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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

Altercation: New York Times Headline Whitewashes Shireen Abu Akleh's
Killing

America's most influential news source bends over backward to shade
the truth about the bullet that killed the beloved Palestinian American
journalist.

It hasn't been a banner week for the Israeli government. Following
four separate, relatively detailed investigations by news organizations,
including one that carried five bylines in The New York Times

that concluded that an Israeli soldier shot and killed the Palestinian
American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh back in May, Palestinian officials
handed the bullet in question to the U.S. State Department so that it
might be tested. State officials then, without the permission of Abu
Akleh's family or the agreement of the Palestinian Authority
,
turned it over to the Israelis. The department then issued a statement
that the
condition of the bullet precludes a "clear conclusion" as to its
origins, though it added that Israeli forces were "likely
responsible" for firing the shot. Even so, it "found no reason to
believe that this was intentional but rather the result of tragic
circumstances during an IDF-led military operation against factions of
Palestinian Islamic Jihad ... which followed a series of terrorist
attacks in Israel." This contradicted accounts of Palestinians who
witnessed the killing as a deliberate attack on journalists, as well as
the conclusions of a CNN investigation

that concurred with this judgment, to say nothing of the fact that it
would be impossible to discern such a thing from the bullet itself.

Recall that the Israelis initially denied that the bullet could have
been fired by one of their soldiers and attacked the Palestinians for
refusing their offer of a joint investigation. Defense Minister Benny
Gantz put most of the blame on "the terrorists who fired from within a
civilian population
."
(The Times' own monthlong investigation found no evidence of any armed
Palestinians near Ms. Abu Akleh when she was shot.) The Israelis
announced there would be no investigation on their part, which led to
protests from dozens of Democratic senators and representatives.

Recall, also, that for reasons I will never understand, Israeli police
also attacked the pallbearers of this "Palestinian icon" as they
carried her coffin by clubbing them at their knees, providing their
enemies with priceless propaganda seen around the world. As Jack Khoury
wrote in Haaretz
:
"The photo tells the Palestinian story in its painful essence. A
casket containing the remains of a woman who struggled in her own way to
present the Palestinian national narrative beyond the conflict and its
divisiveness and power struggles. A coffin raised above the discord,
carried on the backs of young Palestinians who are facing down an armed
and particularly brutal police force. A scene of death, pain and
oppression, that despite everything, proves to the world that the
Palestinian people are still alive and kicking, striving for their
freedom."

The Israelis next made matters even worse. Following the above debacle,
Noa Tishby, the ditzy soap opera actress whom the Israelis rather
crazily appointed as their first-ever "Special Envoy for Combating
Antisemitism and Delegitimization of Israel," insisted
that
"journalist [sic] are killed around the world every week, without the
same global reaction. This is the antisemitic double standard." (Even
were this statement true, someone should have told Tishby that this does
not happen "every week" when journalists are covering nations that
call themselves democracies in territories in which they enjoy complete
control, nor does it happen very often when the victim is an American
citizen.)

In betraying the Palestinian Authority's wishes by turning the bullet
over to the Israelis, U.S. officials not only demonstrated once again
who and what their priorities are in the conflict-recall this was an
American citizen who was killed-but also needlessly undermined what
little legitimacy the Authority has left, at a time when it has been
actively looking for ways to bolster it
.

That's all background for why I am asking you to look at how the Times
decided to headline their story on the State Department's report. It
reads: "Bullet Too Damaged to Prove Who Killed Palestinian American
Journalist, U.S. Says
."
I pay a lot of attention to headlines because in the vast majority of
cases, that is all most people ever see. They read the headline but
never click on the story. And if all you saw was this headline, you
would never know who was responsible and assume that such knowledge was
impossible. Now look at how virtually every other news organization
covered the State Department statement:

"Israeli Bullet Likely Killed Al Jazeera Reporter, Says U.S. Dept. of
State" (New York Daily News
)

"U.S. Concludes Unintentional Israeli Fire Likely Killed American
Journalist" (The Washington Post
)

"Al Jazeera Reporter Likely Killed by Unintentional Gunfire From
Israeli Positions, U.S. Says" (Reuters
)

"Al Jazeera Journalist Shireen Abu Akleh Likely Killed by Israeli
Gunfire" (Newsweek
)

"Israeli Gunshot 'Likely' Killed Shireen Abu Akleh, US Concludes
After Analyzing Bullet" (The [Jewish] Forward and the Jewish Telegraph
Agency
)

The sad fact is that none of these publications, even added together
with all the other publications in the world, will match the influence
of the Times in the way this story is perceived both in the world at
large and among American Jews. And so, as with so many stories in which
the Palestinians are treated as mere objects rather than subjects-so
often dying in passive tense from bombs and bullets that, according to
the typical Times headline, have no apparent origin-it has the effect
of whitewashing the consequences of Israel's occupation. This is not
to say that Times reporters do not do great reporting from Israel. They
do. But just as Times headline writers were, for years, unwilling to
attach the word "lie" to Donald Trump's statements for fear of
offending his fans, so, too, are they especially sensitive about how
they represent the content of the stories about Israel that these
reporters publish. (This Slate story

gets at the overall problem reporters tend to have with this issue,
though of course much has changed in recent times.)

The reason the Times is so important, as I explain in my forthcoming
book, We Are Not One: A History of America's Fight Over Israel
:

Ironically, while The New York Times is often the first example cited by
pro-Israel media critics for alleged pro-Palestinian bias, it is also
the first example cited by pro-Palestinian media critics for its alleged
pro-Israel bias. This is due in part to the fact of its being by far the
most influential and important foreign-news source in the US-indeed,
in the English-speaking world. Former Begin spokesman Zev Chafets
explained that within the Israeli government attention was paid to the
Times correspondent first, with whoever was US Ambassador at the time
following closely behind. The paper had primacy because "if it was in
the Times it was automatically going to be everywhere else." When
former Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Jodi Rudoren took the job as editor
of the Jewish Forward in 2019, she told a former colleague, Ben Smith,
that she hoped to make it the "Jewish New York Times." His reply:
"But the New York Times is already the Jewish New York Times."

As it happens, the following day, the Times published this quite good
article
,
which might be fairly interpreted as a kind of an apology article for
the previous one.

Relatedly, I try to avoid moralistic appeals in politics, but from a
strictly self-interested perspective on the part of the both the
Israelis and the U.S., how can it benefit anyone to instruct
Palestinians of goodwill to learn that:

* Israel reserves the right to shoot a journalist who happens to be a
Palestinian who is covering a protest.

* After such a shooting, Israel feels no obligation to even investigate
the circumstances under which it takes place, much less punish the
person responsible.

* Israeli troops will attack the mourners of such a victim, again,
without even bothering to offer any reasonable explanation.

* Israel will leverage its connections with the United States not only
to betray their word to the Palestinians and turn over critical evidence
in a shooting of an American citizen, but also to let the entire matter
go, despite the protests of virtually half the members of the Senate
from the president's own party.

The Committee to Protect Journalists also has a statement here
.

[link removed]

Chris Wallace has apparently written a terrible book about the nuclear
bombing of Japan, and few, if any, of its reviewers have so far
recognized this. That's what my long-ago dissertation adviser, Barton
J. Bernstein, says here and
I'm sure he's right. (You'll need an institutional log-in or to
pay up, alas.)

One of my favorite species of news article is the personality profile
where the person being profiled thinks themselves wonderful but (pretty
much) everyone else, save perhaps their parents, who reads it thinks,
"Why in the world did this person think this might be good idea?"
Here

is a prime example of that genre, and here
,
as Irin Carmon puts it, is "a lot more about what that Princeton guy
who married his student was actually accused of from this thorough
investigation" before he was fired, despite having tenure and despite
having been previously punished before the article appeared.

P.S.: I wrote this listening to the bonus live disc that came with the
reissue of Led Zeppelin's first album on my stereo, not my computer,
and then I checked Twitter before sending it in and it informed me that
Zep was trending, but for no reason. Can we trust Elon Musk with this
frightening power?

Meanwhile, here they are doing the trivial
Eddie Cochran hit "Somethin' Else," just to show you how great
they were. And here they
are at their best. Here ,
finally, are Little Roger and the Goosebumps improving on one of the
most annoying songs of all time.

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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