Posted on 02/07/2010 4:34:19 AM PST by reaganaut1
LATE last month, a Web site called the Electronic Intifada reported that Ethan Bronner, the Jerusalem bureau chief of The Times, has a son in the Israeli military. Others, including Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a liberal media watchdog group, demanded to know if it was true and, if so, why it did not create an unacceptable conflict of interest for Bronner and The Times.
Bill Keller, the executive editor, confirmed that Bronner’s son enlisted in the Israeli Defense Forces and said, “He’s a 20-year-old who makes his own decisions.” Bronner told me his son joined in late December for roughly a year of training and six months of active duty before he returns to the United States for college. Bronner said he had alerted his editors, as the paper’s ethics guidelines require. Keller said the editors discussed the situation “and see no reason to change his status as bureau chief.”
Bronner occupies one of journalism’s hottest seats, covering the intractable conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. As the top correspondent for America’s most influential newspaper, everything he writes is examined microscopically for signs of bias. Web sites like the Angry Arab News Service have called him a propagandist for Israel. I have received hundreds of messages heatedly contending the opposite: that his coverage is slanted against Israel. Sometimes the “evidence” is a single word in one news article. Sometimes it is his “failure” to show how one side or the other is solely to blame for what is happening.
“No place, date or event in this conflicted land is spoken of in a common language,” Bronner wrote in The Times last year after the three-week Israeli assault on Gaza, intended to stop rocket fire into southern Israel."
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I thought that every citizen of Israel had to make a stint in the IDF as a part of thier citizenship and that most were in the reserves.
Oh spare us the hysteric hypocrisy.
These same "Watchdog" groups have NO problem with the fact that most of the editors and lead reports at the AP and the alphabet networks have personal relations, either via birth or marriage, with members of the Democrat National Committee.
If these "Watchdog" groups were so worried about conflict of interest, they would be hammering ABC/NBC/CBS/AP/NYTIMES et al for their incestuous relationships with the leaders of the Democrat Parties propaganda machine.
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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A corrective policy would, of course, require the media to hire only American citizens for foreign posts, those without the taint of a relative who might hold citizenship in another nation. That'll be a tough standard to follow. For example, they'll have no palestinian stringers or photographers at all. And how about US beats, is it legit to hire potentially biased Americans to report the news. What's next, hiring conservative political commentators?
That’s true, presuming his son is and Israeli citizen. That’s not established, he may simply be a volunteer. Still, imo it’s potentially an interesting exercise of visiting the “sins” of the son on the father. Were it race based, a reporter on the civil rights beat adopts a black child and is transferred, it would be clearly actionable and condemned by the left far and wide.
Every Jewish citizen (essentially) has the obligation.
All other citizen have the right to serve. Many non-Jewish Israelis do serve (e.g., Druze).
Non-Israeli Jews have the option to serve. I met my wife this way (she is Jewish, but non-Israeli -— for a little while longer, working on her).
...a Web site called the Electronic Intifada reported that Ethan Bronner, the Jerusalem bureau chief of The Times, has a son in the Israeli military. Others, including Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a liberal media watchdog group, demanded to know if it was true and, if so, why it did not create an unacceptable conflict of interest for Bronner and The Times.Thanks reaganaut1.
But the Electronic Intifadah and the MSM have no problem with all the Muslims, Palestinians working for AP, CNN, BBC, and Reuters who report on the Iraq war and the Israeli operation in Gaza.
They did not even have a problem getting their news on the Lebanon war from Hezbollah.
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