Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #700, 6/1/14

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #700, 6/1/14

In Memoriam: Al Liss, Longtime Brith Sholom Executive Director, Zionist
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I know that Al Liss couldn’t have been Brith Sholom’s Executive Director since that fraternal order, to which I’ve belonged, like my father before me, for most of my life, came into existence in 1905, but it seemed to me that Al had been there so long, embodying and eloquently championing what it stood for, that by me he might well have been. At the Brith Sholom booth at an Israel Day one spring afternoon on the Parkway, Al told me about his involvement in The American League for a Free Palestine, and many times we talked about how Brith Sholom, sponsor for the past 700 weeks of this media watch, helped in supplying “farm machinery” to Israel in 1948 and helped in other ways over the years. Al passed away this week, removing from our midst another of those now very elderly folks who proudly and, with far greater meaning than our generation, called themselves “Zionists.” They’ll be missed.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Lewis Katz, who along with Gerry Lenfest bought out Inq co-owner Norcross in an internal auction this past week, died last night in a small plane’s crash in Boston. He had been a philanthropist. The community’s condolences are due to his family. The Inq’s website says that the sale will move forward, and that Mr. Katz’s son, Drew Katz, will fulfill his father’s Inq ownership role.

This Week At The Inq: Another Ownership Change
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One of the Philly Inquirer’s (Inq’s) feuding ownership factions bought out the other this week. Lewis Katz, one of the buyers, died last night in a small plane’s crash in Boston. The Inq’s website says the sale will proceed, and that Mr. Katz’s son Drew will take over his father’s Inq ownership role. Who knows how this Inq ownership change will affect its Israel coverage, if at all, but a prior Inq ownership change did have a noticeable effect, so let’s look back how it did.

I quoted last week the wire service news article that graced the Inq’s front page the week of Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #1 of January 7, 2001. That news article talked about “nearly four million Palestinian refugees and their descendants” who “fled or were forced to leave” their homes in 1948 “during the creation of Israel.” The perpetrator of that particular much-repeated canard was Knight-Ridder, but the AP kept saying much the same thing, and the Inq in those days kept prominently reporting negatively on Israel from three sources – its owner, Knight-Ridder; the AP; and the Inq’s own only-such-place-in-the-world Jerusalem Bureau.

The ownership change, for the better, though through no action of ours, was caused by the demise of Knight-Ridder. It had two effects. One was the end of Knight-Ridder News Service as a routine Israel-reporting news source in parallel with the AP and the Inq’s Jerusalem Bureau, diminishing the wellsprings of the Inq’s unwholesome focus on Israel from three sources to two.

McClatchy, which likely would not have been much of an improvement over Knight-Ridder, almost ended up with the Inq, but the Brian Tierney local group bought it, and in its severely financially-strapped effort, as Brian put it, “to make pigs fly,” closed the Inq’s Jerusalem Bureau. I don’t know how many comparable American city papers have/had their own foreign country news bureaus, but the closing of the Inq’s in Jerusalem further reduced the intensity of its imbalanced focus on Israel.

The Tierney group still owned the Inq as Israel and its supporters prepared to commemorate its 60th independence anniversary in 2008. BSMW, endorsed by 160 readers’ letters, sent Mr. Tierney a 60-page dossier of its Israel reporting, calling upon it for four coverage changes:

[a] stop calling the UN’s attempted 1948 partition of western Palestine between its Jewish and Arab populations the 1948 “founding” and “creation” of Israel;

[b] stop calling the partition-rejecting multi-nation Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction “the war that followed Israel’s creation” without the invading Arab states so much as named;

[c] stop calling the Arabs who left Israel during the war started by that Arab invasion “Palestinian refugees of the war that followed Israel’s creation”; and

[d] start mentioning equally prominently and frequently the greater number of indigenous Middle East Jews who left vast Arab and other Muslim lands, mostly for Israel, in that war and its wake than Arabs left tiny Israel.

Herb Denenberg of The Bulletin devoted a whole page to our effort.

We weren’t favored with a direct reply, but on May 8, 2008, the Inq ran an Inquirer Staff Writer piece, authored by Michael Matza, former head of its former Jerusalem Bureau, that uncharacteristically referred to 1948 as when “Israel gained its independence from the British,” referenced “the United Nations partition vote” and “1947 when the United Nations adopted the partition plan,” and stated that in 1948 “the armies of Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon and Iraq invaded the land Israel claimed as its home.” It wasn’t until that remarkable article’s tail-end last sentence that Mr. Matza signed off (I’ll bet smiling) with a signature “the creation of Israel and war that followed.”

That same day, the Inq ran an almost-Inq-owner McClatchy timeline insert including

*** “1948, U.N. proposed separate Jewish and Palestinian states ….”

*** “Jews proclaimed the state of Israel; fighting between Jews and Palestinians caused two-thirds of Palestinian population to flee.”

The U.N., of course, attempted to partition Palestine between its Arab and Jewish populations into an “Arab State” and a “Jewish State,” not to partition Palestine between “Palestinians” and Jews (rather like partitioning Pennsylvania between “Pennsylvanians” and Jews), and even referred in partition resolution 181 to Palestine’s Jews and Arabs as “the two Palestinian peoples.”

Nor did McClatchy and the Inq’s “fighting between Jews and Palestinians caused two-thirds of Palestinian population to flee” remotely resemble what had historically happened. As the Inq itself put it that very day: “the armies of Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon and Iraq invaded the land Israel claimed as its home.”

OK, it’s now six years later. Has anything changed?

Last week’s BSMW #699, quoting AP last week in the Inq:

On that day [May 15, 2014], Palestinians marked the anniversary of their uprooting in the war over Israel’s 1948 creation …. (Inq, Wed, 5/21/14, A3, AP) (emphasis added)

Week before’s BSMW #698, quoting AP a fortnight ago in the Inq:

Palestinians marched in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to commemorate their displacement in the Mideast war over Israel’s 1948 creation. (Inq, Fri, 5/16/14, A4, AP) (emphasis added) (see BSMW #698)

I’ve lost count how many successive owners the Inq’s had during the time of this Inq-focused media watch. I’m not sure it matters that much. Perhaps we could make a better-balance-on-Israel pitch to the younger Mr. Katz, who like Mr. Tierney is at least closer than San Jose. But if we really care about the media not telling the West about “Palestinians displaced by Israel’s creation” or, as Mr. Matza put it, “the creation of Israel and war that followed,” the people with whom to begin are not media moguls but us, the Jewish Diaspora grassroots. Here’s two ways you can help: [1] stop using the Arabs’ and media’s loaded lexicon of Jewish homeland delegitimizing expressions, all of it, and [2] get your brother-in-law to subscribe (it’s free) to Brith Sholom Media Watch.

Regards,
Jerry