Some stories are like heartburn; they keep coming back, no matter how many remedies we try.
So it is with complaints about National Public Radio (NPR) Mideast coverage. Pro-Israel media watchdog groups could fill encyclopedias with documentation about NPR’s one-sided coverage, and even many Jews on the left spit with anger every time they hear NPR Mideast correspondents who sound more like al-Jazeera editorialists.
But legitimate Jewish concerns about NPR coverage, some Jewish leaders worry, could get caught up in an intensifying ideological assault on the very idea of public radio, a crusade which leaves many Jews cold.
And the issue points to a sharp debate among Jewish groups over tactics: Do you work with errant broadcasters for incremental improvements in coverage, or do you go after them with all guns blazing while demanding adherence to a high pro-Israel standard?
You don’t have to be a right-wing crazy to see something askew in the way NPR covers the Middle East.
Suicide bombers are “militants,” never “terrorists”; stories focus sympathy on Palestinians humiliated at checkpoints or bulldozed out of their homes but give short shrift to families of Israelis blown to bits in pizza parlors or discos. Palestinian charges about Israeli actions are taken at face value, while Israeli explanations are treated with dripping skepticism.
Sometimes, it’s just the journalistic craving for a good story about a weak, oppressed victim; more often, it seems to reflect a comprehensive perspective in which Israel’s government can never be right, Palestinians can never be wrong even when they send people out with explosives strapped to their bodies.
Some political appointees at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) apparently see things the same way.
Last week the New York Times reported that the corporation, which distributes public money to stations, is considering using outside monitors to oversee NPR’s Mideast coverage as part of the broader effort to ensure balance.
But Jewish groups, by and large, aren’t celebrating, and the reason is plain: The NPR Mideast controversy is getting caught up in a much broader debate about public broadcasting, with the risk that the Jewish community — with its legitimate concerns about NPR — could get caught in the middle.
The White House and its friends at the CPB are mad about what they see as unfair coverage of administration policy, both domestic and international. Public television, not radio, has been the biggest irritant; domestic issues, not Middle East coverage, have been a particular bone of contention.
CPB officials have pressed the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), the television arm of public broadcasting, to balance its liberal commentators with conservative ones, and radio and television stations have been urged to run more music, less talk. The same pressure is being applied to the nation’s foreign broadcast services — once a primary source of reasonably objective news for much of the world, now becoming popular music outlets.
The risk for Jewish groups is this: Despite their very real grievances about biased Mideast coverage at NPR, they could get caught up in a fight that has more to do with rank partisanship and ideology than journalistic fairness and balance. In fighting for fairness, their argument could get buried by those who want censorship.
Many Jews would like to see better, more balanced Mideast coverage; few want NPR turned into the kind of journalistic drek most Americans feed on, or a government propaganda organ on the order of Radio Havana, or just eliminated.
Jewish leaders say they will continue to complain to NPR about bad coverage, but they are apparently unwilling to give support to something that looks like a politically motivated effort to force sweeping changes in public broadcasting by using criticism of its Israel coverage as camouflage.
This reluctance also points to sharp divisions within the Jewish community on the best strategy for dealing with wayward media.
Pro-Israel media watchdog groups like CAMERA perform a public service by meticulously documenting the bias of many radio and television outlets.
But many Jewish leaders complain that these groups, by reflecting the views of the most hawkish segment of the community and measuring the media against that standard, just make it harder to do what these leaders believe has to be done: working with even unfriendly reporters, editors and producers to produce incremental improvements in their coverage.
There’s a final twist in the NPR controversy. There are no hard statistics, but almost every broadcasting professional believes it: Jews are disproportionate supporters of public radio and television.
Jews may dislike NPR’s blatant anti-Israel bias, but that apparently hasn’t diminished support for what public broadcasting stands for: an alternative to commercial, lowest-common-denominator broadcasting and tabloid-style news.
James David Besser is a Washington correspondent for Jewish newspapers across the country.
TWO VIEWS:
National Public Ruckus