Okay, everybody, welcome back to the show.
This is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your guest host, Zoe Greif, and I am pleased as punch to welcome our first guest for today's show, Peter Hart.
Peter Hart is the Activism Director at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
He writes for FAIR's magazine, Extra, and is also a co-host and producer of FAIR's syndicated radio show, Counterspin.
Welcome to the show, Peter Hart.
How are you doing today?
I'm doing good.
Okay, well, it's a pleasure to talk to you.
I want to ask you about this March 9th article from earlier this year, a couple of days ago, about the New York Times correction box.
Israel, Iran, and you point out that the New York Times has been doing a lot of corrections lately.
Can you pick up that ball and explain it a little bit more to the viewers?
Yeah, I mean, you know, I think it's interesting to read the corrections box in the New York Times because it's such a strange part of the paper.
There is this assumption that if something's corrected there, that means that they did something wrong and therefore much or all of the rest of the paper was just all right.
But then you have these weird corrections, and I was writing about a couple that I'd seen over the last week.
The first one was about how the New York Times referred to AIPAC, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, had the big convention, you know, that they do every year in D.C.
Something like 15,000 people are on hand.
Every politician, it seems it's a bipartisan phenomenon, goes forward.
And that was the need for AIPAC, yes.
You know, there's this ritual, I've got Israel's back kind of thing, as Barack Obama put it.
And then there's this citizen lobbying effort that goes on where the Capitol Hill is just sort of flooded with people who go and relay talking points to their representatives, with a couple of exceptions.
I think Ron Paul's office doesn't have visitors, and I think Dennis Kucinich, but everyone else is being visited by these citizen lobbyists to all sort of tell the same story.
But anyway, the Times has this correction that says because of an editing error, the article about the lobbying effort referred incorrectly to the organization known as AIPAC.
It is a pro-Israel lobbying group that works in the United States.
It does not work directly for the state of Israel or its government.
A lot of people saw this, and you saw it buzzing around the web because it was so weird.
Everybody knows who AIPAC is.
Nobody is under the assumption that it's the formal lobbying arm of the state of Israel.
And when you read a correction like that, you're not exactly sure what they're correcting.
So you have to go back to the story, and you find that the reference in the piece that seems to be what they're correcting is the reporter saying that AIPAC was an Israel lobbying group.
Now, we can have a long discussion about what language means and what the words might imply, but this is what AIPAC is.
This is what they do.
So when you see somebody correcting, or more to the point, an organization like the New York Times correcting a story about AIPAC because it says that AIPAC is an Israel lobbying group, and the correction tells you, no, no, no, it's a pro-Israel lobbying group.
That suggests, to me at least, and I think to other people who saw it, that there isn't really anything worth correcting in this piece, but there were a lot of people, and more importantly, a lot of very powerful people, who complained to the Times about the language in this piece, and the correction is kind of a makeup for that.
People complain to the Times all the time, every day, and some of the complaints are valid.
This one strikes me as kind of crazy, but the fact that the Times would respond to it, I think, is very revealing.
Well, I got to ask you, Peter Hart, if AIPAC doesn't work, I mean, again, I don't want to get tripped up on all this language, but if they don't work on behalf of Israel, then who do they work on behalf of?
What is the Times even trying to say here?
That's the question, you know, and you know what AIPAC does, and you know its role in the political debate.
You know, a couple of years ago, we had this massive controversy, totally manufactured, in my view, about the book, The Israel Lobby.
One of the things that I think has been encouraging over the last couple of years is that the debate over American policy vis-a-vis Israel has expanded, and I think, you know, there's a lot of reasons for it, but I think that book by Walton Mearsheimer did present a case that I think people have, you know, at the time, it was very controversial, now it's, I think, less so, because people do, across the political spectrum, understand that this is an area where U.S. foreign policy has taken a decidedly one-sided perspective, and in some cases, it's a dangerous one, and the debate about Iran, I think, is a perfect example where, you know, when you see Barack Obama going to the AIPAC conference and saying, make no mistake, I've got Israel's back, well, Israel is threatening to launch an attack unprovoked on another nation, which could plunge the region, and perhaps the world, into a war for the President of the United States to say, I've got Israel's back no matter what, this should strike people as very alarming and unusual, and this is, I think, the discussion that we should be having, but when you see an outlet like the New York Times correcting that AIPAC is not an Israel lobbying group, it's a pro-Israel lobbying group, we're really straying far off course here, I think it's a monumentally bizarre instance of, I think, the very effective and very coordinated efforts to critique outlets like the New York Times when it comes to how they cover Israel.
Very much so.
Real quickly, I just wanted to ask you, there's another point in your article that I wanted to have you explain for the benefit of the viewers, rubber bullets, are they really that non-lethal after all?
That's a point you make it in your article, and apparently they are lethal at times, but would you please explain a little bit more about rubber bullets?
Yeah, this was the piece, actually, the correction the very next day, the Times issued this correction, and it was a picture that they had on the front page of Israeli soldiers in the West Bank, and the picture was of Israeli soldiers with what looked like heavy arms firing, you don't see what they're firing at, and the correction the next day says the soldiers, the article was not even about the soldiers, but the soldiers were firing rifles at stone throwers in the West Bank, but the rifles contained rubber bullets.
Again, this is a strange correction because it's not what the article was about, there was no suggestion that they were firing live ammunition at people, so it is this kind of correction out of nowhere, where you're being told that, you know, that picture that you saw, that you might not remember, that did not really correspond to the article that you read, or was not explained in the article that you read, actually, we should make clear that they were firing rubber bullets, the implication seeming to be that rubber bullets are not that harmful, and I think we've had instances in the United States and elsewhere where rubber-coated bullets have, in fact, been very harmful and can be very dangerous.
Again, if you get to this question of who is calling the Times to complain about this, and why, and I think in both cases, I would suspect that there were very powerful interests at work here who were trying to soften coverage that they might deem too anti-Israel or too critical of Israel.
We noted, I think, 10 years ago, that one of the arguments that you saw in media coverage of Israel, when people were critiquing the coverage for being too anti-Israel, was that the coverage should call them rocks instead of stones, when Palestinian kids were throwing them at Israeli soldiers.
This is the state of media criticism when it comes to Israel, from the pro-Israel side, that, you know, we're talking about whether something is a pro-Israel lobbying group or an Israel lobbying group, whether the rubber bullets are rubber or tipped or something else.
It suggests a real keen sensitivity to how Israel is being covered, and the Times, I think, willingness to respond proactively when they're criticized.
Yeah, I wonder, Peter Hart, who makes these calls to the New York Times, and who answers these calls, and what do they say, and how does it have this effect as to, you know, appear as a correction a day later?
Do you have any insight on that?
It's always hard to say, you know.
The Times is not very transparent about these things.
We know in the past there have been groups like Camera, which are sort of pro-Israel groups that monitor the media, and I think are not at all hesitant about putting enormous pressure on the media to toe the line on these kinds of stories.
Peter Hart, I'm sorry, I wouldn't ask you a question right up against a hard break, my bad.
I'll let you answer more fully if you want to on the other side.
We're talking with Peter Hart, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, more like this on the other side, Antiwar Radio.
All right, welcome back to the show, Antiwar Radio.
I'm your guest host, Zoe Greif, and I've got on the line Peter Hart of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting fame.
Welcome back, Peter, and I just want to give you the chance to finish up, if you want to, what we were talking about before we were so rudely interrupted by the break.
Who calls the New York Times, and who answers, and what do they say that results in a correction the next day?
Well, I think there's a group called Camera that's been very active over the years on Israel coverage, pro-Israel group, and they've had very effective boycott sort of letter writing campaigns against a lot of outlets.
They went after an NPR affiliate in Boston, seemed like it did a real dent, caused real damage in their fundraising.
They went after the LA Times, and this is when papers do the rare thing of kind of straying from the line on Israel, so these kind of cops are out there on the beat, and I don't think it's necessarily them in these cases, but, you know, as I'm sure your listeners don't need to be told, the debate on Israel in this country is one where I think the parties hardly differ, and when you have an issue like that where there isn't a real partisan break and elites seem to agree more or less on the contours of American policy, it's very unusual to see media push back against that or to include voices that critique the dominant line.
So, you know, it's an area where there isn't a lot of media debate, and so you're left to kind of quibble over whether or not to call AIPAC a lobbying group, an Israel lobbying group or something like that, but it goes to show you just how much pressure there is out there on outlets like the Times.
I'm reminded of the phrase, the banality of evil with regard to this bipartisanship that you talk about with regard to Israel, but continuing, if I can switch gears here, I'd like to ask you about this fairness and accuracy in reporting story.
After Afghan massacre, war gets victim status.
Let's talk about the media coverage of this latest massacre in Afghanistan.
I don't know if it was one soldier who went off and killed those 16 people or more, but that's not what we're talking about here.
We're talking about the media coverage and, you know, the Afghan war itself as a victim of this guy's extracurricular activity.
Would you care to speak to that, Peter Hart?
Yeah, you know, we've been through this a couple of times over the course of this war where something like this happens and an incident in isolation that gets a lot of attention.
I think it serves to distract us from the day-to-day problems with the Afghan war and the real idiocy of the policy.
I think we're sort of afraid to call it what it is at this point, but you have an incident like this that brings it back into the news and it's treated as a kind of PR problem for the government.
Reuters story called it the latest American public relations disaster in Afghanistan.
A public relations headache was the Associated Press.
The USA Today had a headline, The Killings Threaten Afghan Mission.
I saw that today at NPR as well.
The New York Times talked about how there were fears about anti-American hostility being rekindled in Afghanistan, a violent reaction adding to a feeling of siege among Western personnel.
You get the sense that the problem here is that, see, this incident ruined a perfectly decent Afghan war strategy and has created a problem for Barack Obama.
The problem is the war itself, obviously, and the sooner that policy elites figure this out, the better.
And I think this is a story that kind of encapsulates all of the disasters of the Afghan war at once.
We have a soldier going out apparently and acting in accord with the kind of night raid policies that we've been pursuing there for probably the better part of a decade.
Obviously, they're not as deadly as this one, but soldiers kicking down doors and raiding homes is a daily fact of life in Afghanistan.
So we have that.
We have a soldier who, by some accounts, shouldn't have been out in the field in the first place due to his brain injury coming from a base in Washington State that has been the scene of so many similar scandals, soldiers from that area.
We have a lot of things on our plate to deal with here, but for mainstream media who have continued to line up behind staying the course in Afghanistan, this is just one more example of a public relations problem.
When the problem itself seems to be much bigger than that, it seems to be the war.
The New York Times has an editorial today saying, you know, this action is terrible.
It's obviously an unspeakable tragedy, but we should redouble our efforts to figure out a way to arrange a U.S. presence post-2014.
This is the quote-unquote liberal New York Times saying the solution here is to try to figure out how to keep the war going on.
Well, that leads to my next question, Peter Hart.
I did go to journalism school, actually, just long enough to realize, wow, I don't really want to do that, at least not in the conventional sense.
But I remember being taught things like, you know, context and attribution.
And, you know, I remember if I got a fact wrong on a paper, if I misspelled a proper name, it was an automatic zero, no matter how good the rest of the article may or may not have been.
So my point is, how can the New York Times get away with this lack of context, with, you know, this lack of attribution?
Anonymous Israeli officials say Martians are going to do this or that, and they just report it with a straight face.
There's no accountability.
Peter Hart, what's going on with the journalism today?
Well, I think the rules maybe that you learned, albeit briefly in journalism school, might be the same ones that I learned, too, albeit briefly in journalism school.
But journalism as it's practiced at the level of the New York Times or some of the networks is very different.
I think, you know, I always urge this to people who are trying to get a sense of what reality is like in the Afghan war.
You read Michael Hastings' book.
Remember, he wrote that piece for Rolling Stone about Stanley McChrystal that caused the controversy.
Hastings' book is a testament to the kind of journalism we think journalists should be doing all the time.
You have access to these elite sources, but you're not pulling punches.
You're reporting what they're saying, and you're putting in the context of a failed strategy that on its face is obviously not working.
If all journalism looked like that, I think our public debate about the Afghanistan war would be very different.
And I don't think Hastings is doing something unusual, or he's breaking the rules.
He's breaking the Washington rules about how you're supposed to be a reporter, and that probably means he's never going to work for the New York Times.
But what it does mean is that he's going to give us a better impression of what's happening in the Afghan war.
Things like that exist, I think, to remind us of the limitations of the corporate-owned media, and to the extent that we can continue to remind ourselves of that and seek out the alternatives that are really the only source of realistic impressions of a war like Afghanistan, then we do ourselves a great service because we can remind ourselves that what the New York Times is telling us is not necessarily all the news that's fit to print.
And speaking of journalism school, this was in the late 1990s, but when I finally got to my senior level class, they revealed the big secret of journalism.
And what that was is you go upstairs into the library, and you get on this computer, and you look up the newyorktimes.com, and that's back when it was internet 1.0.
There weren't any hyperlinks or anything to click on.
You could just read it on your screen, and you were supposed to, this is what my instructor told me, you're supposed to pick three or four stories that look interesting, try to give them a local, you know, fluff it up to give it a local angle, and that's the news.
Whatever the New York Times says, you're not supposed to question it, or verify it, or fact check, or anything.
You're just supposed to, you know, parrot it just blindly.
That's the news.
That's what I was taught in journalism school.
And if you, you know, we used to watch all the network newscasts at 6.30 and ABC, CBS, NBC, and if you did that on a lot of nights, if you had read the New York Times in the morning, you knew what was going to be on the newscasts, except, you know, if they were breaking news and something interrupted it, that it was what the New York Times said kind of set the agenda.
We're in a different media environment in some ways now, but in some ways we're not.
The New York Times still has this unusual reputation as the kind of paper that you go to when you're looking for, you know, the gold standard in American journalism.
And to the extent that criticism of the Times can either improve it or can, more importantly, diminish that reputation, I think it's a good thing.
So if people feel like they're, you know, you always see these things where the journalism is in crisis because people don't trust the news.
To me, that's a great sign.
It's a great sign that people look at the New York Times and say, well, I'll check it out for myself.
This is a wonderful moment in journalism, not as journalists practice it, but as how we as citizens interact with the media and question what we're reading and seek out alternatives that are available to us that 15 years ago weren't available.
And if your journalism professor tried to do that kind of exercise with students today, you know, they would laugh.
There's no reason to expect the New York Times to be the paper that, you know, tells you everything you need to know in life.
What do you think is the trend for the future?
It seems to me like the New York Times is undermining its own credibility all day, every day.
It seems like it can't last that eventually the mainstream public is going to catch on.
What do you think, Peter Hart?
You know, I think there are always going to be outlets like the Times, whether it's called the New York Times or whether it's called something else that have an unusual footprint in the media landscape.
You look at something like Politico, which I think is rarely a source of revelatory journalism, but has an unusual power because they speak to the beltway.
So there's always going to be outlets like that that have a lot of sway, but there are always going to be a thousand others that are pushing back.
All right.
I wish we could talk more, but that's all the time we have to talk with Peter Hart from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
Thank you so much for your expertise and your time on the show today.
My pleasure.
All right.
Good to talk to you.
This is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your guest host, Zoli Greif.
More on the other side.
