(
www.the-idler.com)"Read All About It In The Idler
"8 February 2002
BIAS: A National Public Radio Cover-Up?
By Andrea Levin
Kevin Klose, NPR President and CEO
Last December, National Public Radio's On The Media, which claims to be a program devoted to candid examination of media issues, sent reporter Philip Martin to investigate the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America's (CAMERA) intensifying complaints that NPR broadcasts skewed and inaccurate anti-Israel coverage. (Editor's note: CAMERA's complaints about anti-Israel bias led a number of underwriters to pull financial support from NPR stations).
In interviews with CAMERA officials conducted for the program, and in an interview with one of several former NPR underwriters who have ended corporate advertising on the network because of its's anti-Israel bias, Martin pre-taped detailed commentary documenting NPR's bias.
The discrepancy between what was actually said in those interviews, and what was edited for broadcast is testimony to NPR's determination to suppress documented and factual criticism of the network.
For example, CAMERA representatives (in an interview also taped by CAMERA) told Martin that NPR had regularly responded to detailed complaints about error and distortion in specific segments with the claim that, over time, NPR's reporting on the Arab-Israeli conflict is balanced and fair.
NPR claimed to have done a review of two months of coverage in the fall of 2000, and to have found a near-perfect balance in presenting contending Israeli and Palestinian perspectives. In response to this in-house NPR study, CAMERA undertook its own two-month analysis of NPR programming.
But where NPR identified 50 odd speakers in its "study," divided equitably between the parties, CAMERA identified 350 speakers and found a gaping disparity in the time afforded to Israeli and pro-Israeli speakers compared to that provided the Arab and pro-Arab speakers.
Pro-Arab speakers received 77% more time than did pro-Israeli voices.
More dramatic still was the disproportionate number of segments that included only pro-Arab speakers and excluded entirely any pro-Israel voices, compared to the many fewer NPR reports that omitted Arab speakers.
The Arab-speakers-only segments were almost twice as numerous (41 to 24) and four times as long (18,321 words spoken on the air versus 4,934). Clear evidence of bias.
On the Media's reporter was given a copy of the CAMERA study.
All this was described in the taping -- but none of it was aired on NPR.
Nevertheless, NPR presented comments rebutting CAMERA's findings by Professor Alan Stavitsky , associate dean of the University of Oregon Journalism School, and author of Independence and Integrity: A Guideline for Public Radio Journalism.
He declared: "... I think NPR has done a very fair and balanced job of hearing from all sides of the controversy, but if you focus on an individual story or commentary or documentary, then it might appear that there was not balanced coverage."
Yet Stavitsky offered no evidence for his defense of NPR. And he was not challenged by Martin to produce any back-up.
During the interviews, Martin asked what recent, specific objections CAMERA had about NPR coverage.
The reporter was handed a copy of a CAMERA letter to NPR president Kevin Klose dated November 26, 2001 protesting a November 24the segment from reporter Linda Gradstein.
The essentials of that letter were described in the interview: Gradstein's story was devoted entirely to deploring Israel's preventing certain Palestinians from harvesting olives.
Although the report ran longer than five minutes, it was devoid of any explanation from Israeli officials, or mainstream Israeli speakers, pointing out that Palestinian olive groves have been used as cover for ambushes and sniper-fire against Israelis.
Gradstein's omission of this crucial information was clearly noted in Martin's off-air interview with CAMERA.
Indeed, Martin reiterated the CAMERA point during the taping, saying:
"So, in other words, again just so listeners understand this, what you're saying is that here you have a story ostensibly --in the frame of reference of the reporter --about Palestinians attempting to go about their lives, picking crops, olives in this case, and there seems to be a dissociation from the security --the realistic security issues that are a part of the story and you're saying that part of the story is not elucidated. Is that correct?"
Neither this Martin comment, nor any CAMERA statement faulting NPR for its omission of Israeli security concerns made it onto the On the Media broadcast.
Likewise, CAMERA's specific (and taped) objection that the same Gradstein report contained a "material error" when she claimed Jewish settlers "shot dead" an 18-year-old Palestinian girl "as she picked olives."
In fact, as the New York Times and myriad other media reported , the young woman was killed accidentally by soldiers -- in a firefight triggered by Palestinians shooting at Israelis.
Yet, the CAMERA interview was edited by NPR to broadcast the error one more time, without any CAMERA rebuttal. Although CAMERA has urged an on-air correction, as of this writing, more than a month after alerting NPR to the error, the segment remains uncorrected.
In the taping, Martin asked CAMERA about NPR's response to criticism of anti-Israel bias. CAMERA replied that NPR evades accountability, and refuses to address substantive concerns.
This exchange was likewise eliminated from the broadcast.
In Martin's taped interview, CAMERA described in detail NPR's blacklisting of terrorism expert Steven Emerson. This issue was raised as well by a former NPR underwriter in his lengthy interview.
Emerson's work includes the prescient 1994 PBS documentary "Jihad in America," which warned of the presence of radical Islamic groups in America's open society -- well before 9/11.
The serious matter of the banning of Emerson from NPR's airwaves was, again, entirely removed from the broadcast.
On The Media's segment was supposed to look honestly at the single most contentious aspect of NPR's reporting, anti-Israel bias. This bias is increasingly causing the network to lose public support, and may prompt renewed Congressional inquiry into NPR's flouting legal requirements for fairness and balance in tax-supported media.
Instead of presenting a balanced program on this issue, NPR's On the Media simply repeated the same distortion and bias characteristic of the network's broadcasts generally, underscoring the depth of NPR's anti-Israel bigotry.
(Editor's note: When co-hosts Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield read letters from listeners complaining about NPR's ant-Israel bias in the On the Media broadcast, they mocked them on the air with Yiddish dialect phrases.)