Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #667, 10/13/13

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@comcast.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #667, 10/13/13

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Sunday through Saturday, Israel found itself uncharacteristically ignored This Week In The Inq. No fodder there for a weekly Inq-focused pro-Israel media watch. This week, though, you can’t Blame-the-Editor. He got fired on Monday, the Inq itself reported on Tuesday. (Internal “tensions rose over his removal,” the Inq reported on Wednesday. A suit for his reinstatement was immediately filed by some Inq owners against other Inq owners, the Inq reported on Friday.)

Some insight on Inq-Thinq, how the paper today sees its role in informing its readers, appeared in these articles, reflecting a very different Inq from what area pro-Israel media watchers faced when BSMW set out to do weekly pro-Israel Inq-watching 667 weeks back. Through a succession of financial jolts, chronicled over the years in this media watch, the intensity of the Inq’s Israel obsession has lessened. My guess is the addiction remains and will resurface when temptation arises.

BSMW this week recaps those jolts, and then cites three Israel coverage instances exemplifying the depth of the Inq’s imbalanced misperception of Israel and Israel’s Jews.

This Week At The Inq: Public Fallout From Infighting Over Editor Ouster
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Surprisingly, the Philadelphia Inquirer ran three long house-written news articles This Week In The Inq on infighting over its firing of its editor, surprisingly because the Inq is a private enterprise, so its intimate internal workings aren’t a public affair, even under Obamacare (which, unsurprisingly, the Inq is in favor of).

A bit that’s media watch-relevant appeared in these articles – “Marimow Fired as Inquirer Editor; ‘Differences’ Cited,” Inq, Tue, 10/8/13, A1, 16; “Tensions Rise Over Editor’s Removal,” Inq, Wed, 10/9/13, A15, 18; and “Suit Filed In Firing of Paper’s Editor,” Inq, Fri, 10/11/13, A18, 20, all by Inquirer Staff Writers.

Tuesday’s article led with citing “philosophical differences” between the Inq’s publisher and editor “over the direction of the newspaper as it fights to maintain its print readership and establish a new digital presence,” and then quoted just “fired” (Inq’s word) editor Marimow that the Inq’s facing “extremely difficult circumstances.” Further down it said the current owners had bought the Inq, Daily News and Philly.com for $55 million, “significantly below [you could say that] the $515 million sale price to a different local ownership group in 2006, and the $139 million that creditors paid at a 2010 bankruptcy auction.” It said that the paper, like others in the industry, “has been roiled by management changes and cost-cutting in recent years.”

What is of particular interest to us, as Inq-focused pro-Israel media watchers, is Tuesday’s Inq reporters’ quote of their interview of Robert J. Hall, their publisher, on how the Inq [one of America’s largest 20 papers – Inq article Friday] is responding to its current financial pressures:

“It was the urgency to make changes and the type of changes to be made, based on research,” Hall said in the earlier interview. IGM [the Inq’s corporate owner] has conducted market research showing that casual readers of the newspaper and nonreaders could be enticed with more local news focused on their daily concerns.

“Currently, we are on a path to becoming a more local paper, with local content that is relevant to readers,” Hall said. “It’s all about their life and their community.” …. [emphasis added]

What an incredibly far cry from the Inq that BSMW found when it began its Inq-watching in January 2001. The Inq was then owned by Knight-Ridder and ran Knight-Ridder News Service news articles on Israel, AP news articles on Israel, and articles on Israel by its own only-such-place-in-the-world Jerusalem Bureau, sometimes on the same day. To cite the Inq’s intensity on just one Israel issue, that particular month the Inq ran news articles referencing “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants” or the equivalent on January 4 (Knight-Ridder), January 9 (Knight-Ridder), January 10 (AP), January 12 (AP), January 13 (AP), January 14 (AP), and January 21 (AP).

The first jolt came around 2006 with the demise of the Inq’s owner, the frequently-appearing on Israel Knight-Ridder. A second Israel-intensity-diminishing jolt came with then local owner Brian Tierney’s decision that a Philadelphia Inquirer needed its own South Jersey Bureau more than its own Jerusalem Bureau. And now we have (along with downsizing of the daily ed and op-ed pages from two to one, and apparent, alas, loss of Krauthammer on Mondays) this publisher-announced shift to “more local news,” to the Inq currently being “on a path to becoming a more local paper.” Alevai.

Three Exemplars of Inq’s Imbalanced Perception of Israel

“Israel’s Gaza Attacks” of March 2008

In February 2008, Hamas escalated from lobbing small Qassam rockets at Negev towns like Sderot to also launching large Grad rockets at the city of Ashkelon. Over a ten-day period in late February and early March, I printed out twelve pages of news article squibs from the Conf. of Presidents’ Daily Alerts, headlined, e.g.:

*** “Fifty Palestinian Rockets Bombard Israel … Ashkelon Hospital Targeted”

*** “Ashkelon Residents Realize: ‘We’re Just Like Sderot’”

*** “Ten Palestinian Rockets Hit Ashkelon”

The news clips quoted in BSMW #375 included the following:

*** Friday, 2/29/08, AP/International Herald Tribune:

The Israeli city of Ashkelon (pop. 120,000), located 17 kilometers (11 miles) from Gaza, was hit by several Iranian-made Grad (Katyusha) rockets on Thursday, fired by Hamas militants in Gaza. One hit an apartment building, slicing through the roof and three floors below, and another landed near a school, wounding 17-year-old girl.

*** Monday, 3/3/08, Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs:

The 122 mm. Grad rockets (also known as Katyushas) fired from Hamas-controlled Gaza against the Israeli city of Ashkelon are a standard military artillery weapon, equipped with a weapons-grade high explosive fragmentation warhead. The range of the rockets fired against Ashkelon is over 20 km., an upgraded capability which places about a quarter of a million Israeli civilians in constant danger of Hamas attack.

The Inq’s headlines between February 28 and March 6, 2008, on Israel’s response to this rocketing mentioned “Hamas,” “upgraded capability” or “escalation” “Grads” or “Katyushas,” and “Ashkelon” NOT AT ALL. What the Inq’s headlines did mention was

*** Inq headline, 3/3/08, A1: “Mideast Peace Talks Off; Palestinians Suspend Discussions; Israel Vows to Keep Up Gaza Attacks; Condoleeza Rice is Due in the Region Next Week”

*** Inq headline, 3/4/08, A1: “Israelis Exit Gaza; Hamas Sees Gain; Amid the Losses, It Claimed a Hezbollah Resistance Model”

*** Inq headline, 3/5/08, A3: “Abbas Declines To Set Time for Resuming Talks; He Met with Rice, Who Pushed for the Resumption of Negotiations Broken Off Over Israel’s Incursion into Gaza.”

*** Inq headline, 3/6/08, A2: “Mideast Talks Back on Track, Rice Says in Visit to Region; Abbas Had Halted Them After Israel’s Incursion into Gaza. No Date for a Restart was Announced.”

Do you think that “Hamas,” “Escalation” and “Ashkelon” deserved Inq headline mention? Even once? Or just “Israel’s Incursion into Gaza,” “Israel’s Gaza Attacks”?

“Outcry, Crisis After Deadly Raid By Israel”

Every day for a week, starting with its huge, hysterical June 1, 2010, “Outcry, Crisis After Deadly Raid By Israel” headline at the top of A1, the Inq ran a front page or A2 article on Israel’s interception at sea of “an aid flotilla” bound for Gaza, followed by continuing follow-ups, many on Turkey’s demand that Israel “apologize” for killing nine of the resisting “activists” on the ship who were attacking Israel’s soldiers. That initial “Outcry, Crisis” Inq headline substantially exceeded in size and tone of hysteria, e.g., the Inq’s headline a couple months later when the Taliban lined up ten medical aid workers, six of them American, in an Afghan forest, and mowed them down execution style.

On September 2, 2011, the United Nations issued a report that the New York Times reported reached “the conclusion that Israel’s naval blockade is in keeping with international law and that its forces have the right to stop Gaza-bound ships in international waters.” The Inq ran this NY Times report on page 18.

The very next day, 9/3/11, the Inq ran above-the-fold on A1: “Turks Oust Top Israeli Diplomat; They Want an Apology for a Raid Last Year.”

Israel “Fuels a Bitterness” By Not Repatriating “Suicide” Bombers’ Remains

The Inq ran this front page Inquirer Staff Writer article a decade ago, but it has stuck in my craw as illuminating the paper’s mindset regarding the respective rights and standing in Palestine of Arabs and Jews. In June 2002, the Inq ran a page 1 article stating that Israelis “fuel a bitterness” by not promptly repatriating [for sanctification of “martyrdom”] so-called “suicide” (Inq-speak for mass-murder) bombers’ remains. This front-page article was not written by a home office Inqnik, but by an Inq reporter stationed in Israel who’d stood on Jerusalem sidewalks watching religious Jews and sanitation workers, unaided by Arab bomb dispatchers the Inq labels as “militants,” scraping up from the street and the gutter little bits and pieces of exploded and incinerated remains of what just before had been pizza-enjoying or municipal bus-riding Jewish men, women and kids.

So how’s that for a balanced perception of respective Jewish and Arab equities in what had been Israel & Judah, Yehud and Judaea for a millennium, followed exclusively by foreign, mostly non-Arab, rule for two millennia (by European Romans and Byzantines, then foreign Arab dynasties progressively controlled by the Turks, then European Christian Crusaders, and finally for six centuries non-Arab Mamluks followed by non-Arab Turks), until Jewish Israel became the land’s next native state after Jewish Judaea? The Inq’s Trudy Rubin could hardly have done better had she called Jews in historic Jerusalem (capital of every Jewish state, and with a renewed Jewish majority dating from 19th century Ottoman times) “Jewish settlers” beyond “Israel’s 1967 borders” in “Arab East Jerusalem” ten times in one sentence.

Regards,
Jerry