Ethan Bronner Reveals the Deal on Journalism in the Middle East.

Dexter Van Zile
CAMERA/Snapshots
29 April '10
Posted before Shabbat

One of the biggest problems with coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict is the failure of journalists to acknowledge and correct for the fundamental differences between Israel and its adversaries. Israel is an open society with a free press and as a result, its actions are subject to much greater scrutiny than its adversaries.

Ethan Bronner, the Jerusalem Bureau Chief for the New York Times acknowledged this problem during a recent talk at the Brandeis University. Speaking at the school in Waltham, Mass., on February 2, 2010. During his talk, Bronner stated that covering Israel is “kind of a a piece of cake, to be honest.”

He continued:

It’s pretty easy. You have enormous access to officials. You have pretty good access to the military and you have a very very open robust debate going on all the time.

And when you arrive for example in Israel as a reporter you go to the government press office they give you a list of the phone numbers of all the ministries and within about five minutes you can get the cell phone numbers of the various ministers and that is not true in Palestine or in the Arab world generally. You will get phone numbers for people, but there isn’t that same robust debate. There is very little investigative journalism, basically none, in Palestine and there are no columnists complaining about the situation the way they are in Israel.

And since we as foreign correspondents spend our time sort of creaming off the conversation that goes on inside a society, it means there’s a lot to cream on one side and very little to cream on on the other. This means that when you or others complain about unfair coverage of Israel, my advice would be “Don’t complain about our not writing positive things about Israel. Complain about our not writing enough negative things about their enemies” because I think therein lies the imbalance which is difficult and does need to be corrected. It’s hard to do because one society is more closed than the other and to remind you we rely on we live off controversy and tension. So Israel, you know, is all day long exposing itself with those questions.

The fact is that you could in the morning turn on the radio – you’d have to have two radios to do this exercise properly – for the army radio and then the Voice of Israel state radio. From six to about noon, there’s nothing but talk and each one is interviewing members of Knesset, members of the government, officials, ministers and experts and everyone’s yelling at each other all day long.

All you have to do is sit, take notes on it, go for a siesta, write your story. You don’t have to leave your bed. (Laugher)

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