A grand newspaper or a political rag sheet?

Yisrael Medad
Green-Lined/JPost
11 July '10

I cannot even begin to grasp the embarrassment and shame some half-dozen New York Times reporters feel in the wake of their atrocious labor of disdain and professional sloppiness directed against the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.

Entitled "Tax-Exempt Funds Aid Settlements in West Bank", its authors (Jim Rutenberg, a former a correspondent in the paper's Washington bureau; Mike McIntire, an adjunct Assistant Professor at NYU and one of a group which merited a Pulitzer Prize in 1999; Ethan Bronner, New York Times Israel Bureau head, also a Pulitzer Prize winner who began his journalism career at Reuters 30 years ago, Isabel Kershner, currently New York Times Israel correspondent and formerly of The Jerusalem Report and Myra Noveck who, as it happens, is married to extreme left-winger and ideological opponent of Jewish residency beyond the Green Line, Gershom Gorenberg) purvey rumors, insinuate, hint, contradict themselves in self-correction, claim and then withdraw the accusation and generally botch a fairly simple topic. As Dr. Alex Safian of CAMERA writes, the story has "no news, no scoops, no revelations, few facts and plenty of errors and omissions."

The many critical of the story are probably snarling at the piece's blatant "proactive" negative attitude in relation to the article's focus subject, but the authors have been criticized before on topics unrelated to Israel. For example, Rutenberg had a run-in with Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, who mulled after his encounter with Rutenberg, "I was used to make a point Rutenberg wanted to make before he talked to me." By the way, Berkeley economics professor and former Clinton Administration official Brad Delong, reflected on Rutenberg's treatment of Rosen and observed "if the journalist is looking for a particular quote, figure out whether you want to be the person who gives that quote - and if not, get off the phone." If only reporters were obliged to reveal as much about themselves as they want their interviewees to do.

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