New York Times: In-Depth
The newspaper of record has missed its cue.
honestreporting.com
November 2002 - On a visit to Saudi Arabia, The New York Times' Maureen Dowd questioned the anti-Israel slant of Saudi education ("Under the Ramadan Moon" - Nov. 6). Dowd spoke with Saudi deputy ministers of education, and reports:
"They were defensive about American suspicion of the religious hard-liners' influence on boys' schooling. 'Why don't you go to Israeli math textbooks and see what they're saying -- If you kill 10 Arabs one day and 12 the next day, what would be the total?' demanded one deputy." nytimes.com
Of course, no such Israeli textbook exists. It's bad enough that the Saudi media prints blood libels against the Jews. But for The Times to be echoing these claims, allowing such inflammatory statements to go unquestioned, unchallenged and uncriticized, points to one of two problems: Either Dowd actually believed the libel, and ignored the basic journalistic rule of fact-checking. Or Dowd knew that the Saudi claim was false, but reported it anyway, thus being guilty of gratuitously spreading a vicious, baseless lie.
Either way, The New York Times has misled countless thousands of readers.
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August 2002 - The New York Times was caught altering the words of news sources. James Bennet ("Israelis Clamp Down on Nablus, Hunting Suspects") reported that Israeli officials have labeled Nablus as "the center of Palestinian militancy in the West Bank."
Did the Israeli official really call it Palestinian "MILITANCY"? The Jerusalem Post covered the same story ("Israeli tanks move into Nablus") and reported that: "IDF Spokesman was quoted by Item news agency as saying Nablus is a hotbed of Hamas and Fatah TERRORIST activity."
Ha'aretz as well ("IDF enters Nablus to hit Hamas") reported that: "Nablus has become the capital of TERROR, Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer said Friday."
See the doctored New York Times article at:
nytimes.com
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August 2002 - James Bennet of The New York Times reported on the "U.S.-Mideast Connection: The News Becomes Less Foreign," in which he examines a variety of U.S.-Israel cultural and sociological connections, including the fact that 90,000 American citizens live in Israel.
Bennet then apparently tries to subtly undermine U.S. foreign aid to Israel, by weaving in various references to American weaponry:
"In Nablus, in the West Bank, where Israeli forces brandishing American-made M-16 rifles spent another day today hunting for explosive laboratories and suspects in the casbah..."
And:
"Hamas said its attack on the campus was in retaliation for an Israeli air raid on Gaza City last week... Israel used an American-made F-16 warplane for that attack."
Read Bennet's article at:
nytimes.com
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May 2002 - The Salute to Israel parade in Manhattan drew 700-800,000 people, including marching bands and professionally designed floats (http://www.salutetoisrael.org). About 600 protesters also showed up -- representing.0008 of total attendance.
Yet The New York Times ran a front-page photo that showed the parade in the background, with anti-Israel protesters prominent in the foreground, holding a placard that read, "End Israeli Occupation of Palestine." Inside the newspaper, a photo of a pro-Israel marcher was outweighed by a larger picture of protesters, one waving a sign that likened Zionism to Nazism.
The ensuring article devotes more ink to the protesters than it does to the pro-Israel paraders themselves. Read the article at:
nytimes.com
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May 2002 - Following the end of the Bethlehem Church siege, The New York Times provided sympathy for the 26 Gazan-bound terrorists, in Tim Golden's article, "Cast Adrift After Siege, Bethlehem Exiles Grieve." Golden describes the difficulties the men will have finding work, and writes:
"The echoes, critics of the deal said, could scarcely be crueler: after half a century in which Palestinians have fought for the return of compatriots who fled at Israel's creation, they have been forced from their homes once more.
"Adding to the sting, European officials announced today that the Bethlehem fighters who had been flown to Cyprus at Israel's insistence would be scattered among at least half a dozen European countries."
Golden doesn't mention the added sting of the hundreds of Jewish families torn apart by the work of these terrorists. As to their crimes, The Times reports that Israel "accused most of them of having joined in attacks on Jewish settlers." In fact, some of the 26 terrorists were involved in shooting at Israeli vehicles, preparing bombs, and dispatching suicide bombers.
Read the New York Times report at:
honestreporting.com
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March 2002 - The New York Times published an illustrated graph, comparing Jewish deaths and Arab deaths in the current conflict. Many readers wrote to complain that the graph was misleading, making no distinction between civilians and armed combatants, and implying that all the Arab dead were somehow at the hands of Israelis -- when in fact scores of Arab dead were suicide bombers or suspected collaborators killed by other Arabs.
The response from The New York Times was surprisingly curt and dismissive. Bill Borders of the Times wrote: "The graphs are correct because everyone that they count as dead is in fact dead. All of them."
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February 2002 - The New York Times published Yasir Arafat's op-ed piece, "The Palestinian Vision of Peace." Arafat lied with impunity when he "condemned the attacks carried out by terrorist groups against Israeli civilians." Yet Fatah and Tanzim are terror groups led by Arafat himself!
Arafat tried to deny the historical record when he wrote of Ariel Sharon's "opposition to every peace treaty." But Knesset voting records show that Sharon supported Israel's withdrawal from Sinai. Sharon supported the treaty with Jordan, too. And Sharon negotiated the deal with Arafat at Wye. So why does the Times allow the publication of Arafat's lies?
We also question The Times' daily e-mail update sent to subscribers, "Today's Headlines from NYTimes.com," which did nothing to identify the op-ed as opinion, or even to identify the author as Arafat -- just the following unqualified blurb about the article: "Palestinians want to live as equals alongside Israel in an independent and viable state on the territories occupied by Israel in 1967."
Read the Arafat op-ed at:
nytimes.com
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February 2002 - The New York Times Sunday magazine ran a 7,700-word paean to the Palestinians, entitled "The Palestinian Conversation," by Deborah Sontag, the Times' former correspondent in Israel. Sontag quoted nine different Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza.
Take Abed al-Raouf Barbakh, the Fatah representative with a handgun in his vest, whose incitement for violence led to even Arafat seeking his arrest. "He [Barbakh] presented himself as a kind of youth counselor," Sontag wrote. "He talked of planning a garden among the weeds... [W]hether or not he was sincere, he sensed that it would be politic to ask me to send the world a message that even he, a fighter, really wanted quiet..."
Or read about Sayeed Siyam, the Hamas representative who Sontag described as looking "like the Mr. Rogers of Hamas, and it turned out that he was an elementary school teacher... Siyam spoke as softly as if he were in a library explaining the Dewey Decimal System..."
Hamas and Fatah are the primary terrorist organizations perpetrating attacks on Israeli civilians. Yet Sontag makes them sound like, well, Mr. Rogers.
Sontag presents outrageous Palestinian accusations, without qualification or rebuttal. She quotes one woman as saying: "Do I look like a warrior? But if I go down to my fields, they [Israelis] will shoot me, a little old lady, and they will say that I was on my way to plant a bomb."
Read Sontag's article at:
honestreporting.com
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January 2002 - Wafa Idris blew herself up on Jaffa Road in Jerusalem. As the first woman suicide bomber, the media positioned her as a "Palestinian folk hero." Articles were written providing details of her love life, education, hobbies, and humanitarian volunteer work.
The New York Times, for example, described Idris as someone with "chestnut hair curling past her shoulders"... who "raised doves and adored children." This despite the fact that she tried to killed or wounded 150 innocent civilians.
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April 2001 - The Times' Israel correspondent Deborah Sontag portrayed 10-moth-old Shalhevet Pass, murdered by a Palestinian sniper, as a despised settler:
Many Israelis have long considered the Hebron settlers to be extremists, living in a world apart. But they rallied behind the community after Shalhevet was killed; newspaper headlines referred to the killing of an Israeli baby and not a "settler baby." nytimes.com
Sontag made the outrageous implication that Jews might normally disregard the ruthless murder of another Jew (and even a Jewish baby), simply because they don't share the same political views. |
