained the technology and now not only makes them for its own use, but sells them to Third World countries.

Among violations of its agreements with the U.S. were Israeli sales of U.S. arms to Iran throughout the Iran-Iraq war, Israeli development of nuclear weapons in the '60s and '70s, and Israeli sales of U.S. arms and technology to all comers, from apartheid South Africa and Communist China down to genocidal Guatemalan military juntas and the Medellin drug cartel. These actions should trigger congressional investigations looking toward a cutoff of U.S. military and economic aid, as would such violations of U.S. law by any oher U.S. aid recipient.

In the absence of media demands for such investigations, however, members of Congress have been able to avoid the political risks of criticizing Israel. No one likes to be called an anti-Semite, as virtually all critics of Israel are called. The only exception is for the many American Jewish critics of Israel who, instead, are called "self-hating Jews," and epithet frequently applied to the aforementioned Mike Wallace, Rita Hauser, Anthony Lewis and Milton Viorst solely because of their criticisms of extremist actions by Israel's Likud government.

Nor do many members of Congress voluntarily incur the wrath of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Israel's lobby in Washington, which can set some 70 to 80 deceptively named pro-Israel political action committees to work to help or hurt candidates at re-election time.

The media should, therefore, assume the responsibility of providing at least sufficient information to enable Americans to evaluate the positive or negative impact on Israel and its neighbors of the extraordinary level of U.S. aid, which amounted to $5.7 billion in 1991, about a third of America's worldwide foreign aid total.

Instead, there is what pioneer anti-Zionist Jewish writer Alfred Lilienthal lables "mythinformation." Not only are Americans uninformed, they are misinformed. Such total misstatements as "Israel has never fought an offensive war," or that $10 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to Israel "will cost the taxpayer virtually nothing" are routinely printed by the media.

Yet, if challenged, most editors would agree that the Suez war of 1956, the Six-Day War of 1967, and the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 all started with surprise Israeli attacks on their neighbors, and that Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole said of America's $400 million loan guarantee to Israel in 1991 that it would have been less costly to the U.S. taxpayer just to give Israel the money.

Much of the above is known to political activists. What follows, however, may surprise some readers.

The Threat of Media Retaliation

When President Bush decided last summer to "go public" in resisting Israeli demands for the $10 billion in unconditional loan guarantees that would enable it to complete its physical colonization of the West Bank, he was warned of the consequences by his advisers. They told him that although he could override attempts in Congress to give Israel the guarantees, challenging Israel would trigger retaliation from Israel's partisans in the U.S. media.

The precedents are there for all to see. In the 1960s Senator J. William Fulbright held public hearings in Washington on all foreign lobbies-the China lobby, a lobby for Caribbean sugar producers, and the Israel lobby. The media reaction was quick and deadly. The New York Times announced, quite inaccurately, that Fulbright sounded like a segregationist when he was on the stump in Arkansas. The Arkansas press darkly informed its readers that when he was in Washington Fulbright sounded like "an internationalist." A well-funded candidate from his own party (Governor Dale Bumpers, who still holds Fulbright's Senate seat) was found to challenge and beat him in the Arkansas Democratic primaries.

After President Dwight D. Eisenhower, such a popular American president that he could have had the nomination of either party, challenged Israel at the end of his first term, the media began depicting him throughout his second term as inarticulate, intellectually lazy, bad-tempered and obsessed with golf.

After Jimmy Carter took on Israel's Menachem Begin at Camp David and afterward, he never quite understood what hit him. He blamed it on a sudden national "malaise," and the press blamed the "malaise" on Carter's "failed presidency." The "failure," of course, was that after Begin reneged on his promise to freeze Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, Carter failed to ignore it and instead called Begin a liar.

Media attacks on every aspect of his first term, accompanied by an unsuccessful primary challenge by Senator Ted Kennedy, ensured that Carter didn't get a second one.

That's what has been happening to President Bush ever since he signaled in the first week of September that he was going to tie aid to Israel to the peace process. Americans suddenly learned from the media that they were in the depths of a severe recession and that it was all because George Bush was so busy being president of the world that he hadn't stayed home and developed an economic plan.

Indeed there are economic problems in the U.S. After 40 years of Cold War, punctuated armed forces will release half of their personnel into the civilian job market in the next five years, and major military production lines all over the United States are slowing or coming to a halt. There will be readjustments every bit as severe as those at the end of World War II, which for the U.S. lasted less than four years.

Further, the Gulf war almost doubled the world price of oil in the fall of 1990, which hurt even the most robust of the world's industrial economies. Already, however, the price of oil is back down to pre-Gulf war levels, and it is clear that the U.S. economy is resilient enough to create new, though different, jobs at about the same rate old ones are vanishing.

All "leading economic indicators" are up but one. It's called the "consumer confidence index." I suspect not one in a hundred Americans had ever heard of it until after pro-Israel American journalists lost confidence that Israel was going to get its loan guarantees from the United States without someone blackmailing the president.

Now "consumer confidence" is the only indicator that stays down, and that's a direct result of the media war on the president. Clearly there are leading American journalists ready to talk the U.S. into a real depression if they think it will help Israel get rid of Bush.

The Public Catches On

The public catches on, however. Here are excerpts from a letter to the editor in the March 7 Washington Post: "Stop it! Why do you folks always want to color my day with headlines of gloom and terror. . . When I touched the paper, it nearly seared my hands. The front page screamed with pain. Every adjective-drenched headline proclaimed fear, anger and strife. Six of the seven headlines characterized the world as 'worried,' 'venting anger,' experiencing 'new negativity,' 'double tragedy' and the 'worst downturn in decades' . . . Why do you folks continually trumpet news of the world in tunes of fear, strife, negativity and tragedy?"

There's one reader who sees what's going on, even if he doesn't know why. When the rest of America catches on, it will be the beginning of the end of the dip in "consumer confidence," and of America's media-manufactured "Bush recession."

When Bush won the March 3 Republican primary in Maryland with an overwhelming 70 percent of the vote, and only 12 percent of Republican voters said in exit polls they would not be voting for Bush in the fall, the March 4 Washington Post reported: "Republicans delivered a sharper-than-expected message of discontent with the president's handling of the economy and taxes by giving nearly one-third of their votes to Patrick J. Buchanan. Four out of 10 Republicans who voted for Buchanan said they would vote for the Democrat in November rather than support Bush, according to exit polls."

It's the same story, totally bent out of shape.

It's the same story, totally bent out of shape. Jimmy Carter could explain why. So could those advisers who warned Bush of what would happen when he took on Israel. Now the media seldom mentions Bush's refusal of unconditional loan guarantees to Israel, since polls show more than 80 percent of Americans consistently support him on this.

Instead, those hundreds of unseen hands in the U.S. media are hard at work to fulfill the desparate hope of Israel's Likud leaders that, by bringing down their own government, holding elections, and then taking their time about organizing a new Israeli government they can stall on peace negotiations, stall on freezing settlements and stall on trading land for peace until President Bush is beaten at the polls next November, like President Carter in 1980.

If enough Americans catch on, however, that may not happen this time. And, if Israel's media supporters can't influence U.S. elections, that's a very good thing for world peace and for American relations with all of its friends inside and outside of the Mideast.

Nor would a second Bush term be a bad thing for Israel. A comfortable majority of the most active American Jewish fund-raisers for Israel support a land-for-peace settlement. So do more than half of the Israelis. They, like most of their Arab neighbors, realize there is no security against weapons of mass destruction except the security that comes with a just and lasting peace.

It's a pity that America's mainstream media has elected to tell none of this to the American public. As Abraham Lincoln said, however, "you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." For the sake of Middle East peace, he'd better be right.

Richard H. Curtiss, a retired U.S. foreign service officer, is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

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