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NY Times: No Conflict of Interest - With the Conventional Wisdom
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.
This is what is called neutrality and objectivity in mainstream journalism. Power establishes the framework, and reporting goes on within that framework. Some journalists find inventive ways to find the fissures in the system, allowing some coverage that offers an alternative view, but the pattern of coverage remains constrained by the dictates of the powerful.
So, in the Israel/Palestine conflict, U.S. reporters accept the dominant narrative of the legitimacy of Israeli violence to maintain control over the land and resources that Israel wants to retain. Palestinians argue that Israel is a colonial settler state that uses the predictably violent tactics of such states, ignoring international law and moral principles in large part because U.S. diplomatic, economic, and military support provides cover. Most of the world supports Palestinian resistance, while in the United States the public is mostly unaware of the basic facts of the conflict. (For an excellent analysis, see the film "Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land: Media and the Israel-Palestine Conflict."
When supporters of Palestinian rights in the United States complain about the incomplete or distorted nature of U.S. coverage, they usually are swept up in a he-said/she-said battle with the more reactionary faction of Israeli supporters. Mainstream journalists typically see themselves as embattled truth-tellers, fending off ideologues and absorbing invective from each side.
So, Keller lauds Bronner for reporting "scrupulously and insightfully on Israelis and Palestinians for many years," which is an accurate assessment of Bronner's work if one accepts the Israeli/U.S. narrative of self-defense as authoritative. Within that narrative, reporters such as Bronner can raise questions about the most troubling examples of Israeli violence, so long as the basic framework is accepted. This allows Keller to stand tall, declaring that "pandering to zealots means cheating readers who genuinely seek to be informed."
Are there zealots on both sides, ideologues who don't care about facts and want the news to reflect their vision of the world? Of course -- the world is full of such people on many issues. But that says nothing about whether the Times' de facto adoption of the Israeli/U.S. narrative in its reporting is defensible.
If U.S. journalists reduced their reliance on official sources and considered challenges to the way U.S. policymakers define the conflicts of the world, they might be able to resist the tendency to follow the flag (the phrase, by the way, was used by former CBS News anchor Dan Rather during a speech in which he acknowledged that U.S. reporting, including his own, about the 1991 Gulf War often was flawed).
If U.S. journalists could break out of the frameworks of the powerful, they would have to take up the more difficult work of coming to a truly independent assessment of such conflicts. That kind of journalism is crucial not only to hopes for real justice and peace in the Middle East, but also to the hopes for deeper democracy in the United States.
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16 Comments so far
Show AllThis is a great tradition in American Zionist journalism and I always think of Wolff Blitzer who wrote for the right wing Jerusalem Post before taking over the most important position on CNN. There are many of these people who put Israel's interests ahead of anything else including that of the United States.
Large scale, customary journalism is dead. A news organization acting as the fourth estate died when Reagan changed the law to allow media consolidation. Today's national newspapers are advocates of their owners and their owners alone.
Debates about individual integrity versus institutional policy exactly resemble debates about quantum physics. Each particle behaves in a perfectly random manner, yet large quantities of particles whether released all at once or in a prolonged succession, will fulfill exactly the same function for the applied condition. This person or that may display great personal courage and integrity, yet taken altogether the institution fulfills the prescribed policy and the individual's integrity was nothing other than a piece of that total picture.
The NYT has never been an objective voice concerning Israel. Note that there is no remark that if Bronner and son are Americans,= and he serves in the Israeli army, IDF, then he technically is a traitor. What kind of reporting do you expect to receive from turncoats? Moreover the common practice of stationing reporters self-identified as Jewish automatically creates the perception of bias. But all of this isn't "news fit to print".
Rahm Emanuel was also in the IDF, probably because he held dual citizenship. No US citizen is considered a "turncoat" if he serves in the Israeli army, since they are a firm ally. Obama is as committed to Israel as Emanuel, and the Times is as committed to the Israel-self-defense narrative as AIPAC itself, just as Jensen suggests. So yes, there is no "objectivity" anywhere to be found in this matter, but fighting with Israel against Palestinians is perfectly in line with standard Israeli-biased US narratives of the conflict.
"The phrase "Conflict of Interest" has become as quaint and meaningless as the, Geneva convention, and the US constitution in our corrupt country.
In cased you missed it - here's a good example of a headline that won't be seen in the U.S. There was a one sentence reference to the situation at the end of a veeeery long article yesterday.
In case anyone missed it:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,676634,00.html
SPIEGEL ONLINE
02/08/2010 06:55 PM
Greek Debt Crisis
How Goldman Sachs Helped Greece to Mask its True Debt
By Beat Balzli
Goldman Sachs helped the Greek government to mask the true extent of its deficit with the help of a derivatives deal that legally circumvented the EU Maastricht deficit rules. At some point the so-called cross currency swaps will mature, and swell the country's already bloated deficit.
Greeks aren't very welcome in the Rue Alphones Weicker in Luxembourg. It's home to Eurostat, the European Union's statistical office. The number crunchers there are deeply annoyed with Athens. Investigative reports state that important data "cannot be confirmed" or has been requested but "not received."
Creative accounting took priority when it came to totting up government debt.Since 1999, the Maastricht rules threaten to slap hefty fines on euro member countries that exceed the budget deficit limit of three percent of gross domestic product. Total government debt mustn't exceed 60 percent.
The Greeks have never managed to stick to the 60 percent debt limit, and they only adhered to the three percent deficit ceiling with the help of blatant balance sheet cosmetics. One time, gigantic military expenditures were left out, and another time billions in hospital debt. After recalculating the figures, the experts at Eurostat consistently came up with the same results: In truth, the deficit each year has been far greater than the three percent limit. In 2009, it exploded to over 12 percent.
Now, though, it looks like the Greek figure jugglers have been even more brazen than was previously thought. "Around 2002 in particular, various investment banks offered complex financial products with which governments could push part of their liabilities into the future," one insider recalled, adding that Mediterranean countries had snapped up such products.
Greece's debt managers agreed a huge deal with the savvy bankers of US investment bank Goldman Sachs at the start of 2002. The deal involved so-called cross-currency swaps in which government debt issued in dollars and yen was swapped for euro debt for a certain period -- to be exchanged back into the original currencies at a later date.
Fictional Exchange Rates
Such transactions are part of normal government refinancing. Europe's governments obtain funds from investors around the world by issuing bonds in yen, dollar or Swiss francs. But they need euros to pay their daily bills. Years later the bonds are repaid in the original foreign denominations.
But in the Greek case the US bankers devised a special kind of swap with fictional exchange rates. That enabled Greece to receive a far higher sum than the actual euro market value of 10 billion dollars or yen. In that way Goldman Sachs secretly arranged additional credit of up to $1 billion for the Greeks.
This credit disguised as a swap didn't show up in the Greek debt statistics. Eurostat's reporting rules don't comprehensively record transactions involving financial derivatives. "The Maastricht rules can be circumvented quite legally through swaps," says a German derivatives dealer.
In previous years, Italy used a similar trick to mask its true debt with the help of a different US bank. In 2002 the Greek deficit amounted to 1.2 percent of GDP. After Eurostat reviewed the data in September 2004, the ratio had to be revised up to 3.7 percent. According to today's records, it stands at 5.2 percent.
At some point Greece will have to pay up for its swap transactions, and that will impact its deficit. The bond maturities range between 10 and 15 years. Goldman Sachs charged a hefty commission for the deal and sold the swaps on to a Greek bank in 2005.
The bank declined to comment on the controversial deal. The Greek Finance Ministry did not respond to a written request for comment.
URL:
* http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,676634,00.html
RELATED SPIEGEL ONLINE LINKS:
* Interview with German Government Economic Adviser: Euro Zone 'Could Cope with Greek Bankruptcy' (02/05/2010)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,676157,00.html
* Europe's Lehman Brothers: Brussels Intervenes to Slow Greece's Plunge (02/04/2010)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,675912,00.html
* Pressure to Reform: European Union Puts Greece under Financial Surveillance (02/03/2010)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,675793,00.html
* Betting on Default: Hedge Funds Speculate on Greek Debt (02/01/2010)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,675196,00.html
© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2010
All Rights Reserved
Reproduction only allowed with the permission of SPIEGELnet GmbH
But I could be wrong !
Hmmm
This article begs the question; how many Palastinian reporters work for the NY Times? And of those, how many are assigned to the Middle East? The answer of course is that there are ZERO Palastians working for the Times, let alone being allowed to cover the genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. Taken one step further; How many Palastinians or even arabs in general are working in the White House today? And how many jewish Americans are working in the whitehouse today? The answer to these questions helps explain why we have such a one-sided and clearly misguided foreign policy.
Yes, yet more evidence to add the mountain of evidence that the corporate media is run and staffed by right-wing, conservative, imperialist, zionist propaganda artists. Just Ask Joel Kovel, Norm Finkelstein, Robert Fisk, John Pilger, and Chris Hedges - to name a few.
Perhaps the key paragraph in the article is this:
>>This is what is called neutrality and objectivity in mainstream journalism. Power establishes the framework, and reporting goes on within that framework. Some journalists find inventive ways to find the fissures in the system, allowing some coverage that offers an alternative view, but the pattern of coverage remains constrained by the dictates of the powerful.<<
How true we know this to be. The Fawning Corporate Media is entrenched in the bowels of power and the status quo. It sees the world in a distorting mirror and themselves not at all.
Yet SOME real journalism is now available online; and as the public gets more computer savvy (or has kids to help them) they are, slowly, discovering alternative news sites. Unfortunately, too much of the time, these are RW or conspiracy theorist sites promoting the most puerile of secret plots -- like the "Climate-gate" controversy as "proving" global warming is a hoax (despite rising seas and disappearing glaciers). We need to steer them to progressive and truly independent news sources, perhaps with e-mailing selected and provocative paragraphs and a hyperlink. Perhaps with entire (short) articles. Or printouts.
Articles from here seem a natural choice, have done it with a gun-toting, teabagging friend with no backlash yet. Maybe he's just been polite, or maybe...
Gary
"I glance at the headlines just to kind of get a flavor for what's moving. I rarely read the stories, and get briefed by people who are probably read the news themselves."
-- George W. Bush (September 21, 2003)
The quality of the writing at the New York Times --when divorced from the agenda-- is generally excellent. The problem is that the writing is always in service to that agenda: support the CIA/administration, support Israel, support neo-liberalism. That agenda is baked into every single article that goes out the door; sometimes in subtle and sometimes in overt ways, but it is always there.
And that omnipresent, never-acknowledged agenda makes reading the paper a depressing propaganda experience, ultimately unworthy of any thinking person's time other than as an interesting research subject on methods of advancing elite social control.
The NYT's agenda is reflects its demographic. The NYT's agenda is the agenda of the North Eastern establishment, not so much Israel or whatever. If the NE establishment decides that Israel is the enemy, then the NYT will change its tune. And this bias, the bias towards reporting from the point of the North Eastern establishment is pervasive throughout the entire paper, not just the (political) news parts. In the music, arts, literature, sports reporting, there is this bias towards reporting from the NE establishment perspective.
words are not weapons...journalists are neither warriors nor detectives...
exposure is common, consequences much less so...
The NYT would perceive and openly display its conflicts of interest did that not conflict with its interests.
As it is, it isn't.
I save my quarters when I am tempted to buy a paper and eventually send a check to people who report news.
The NY Times, while generally an interesting quiet newspaper, has no compunction about outright lies when it comes to protecting Israel.
The same goes for the Canadian Globe & Mail that invariably shuts down comments on anything about Israel. I believe it has something to do with the owners.
Canada's present Prime Minister, evangelical fundamentalist Harper (sometimes known as Bush-lite or King Stephen) is Israel's greatest cheerleader and continually demonstrates immediate and unquestioning loyalty to Israel -for end time ideological reasons.
End time rapture seekers (Enders) will be the death of us all with their delusional self-fulfilling prophecies, but that's another story.
Canadian Major Paeta Hess-von Kruedener was one of four unarmed UN military observers who were murdered when the Israeli Defence Forces bombed a marked United Nations post on July 25, 2006.
The building sat alone on a bare hilltop, had been there for decades, was hardened against artillery shells and conventional bombs and was emblazoned with UN markings. The IDF, not caring for observers, dropped a laser guided bunker buster on it and then had the gall after an "inquiry" to blame it on a "bad map".
The NY Times chose to report it as a "stray artillery shell".
Harper's only comment was "what was he doing there?"
Most well-paid mainstream journalists will staunchly deny that anyone tells them what to write or to not write.
I've always like Michael Parenti's response to this self-delusion: if you don't feel the tug of the leash, it's because you don't stray very far from the post.