Interest by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in monitoring National Public Radio’s Arab-Israeli news coverage is not evidence of a plot to turn NPR into WBAR (Bush Administration Radio). If anything, it’s an overdue effort by CPB to carry out its required oversight.
Recipients of CPB funds, unlike completely private communications media, are obligated by the Telecommunications Act to provide “strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature.” In a series of studies going back years, and using standards such as those advocated by the Society for Professional Journalists including accuracy, balance, comprehensiveness and context — not any ideological test — CAMERA (the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) has confirmed NPR’s anti-Israel tilt.
NPR’s top executives ought to welcome CPB’s belated focus on the objectivity and balance requirement. It should remind them of the leverage they have to reform a weak link in their operation, the Arab-Israeli reporting. Reform would deprive those who object to government funding of public radio of an argument in their favor.
But don’t bet on it. When NPR heard from Democratic members of Congress, it denied it had a problem. Now the New York Times reports that CPB may monitor NPR’s Middle East coverage, and voices within the network cry “political interference.”
One might think that if Democratic members of Congress and Republican appointees raise similar concerns, NPR should listen.
In 2003, 11 members of the U.S. House, all Democrats, hand-delivered a letter to NPR President Kevin Klose. They asserted that “for many years, National Public Radio programs have presented a view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that is too often biased against Israel. Despite concerns raised over the years by listeners, members of NPR affiliate stations, and members of Congress, NPR coverage of the Middle East, to our ears and the ears of many of our constituents, still exhibits a slanted perspective on the conflict.”
Then they got specific. “Among our concerns about NPR’s Middle East reporting, the following are the most significant: a disproportionate number of interviews with Palestinian spokespersons and those who oppose the policies of the Israeli government (including many Israelis who do not reflect the broad consensus of the Israeli population); imbalanced coverage of Palestinian victims versus Israeli victims; an implied equivalence between Palestinian terrorist operations and Israeli military actions (including the refusal to name Palestinian terrorists as such); and, a lack of context in coverage of specific events.”
These are among the problems CAMERA has documented, problems that are not isolated mistakes but the pattern of NPR’s Arab-Israeli reporting. There is nothing hawkish or dovish about such criticism. It stems rather from an insistence that journalists uphold the standards of their craft.
Reps. Brad Sherman (D-Sherman Oaks) and Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) originated the letter. Other California signers were Reps. Tom Lantos, Adam Schiff and Henry Waxman.
Klose — who likes to say that NPR receives less than 2 percent of its funds in direct federal grants while ignoring the much larger amount of tax money the network collects as fees from member stations — replied as he had responded to individual House members previously: With denial, self-satisfaction at the network’s performance and invocations of First Amendment protection.
So, when CPB held its annual open forum last year, Sherman told the corporation’s board members that the problems persist.
CAMERA testified at the same session. It asserted that CPB oversight of NPR was inadequate. “It avoids the substance of CAMERA’s criticism and numerous other complaints … Internally and with recipients of its tax-supported funds, CPB discusses and seeks clarification. Externally, it polls generalized sentiment. But it is not providing Congress — as required under the Telecommunications Act — any serious refutation of repeated, substantiated findings” of anti-Israeli bias in NPR’s broadcasts.
CAMERA noted that “no one is demanding pre-broadcast interference with NPR’s news coverage.” Instead, “the corporation must ensure by means of substantive post-broadcast review of criticism and complaints that NPR’s Arab-Israeli reporting meets the legal requirement of ‘strict adherence to objectivity and balance.'”
Interestingly, the CPB board reaffirmed its commitment to objectivity and balance in 2002. Perhaps the corporation’s recent creation of two ombudsmen to review criticism, and the interest of Chairman Kenneth Tomlin son in assuring that NPR’s news coverage is balanced is an effort to fulfill that obligation.
The incremental change CAMERA has sought and achieved in a number of other news media outlets has proven virtually impossible with NPR. That being so, CPB’s new focus on the network is no reason for Jewish supporters of public radio to lament. As listeners and taxpayers, we should all applaud.
Eric Rozenman is the Washington director of CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.
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