Pro-Israel groups, angry at how the media are portraying their country in the Mideast conflict, are battling back with boycotts and e-mail campaigns.

I wonder if a lot of people who are upset about bias at the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle aren't really upset with the news. It's not that they're biased, it's that the images tell an accurate story, and they don't like that story being told.

Steve Rendall Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)

In the past few weeks, subscriptions have been canceled or suspended at several of the country's largest newspapers -- including The Chronicle, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times -- in protest of what some readers perceive as an anti-Israel bias.

The groups are most upset when the large newspapers do not cover their protests but report on pro-Palestinian demonstrations. For their part, newspaper editors say issues of bias arise whenever news organizations tackle a polarizing topic.

More than 1,000 people suspended their subscriptions to the Los Angeles Times last month, the paper reported, and another e-mail campaign attempted to make Wednesday "Cancel your subscription to the New York Times Day."

Reader complaints are pouring in to other metropolitan papers, as well. Last fall, pro-Israel demonstrators picketed the Chicago Tribune on two occasions and a handful of people protested outside the Miami Herald.

At The Chronicle, roughly 70 people have canceled their subscriptions in protest, including five Tuesday who objected to a four-page special guide to the conflict. A 14-member delegation of local Jewish groups met with Chronicle editors Wednesday to discuss their grievances. Hundreds of others, on both sides of the Mideast conflict, have written to the paper to complain about perceived bias.

"In the mainstream Jewish community, there's been simmering disappointment and anger over The Chronicle's Mideast coverage," said Michael Futterman, who chairs the Middle East strategy committee of the Jewish Community Relations Council, a coalition of 80 Bay Area synagogues and Jewish organizations. Futterman said that the anger hit a "boiling point" when the Chronicle did not cover a pro-Israel rally in San Francisco on April 14.

The San Francisco Examiner covered the event on its front page, estimating that 5,000 people participated. That same week, Futterman noted, The Chronicle covered a far smaller pro-Palestinian rally.

"It was astounding to people," he said. "It confirmed a lot of the worst suspicions."

Chronicle Executive Editor Phil Bronstein said the paper erred in not covering the rally, echoing an assertion that the paper's reader representative, Dick Rogers, made in a column April 21: "We should have covered it."

"We're fallible -- absolutely fallible," Bronstein said. "We make mistakes. But it does not equate to bias."

Adding fuel to the fire, on the same day Rogers' remarks appeared, the paper had a page one story on a pro-Palestinian rally that attracted 20,000 people to the Civic Center.

Bronstein said the complaints and canceled subscriptions constitute "a useful and instructive period for us."

The absence of a story on the rally provided a touchstone for debate, but supporters of both Israel and the Palestinians have found other coverage to complain about. A headline on April 28 referred to the Palestinians' "bold attack on Israelis," drawing ire from those who saw "bold" as a positive depiction.

Other papers' failure to cover similar rallies also provoked reactions. In New York, an April 21 prayer vigil attracted what the New York Post reported was an estimated 50,000 Jews, but the New York Times did not cover it. Likewise, the Los Angeles Times did not cover a rally in its home city on April 6, inciting protest.

Editors at the New York Times were not available for comment, but company spokeswoman Catherine Mathis said in an e-mail, "Our staff is instructed to cover all sides of the story thoroughly and with scrupulous impartiality."

Mathis did not comment Wednesday on how many people suspended or canceled subscriptions, but organizers of the protest said they hoped for thousands.

Rabbi Avi Weiss at the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale in the Bronx and the national president of the Coalition for Jewish Concerns, one of the organizers of the boycott, said he's going after New York Times advertisers as well.

The Times is "virtually unaccountable," said Weiss, who organized the large pro-Israel rally in Washington, D.C. last month. "The unevenhandedness is astounding."

It's not just pro-Israel readers who scrutinize coverage.

"I've seen some bad reporting towards the Palestinians, from the pro- Israeli side," said Hanan Rasheed of Danville, national executive secretary of the Palestinian National Congress. "The whole story is not coming out."

Steve Rendall, a senior analyst at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, or FAIR, a media watchdog organization in New York, said the media has long showed a pro-Israel bias.

"I wonder if a lot of people who are upset about bias at the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle aren't really upset with the news," Rendall said. "It's not that they're biased, it's that the images tell an accurate story, and they don't like that story being told."

Scrutiny can be good for coverage, according to Steven Brill, a Newsweek columnist who founded Brill's Content, a now defunct magazine that monitored the media. If it makes editors more careful, "I don't think that's bad," Brill said. "As long as 'be careful' doesn't mean 'be cautious.' "

Juan Vasquez, world editor of the Miami Herald, agreed.

"We can't afford to be sloppy on the most minute detail," Vasquez said. "For example, if we do a story in which a suicide bomber kills 10 people and himself or herself, we can't say he killed 11. Our readers will catch that. We make a separate statement, 'killing himself and 10 victims.' That's fair enough, although I don't think that's going to change anyone's mind."

Some media watchers and journalists say the press can't win when it comes to the Mideast.

Peter Waldman, a reporter in the Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau,

who covered the Middle East for the paper from 1990 to 1996, said he spent 10 percent of his time dealing with complaints of bias.

"It's a perennial problem for people writing about the Middle East," Waldman said. "I was always deluged with mail."

©2002 San Francisco Chronicle

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