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Unfair and Unbalanced

Why the media did a lousy job covering the intifada.

Sep 22, 2003, Vol. 9, No. 02 • By JOSHUA MURAVCHIK
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NO SOONER was Saddam Hussein chased from power than CNN revealed that it had often held its tongue about his savagery for fear of losing access to Iraq and provoking violent retribution. Although the confession was stunning, it was only the most recent chapter in a long story. Tyrannies have often managed to compromise Western journalists--by threats, bribes, and trickery. The New York Times covered up the story of Soviet famines in the 1930s. The Times of London hailed Hitler's "night of long knives" as an effort to "impose a high standard on Nazi officials." Mao, Fidel, Ho, Ayatollah Khomeini, and the Nicaraguan Sandinistas all succeeded at whitewashing their portrayal in the Western media. To this list, we can add the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

I recently completed a study of coverage of the Palestinian intifada that found scores of stories displaying imbalance or outright inaccuracy tilted against Israel. Some of this reflected bias--not anti-Semitism, but the perception of the conflict as "an epic struggle of the weak against the strong," in the words of one correspondent for the Economist. More often, however, the cause lay in the asymmetry of the news environments of a democracy and a tyranny. (I use the word "tyranny" since Yasser Arafat's rule has rested more on the dozen or so "security" services that he has always controlled personally than on the election he won without meaningful opposition.)

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