The Other War: A Debate - How the media weasels out of telling the truth

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http://www.cjr.org/year/03/3/mideast.asp

<snip>News outlets say they receive criticism from both sides, so they must be doing a good job. Is that a good indicator?

AHMED BOUZID: For me, the fact that two sides are complaining is no indicator that the media are doing their job right. The media do indeed love to point out that they are getting it from both sides, and I imagine the fact that both sides attack them and accuse them of “bias” comes in quite handy for them during heated meetings with media activists. In our case, the fact that anti-Palestinian groups (who, we are told repeatedly, are “much louder” than us) complain is almost always used as an end-all argument and a way to avoid dealing with specific concerns we may raise. For example, that exact response was given to me by the foreign desk editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, Ned Warwick, back on July 12, 2002, when I met with him and complained that a study we did on their paper found a ratio of thirteen to one for above-the-fold, front-page photographs showing human suffering of Israelis vs. Palestinians. CNN’s Rick Davis also replied in the exact same way when I asked him on July 3, 2002, why CNN had established an exhaustive Web site mourning every single Israeli victim of political violence in the first half of that year, but had done nothing of the sort for the hundreds of Palestinian children, women, elderly, and other innocent victims killed by the Israeli army. And just a couple of weeks ago, the exact same answer was given to us by CNN’s Aaron Brown, in response to a report we issued on February 20, 2003, in which we found that NewsNight reported 74 percent of Israeli deaths but only 18 percent of Palestinian deaths. They all asserted their “fairness” as an indisputable fact, and pointed to the much higher level of noise made by the anti-Palestinian side as conclusive evidence of that fairness. In other words, instead of addressing the specific complaints, they all opted to simply weasel out.

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