IP: Interesting note on the press post twc...

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

> Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2001 15:27:59 -0700
>
>
> Letter to MWO
>
> As an Israeli journalist now living and working in the United States, one
> post-attacks phenomenon has caught me offguard: The refusal among some (but
> by no means all) journalists to countenance hard questioning of the
> administration.
>
> This has extended from the dearth of questions following the highly suspect
> claim of a "credible threat'' against Air Force One (R.W. Apple and William
> Safire in the New York Times are notable exceptions) to The Washington
> Post's Gene Weingarten's decision to nix Bush jokes.
>
> Let me explain why the Israeli experience makes this approach
> counterintuitive, to say the least.
>
> Israel once had an "editors' committee:'' the editors-in-chief of the major
> newspapers would meet once a month with the top bureaucrat in the prime
> minister's office for a top-secret debriefing on the issues of the day. The
> trade-off for being the best-informed journalists in the country: The
> editors would suppress coverage that the government deemed threatening to
> national security.
>
> The government needed the committee because of a huge loophole in Israel's
> censorship laws: it is virtually impossible to prosecute a publisher for
> publishing anything with a foreign dateline. (This led to an elaborate
> system where Israeli reporters would alert foreign agencies to sensitive
> news, and the material would appear datelined Nicosia, London, wherever.)
>
> The beginning of the end for the system was the 1973 war. Israeli newspapers
> had reports - in some cases not even top secret stuff, just conventional
> wire-service reports - that Syria and Egypt were increasing their war
> footing, moving troops and materiel to the frontlines, etc. The Prime
> Minister's office asked the committee to refrain from publishing the
> reports, not wanting to create a "panic.'' The committee complied.
>
> Of course, the surprise attacks caught Israelis completely off-guard. The
> Israeli toll for the "Yom Kippur'' war numbers about 3,000.  After the war,
> in numerous fora, journalists lacerated themselves: Had the reports been
> published, they said, public pressure might have resulted, and the
> government and army might have been goaded into greater preparedness.
>
> The consensus was that the committee had not been loyal to any patriotic
> idea of a "state,'' but rather to the government of the day, with all its
> political temporalness.  In fact, many journalists worried that they had
> betrayed their countrymen by not publishing the reports.  That started the
> committee's a slow death, and it was finally buried - by Benjamin Netanyahu,
> I believe - just a few years ago.
>
> The Israeli press has since become one of the most adversarial in the world,
> to a fault: just about any critique or theory, however unfounded or
> unsourced, seem to make it to print. Whatever its faults, however, Israelis
> have never since been caught offguard on the scale of the Yom Kippur war.
>
> It's unsettling now to be here and see the same faulty confusion of loyalty
> "government'' and "state'' weave itself into commentary (the Baltimore TV
> station is an egregious example).
>
> Again, I'm just a foreigner (though my kids are American), but it would seem
> to me that relentless scrutiny and skepticism are the most reliable
> hallmarks of a journalist's patriotism.
>
> (Name withheld)
>
>
>
> _________________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com



For archives see: http://www.interesting-people.org/