When CNN is the story

CNN is making new efforts to contend with criticism by Israel and the Jewish community of its Middle East coverage. Miriam Shaviv looks at the news station's uneasy history of reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the real reasons it decided to make changes

On Monday night, star CNN presenter Wolf Blitzer is sitting at a table against the backdrop of the Old City of Jerusalem.

"I have with me four very special people," he says, and introduces his guests: two relatives of terror victims, a survivor of a suicide bombing, and a psychologist who deals with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Sherri Mandell, the mother of Kobi, a 14-year-old who last year was stoned to death by Palestinians in a cave near his Tekoa home, begins by describing her son leaving home "with a salami sandwich"; Meir Schijveschuurder, who lost his parents and three siblings in the Sbarro bombing, describes in broken English receiving a call to come to sign an emergency form to allow one of his sisters to be operated on, and how it slowly dawned on him his parents were gone.

Polina Valis, who was injured in the Dolphinarium attack, relates how the friends who were there still support each other, but are still "afraid to go by bus, go the mall, drink coffee."

The name of the show, the first in a five-part series, is Victims of Terror, and in the next four days, it focused on the professionals who were first to arrive at the scene of an explosion, and regular Israelis who have to brave the buses every day, risking their lives.

For many media observers, both the tone and the content of the program were a novelty. Although CNN routinely reports on terror attacks in Israel, pro-Israeli groups have complained over a long period that it downplays the stories of victims, often neglecting to identify them by name and age, and devoting to them less airtime than to suffering Palestinians.

Watchdog groups have long charged that CNN is actually biased against Israel. They have logged countless examples of reporters who allow Palestinian representatives to get away with abject lies, such as the PLO representative to the US, Hassan Abdel Rahman, who said on Crossfire on April 2 that there were "very few" armed people hiding in the Church of the Nativity; reporters who talk repeatedly of violence "flaring up" and "erupting" in the passive tense, helping to disguise Palestinian responsibility for the violence; and reporters who distort facts, for example, on February 16 reporting that "a Palestinian died when a car exploded," without mentioning he was in the process of attempting a suicide bombing.

But this week, there were other gestures towards the pro-Israeli community from CNN. Eason Jordan, the network's chief news executive and newsgathering president, flew in to the region and requested a meeting with Communications Minister Reuven Rivlin. During his visit, he defended CNN's reporting record to virtually every major media outlet in the country, and announced that CNN would no longer give air time to the families of Palestinian bombers "unless there is a compelling reason to do so."

The immediate spur for the gestures was the decision by the YES satellite company to offer FOX News as an alternative to CNN, and a threat by the cable companies to follow suit. The Israeli media treated the gestures as proof that the Israeli lobby really does have power to hurt even such large and powerful networks. The headline in Yediot Aharonot, gloated about "CNN's amelioration trip"; Ma'ariv, boasted of a "special apology."

Clearly, the pro-Israeli lobby's muscle flexing has worked some wonders. But media commentators place the victory in the context of a larger battle CNN is waging, for viewers from the conservative side of the political spectrum in the US.

"CNN has well-documented biases, including being pro-Liberal," says Elizabeth Swasey, director of Communications at the Media Resource Center in Alexandria, Virginia. "There is much more competition in the market now, so they are being forced to change."

In recent months, that competition has increased enormously. CNN's biggest rival is Rupert Murdoch's FOX News, created just five years ago, which has managed to capture much of the conservative heartland. Two months ago, according to Swasey, for the first time, FOX managed to beat CNN in ratings in terms of sheer numbers - although it is still available in fewer homes in the US.

According to Swasey, CNN is under tremendous pressure to regain its number one status among cable networks. It realizes that many of the viewers on the mainstream center and Right in the US feel strongly about Israel and believe CNN is too pro-Palestinian.

"They are not used to losing in ratings," she says. "There is a note of desperation in a lot of what they are doing right now. They will try anything."

EVEN critics of CNN agree that any anti-Israeli bias was never company policy, but there is still a long history of antagonism between Israel activists and individual CNN correspondents.

CNN's relationship with Israel goes back to June 1980, when it first went on air, and when it opened its bureau in Jerusalem.

According to Jay Bushinsky, who was the first bureau chief, there was, from the beginning, a sense that the Israel office was less important to CNN than its European counterparts.

"It was as if we were illegitimate offspring," says Bushinsky, who was at CNN until 1985. "They didn't invest the same kind of resources in us as they did in other bureaus, or treat the personnel in the same way as others," forcing many to remain freelancers, for example. He complains the reporters' work was always treated with a degree of skepticism.

"We covered the Lebanon War assiduously, on the front lines every day, but we always sensed that the editors in Atlanta wished our reports conformed to the approach taken by other networks," he says. "When they wanted to know why our reports were different, I always said, 'because we were there.'"

Bushinsky emphasizes that there was never a feeling of anti-Israel bias or of anti-Semitism, but speculates that one of the reasons CNN was covering Israel "reluctantly" may have been "because too many Jews were working there." Another reason, he says, was that early on, CNN had a largely rural audience, "which may not have been so interested in Israel." Still, he emphasizes that attitudes were very much dependent on the individual editors.

He recalls several skirmishes between the reporters and producers over terminology.

"Even at that stage, the word 'terrorist' was problematic," he says. In July 1985, when Israel exchanged 1,150 Palestinians in detention for three Israeli POWs, he says CNN told him not to call the Palestinians 'prisoners' but 'hostages.' On another occasion, in a light piece about Sammy Davis Jr. entertaining Israeli troops during the Lebanon War, he was told not to sign his piece with the word 'Shalom,' although Davis had addressed Bushinsky with the word as well.

In the late 1980s, one individual caused the first major flare-up in the relationship between the Jewish state and CNN - bureau chief Robert Wiener. (Efforts to reach Wiener through CNN were unsuccesful.)

"He came to Israel with the story already written, with the Israelis bad and the Palestinians good," says a source close to CNN at the time. "Occasionally he would do a story by himself, and it was always about the suffering of the Palestinian people."

According to the source, Wiener created an anti-Israel atmosphere around the office, which was staffed largely by Jews. "He flew the Palestinian flag in the office, and changed the sign under one of the clocks from 'Jerusalem' to 'Palestine.'"

On at least two occasions, he caused controversy with pro-Palestinian stories. Once, says the source, he assigned a reporter to a story about the residents of Ariel who forced Arab workers in their settlements to wear identity tags. Wiener, says the source, later inserted into the report archive pictures of Jews wearing a yellow badge during the Holocaust, "drawing a lot of fire at the time." On another occasion, he assigned a reporter to do a story about an Arab village where several residents had been attacked by wild dogs.

"The Palestinians said the dogs had been sent in by Jewish settlers, that they were attack dogs," says the source. "The reporter came back in tears, but he forced her to put together a story, and honchoed how she wrote it. They did the right thing journalistically, saying "Palestinians said that ," but there was no response from the other side. A few days later, it turned out the real story was that the dogs were wild and rabid. It was completely irresponsible journalism."

In January 1990, the Anti-Defamation league and several Israeli officials complained about Wiener's biased reporting of the Intifada. They also complained that CNN broadcast Palestinian charges of IDF brutality without giving fair weight to Israeli officials' explanations, and said the station repeatedly illustrated reports with dated archival material of soldiers beating Palestinians. CNN said it stood by its staff, but several weeks later, Wiener was transferred. Both he and CNN denied any connection between the move and the criticism.

SINCE then, relations between the network and Israeli sympathizers continued to be marred by occasional incidents. One reporter, Linda Scherzer, was asked to move to another bureau in 1993 after five years in Jerusalem. When she refused to leave the country, she was dismissed, and there are lingering rumors this happened because she was perceived as being too pro-Israeli.

Scherzer says that this was never said to her outright, but "I have always wondered if that was a possible explanation for what happened."

She says that during her time at CNN she never felt pressure to conform to a particular point of view.

"I was always baffled by why [the dismissal] happened, particularly because reporters who covered the Gulf War got tremendous international prominence, including myself. I know that people I reported to were pleased with my work, and Jews in the US certainly didn't see me as too pro-Israel - when I went home to the US, I always got an earful. I am left with lingering questions about how CNN perceived me, whether they suspected that deep down I was just an Israeli patriot."

Other bureau chiefs, particularly Walter Rodgers in the mid 1990s, have also been accused of allowing Palestinian sympathies to show. The complaints by pro-Israeli groups during the second intifada have followed much the same lines.

This time around, reports on CNN's coverage and e-mail campaigns by organizations such as CAMERA and HonestReporting.com did not initially receive much attention from CNN's headquarters.

"They were supercilious and haughty, as if they were CNN, and were above it all," says a consultant to one watchdog group.

Things began to change, however, at the beginning of the year. At that time, senior US Jewish officials and CEOs in the business community began making their feelings known, and e-mail campaigns picked up pace.

In February, CNN failed to identify by name or age two teenage victims of the suicide bombing in a Karnei Shomron pizzeria, one of whom was an American citizen. HonestReporting.com readers sent up to 6,000 e-mails a day to CNN executives, effectively paralyzing their internal e-mail system. The consultant, who was present at several meetings with watchdog groups initiated by CNN, says the top CNN executives had, until then, failed to appreciate the strength of public feeling on the issue.

"We came to the conclusion that the news we see is driven by correspondents in the field, not by the corporate side of the organization which is instinctively more pro-Israel than the correspondents," says the consultant. "A lot of the heads are Jews who care a lot about Israel. One of them said that when [watchdog groups] attack us, he has a hard time in synagogue that week."

What they discovered, says the consultant, was that the reporters on the ground had relatively free rein. They very often came to Israel without proper understanding of the region's history or culture, or with attitudes shaped by other countries they had covered such as South Africa, where the racism model prevailed. Many of the journalists also find themselves influenced by their foreign media colleagues, who reflect their own bias.

"There is a tendency among foreign correspondents to arrive at a consensus about the issue at hand, and report accordingly," says Bushinsky. "Anyone who deviates from the consensus is considered an outcast, someone who 'got the story wrong.'"

According to the consultant, many of the anchors back in Atlanta were much more likely to challenge false Palestinian claims than the reporters on the ground - and they would also often challenge their own reporters.

"[CNN stringer] Rula Amin was challenged four times by Atlanta-based anchors while she reported on Jenin," says the consultant. "On April 16, anchor Daryn Kagan told Amin that there is "a different perception here Rula, I am sure, as we can see from the pictures, a number of homes have been destroyed. But the Israelis would point out that they believe there were gunmen and fighters holding out in those houses, and that's why they had to be attacked so fiercely."

A few days earlier, New-York based anchor Paula Zahn interrupted Amin to remind her that Israelis argue they went into Jenin because "they know that men who are very active in the Palestinian Authority's violence against Israel are located there."

In addition, material on CNN.com which is written in Atlanta was often much less biased towards the Palestinians than the broadcast material. The use of the word "terrorist" to describe Palestinian suicide-bombers, for example, was common, while on air they were routinely described as "militants."

"At the beginning," says the consultant, "the executives didn't believe there was a problem, mostly out of ignorance of what was going on [in the field] . They were not aware of how often the big lie [that 500 Palestinians died in Jenin in April] was spread by Palestinian spokesmen, and seemed shocked when we told them there were 30 cases in 10 days. They were not watching this narrow little part of CNN's operation - they have to watch what's going in a massive empire, and suddenly this corner started biting them in the backside."

Michael Wolf, media critic for New York magazine, says that the executives are "as aware as they decided they should be."

Still, CAMERA executive director Andrea Levin agrees that "Receptiveness to public concern has improved." She compares the situation to 1997, when it took CAMERA a year to get Walter Rodgers to correct an incorrect statement that the Arab population of Jerusalem is dwindling.

"They are responsive to our calls and our comment, we do sense there is an interest and effort," says Levin. "I've been recently in touch with CNN's CEO who also seems concerned."

THE INCREASED attention, of course, took place precisely at the time when the ratings war with the more conservative FOX News Network was heating up. The battle between FOX and CNN, says Swasey, has become "all the rage in the US. It has been the subject of numerous reports in the papers, a truly hot news topic." According to Swasey, CNN has long been regarded as a liberal bastion.

"You see it in the ideological labeling they do - they are more likely to label people from the Right as 'Conservatives,' while not labeling liberals. You see it in their story selections. CNN has long been known as the Clinton News Network, and more recently, as the Castro News Network, because of the way they covered [former US president Jimmy] Carter's visit to the Communist island."

Already last August, CNN chief Walter Isaacson went to meet with House and Senate GOP leaders on Capitol Hill, in order to improve the network's image with conservatives.

"I was trying to reach out to a lot of Republicans who feel that CNN has not been as open covering Republicans, and I wanted to hear their concerns," he said at the time.

Since then, CNN has several times taken more conservative approaches. After September 11, for example, Reuters said it wouldn't refer to the people who attacked the World Trade Center as "terrorists," while CNN vowed to remind audiences that they were fighting the war in Afghanistan because of the terrorism of September 11.

As part of its battle against FOX, Swasey says CNN has recently also made many programming changes, bringing in new faces, "adding bells whistles, gimmicks, different graphics and music to spice it up." Two months ago, FOX finally overtook CNN as the leading cable news company, and since then, CNN's Israel mishaps have only grown larger.

First, a month ago, CNN spent an hour interviewing Hen Keinan, whose mother and baby daughter were killed in a terror attack in Petah Tikva. But CNN International broadcast only short excerpts, showing instead an extended interview with the mother of the terrorist who had perpetrated the attack. The protests from their audience caused CNN to broadcast the interview in full within days, and issue a public apology.

Last week, Britain's Guardian quoted CNN founder Ted Turner as saying, "aren't the Israelis and Palestinians both terrorizing each other?" Although he actually made the comments in April, while the IDF was in Jenin, the comments still prompted a large public outcry both in Israel, and in the US. CNN rushed to disassociate itself from Turner, who "has no operational or editorial oversight of CNN."

The final straw was the threat, by Israel's satellite and cable companies, to either offer FOX as an alternative to CNN, or to remove CNN altogether from the air.

"In the television business, the most important thing of all, the grail you live and die by, is 'carriage,'" says media observer Wolf. "If you lose carriage in a key market like Israel is in that area of the world, the nature of your business begins to fundamentally change. They can't afford to set that precedent, because next they'll lose 3 million here, 12 million there."

This was particularly important, of course, because the Israeli companies had threatened to replace CNN with its chief rival.

"In media, numbers count a lot, even if they are small," says Bushinsky. "With ratings, even a couple of percentage points mean a lot."

TO WHAT extent do CNN's efforts to rebalance its reporting reflect a genuine concern with journalistic standards?

Most media critics say the proof will be in the network's long-term behavior, but are otherwise split on the issue.

"If they are doing it because they are genuinely concerned, I applaud them," says Ken Auletta, media writer for The New Yorker. "If not, they are being craven, and I don't know which one we are talking about."

Michael Greenspan, who worked for CNN's Jerusalem bureau between 1984 and 1990, says "Only Eason Jordan knows."

For Wolf, CNN's interests begin and end with business, and they are merely conducting a PR exercise. "Everyone knows that the Israeli cable companies will not remove CNN," he asserts. "All they've done is set up a situation where everyone can appear to have placated everyone else. This is a big game in which nothing really changes."

But the network's top executives, especially Isaacson, enjoy widespread respect, even from watchdog groups.

"They are a business with competitors," says Levin, "but there is also a relatively new management at CNN which is concerned about getting the story right."

Auletta concurs: "Isaacson is a real journalist, a man of integrity. I can't believe he's trying to perpetuate unfair coverage. My instinct is that these are honest people trying to do a job, who may make mistakes."

Even if they want to, however, CNN's top executives may find it hard to rein in their Israel reporters.

"There is a culture of stars, whether it's Dan Rather for CBS who lands in Israel and didn't know what Temple Mount was, or Christiane Amanpour who arrives with her safari jacket as if she's on a military mission," says the consultant to the pro-Israel media watchdog. "It's hard to control them."

In the meanwhile, CNN is in a tight spot. Pro-Israeli groups are waiting to see if the network will become what they perceive as fairer. On the other hand, media critics and other less interested parties are worried that CNN has compromised its journalistic standards by giving in to partisan pressure.

According to Auletta, if CNN is genuinely interested in making its coverage more balanced, it may have chosen the wrong time.

"In terms of appearances, the timing is unfortunate," he says. "Someone could interpret CNN's actions as meaning that all you have to do is make enough noise and CNN will review its coverage of us. This is not in the interests of good journalism."

For this reason, Wolf says that CNN is likely to backpedal furiously in the next few weeks.

"They will have to send up a lot of PR clouds, saying all they are trying to do is be fair. They will try and convince people they're navigated all the demands, while not changing at all," he says. "That's CNN's job - not to be influenced by people who are trying to influence it."

The biased Beeb - After local satellite and cable TV companies threatened to remove CNN from their subscriber package last week, Shinui party chairman Yosef Lapid had some choice words for the British press: "Newspapers like The Independent and The Guardian are working in the service of the Hamas," he said.

"The reporting is sometimes Soviet-like in its propaganda," says a consultant to one media watchdog group. "I suspect they may even take encouragement from the complaints of the pro-Israel community."

In one example on May 10, 2001, the BBC showed an Israeli attack on a Gaza military base, with "lots of noise, dust, and ambulances," he says. "The next picture showed an ambulance pulling up to a hospital, with a badly wounded man coming out. The problem: it was an Israeli ambulance, with an injured Romanian worker. We brought the editing problem to the attention of the BBC, but there was not a word of apology, nothing."

According to the executive director of CAMERA, Andrea Levin, the BBC does not use the word "terror" to describe suicide bombings in Israel, although they use the word in the Northern Ireland context - and even with regard to rebel groups in Uganda.

She claims that the BBC does not have an imperative to present "a balanced mainstream view of Israeli concerns." On one occasion, Levin says, a BBC reporter actually badgered Bassam Eid, a Palestinian human rights activist who said that the violence should stop because the sides had agreed to settle their differences in negotiations.

"'What do you mean, the people are frustrated! she said,'" according to Levin, "as if she was indignant he would suggest the Palestinians should pursue anything but what they're doing."

Could pro-Israeli audiences hope to influence the BBC in the same way they seem to have influenced CNN? Probably not, say the experts.

"The BBC is one of the largest media institutions in the world and because of its size and influence, it has ingrained policies," says Levin. "Like its image, it considers itself above criticism."

Most importantly, however, is that the feeling in Britain regarding Israel and the coverage of it does not run as deep as the feeling does in the United States. "I don't know whether their audience is as focused on the BBC problem," says Levin.

Even so, says Levin, audience members should continue to bring BBC mistakes to public attention and to the attention of the media outlet. CNN is not the only success pro-Israel activists have had: "There have been many grassroots movements directed at newspapers in the last six months," she says. "Efforts directed at The New York Times, for example, have had an impact."

Jordan's view - Eason Jordan, CNN's chief news executive and newsgathering president, looks relaxed and at home wandering around the corridors of Jerusalem's David's Citadel Hotel. With good reason: this is his 50th visit to Israel in some 20 years. His current visit, he says, should not be taken as an admission that CNN recognizes its local reporting to be biased towards the Palestinians and has to be altered.

"It was logical for me to make this trip at this time because of a confluence of events," he says, citing Ted Turner's comments equating Israeli military actions with terror and the back-to-back bombings in Jerusalem last week.

According to Jordan, CNN is committed to "fairness, truth, and being responsible" in its Israel coverage.

"There is no bias against Israel, we even have great sympathy especially for the victims of suicide bombers, after September 11," he says.

He claims that Wolf Blitzer's series Victims of Terror is not an attempt to mend fences with pro-Israel groups, but a regular part of CNN scheduling.

"We have done many stories on victims in Israel," he says. "In the wake of the attacks last week, we decided it was time to take a greater look at the victims of terrorism. This is not to suggest we ignored victims after other attacks."

Nor, says Jordan, is CNN panicking because of the entry of FOX News into the Israeli news market. "We are out to do the best we can do," he says. "We welcome competition, which only serves to make us better."

Jordan says that on the whole, CNN's reporting from Israel is at a very high standard, but he allows that occasionally the network is "not as clear as it could be," and sometimes "gets it wrong." However, he does not see a pattern or intent, nor is there a conscious effort to exclude stories such as the high level of incitement in the Palestinian media.

"We have representatives and guests talking about these things," he says. "Should we do more? Probably so, but there is no effort to hide important elements of the story."

Still, Jordan is prepared to admit that there is "always room for improvements in CNN." He readily concedes, for example, that the network erred by airing an interview with the mother of the Petah Tikva suicide bomber three weeks ago, instead of an interview with Hen Keinan, whose mother and daughter were killed in the explosion.

"With the benefit of hindsight, we would have done that differently - it was not intentional," he says. From now on, the network will refrain from giving airtime to the families of suicide bombers, at his instructions.

"I know this is a painful time for all Israelis, a country terrorized by suicide bombers. Emotions are very intense and there is a great sensitivity about news reporting. I think CNN is making every effort to ensure our reports are all they should be."

CNN biased?

My husband, a liberal, thinks I'm crazy when I say the media is liberally biased. But as he watched both CNN and FNC coverage of the pledge of allegiance decision, he saw it clearly. I noticed that he turned the TV onto FNC of his own volition. It's a first. Finally!

CNN was that the crown jewel in the media empire formerly known as TimeWarner-AOL?

No.

LOL. Actually, Time Warner bought CNN because they wanted a media outlet and access to cable/satellite. Later Time Warner sold itself to AOL, which at the time I thought was the most rediculous idea ever. Why would a real money maker, with real tangible assets, want to sell itself to a bloated dot com valuing each subscriber at $25,000 (when they were paying only $20 a month to be a subscriber?!). It was a thorougly insane idea, and the Time Warner shareholders got screwed (as I said at the time). Oh well. It's their problem.

If the decade of greed was the 80's, the 90's under Bill Clinton was decade of avarice.

No pain. I love him and knew he was liberal before I married him. But he is more reasonable than most; otherwise, I would not have been able to marry him. He'd even make a good Freeper--usually! He's a teacher and get him talking about education and the unions. . . you'd think he's as conservative as the rest of us. And he was furious as I was about this 9th cc decision. Can't stand Tom Daschle or either Clinton. It just took him longer to get there.

Your husband is a liberal?
I know of plenty of conservative men who are married to liberals but of no conservative woman has married one.
I always women had their brains located in a different part of their bodies, therefore when choosing a mate, tended to choose one based upon shared ideas.
Of course, you might be a born again conservative and changed after your marriage.

At any rate, it sounds as if your mate may be growing.

According to [Eason] Jordan, CNN is committed to "fairness, truth, and being responsible" in its Israel coverage.

Translation: "I didn't do it, your Honor. Oh that blood? Okay, I did it. But I was insane, yeah that's it!"

CNN has been and remains a reliable megaphone for any loony left story. Doesn't matter whether it's Israel=Palestinian Terrorists, or Iraqi chemical weapons as "baby milk," or a farfetched tale that American soldiers nerve-gassed American prisonersin Vietnam. (That last, demonstrated to be a fabrication, was a product of the same Isaacson that good liberal Ken Auletta thinks is a "great newsman" or whatever puckering sycophancy he actually used).

I can't imagine how anyone could get informed about the nation or the world by watching television... but certainly the best and straightest route to ignorance is by cable from Atlanta.

As the bumper sticker says, "Is it real news or CNN news?"

d.o.l.

Criminal Number 18F

My husband, a liberal, thinks I'm crazy when I say the media is liberally biased.

I got a real breakthrough with one friend by getting him to watch the national political conventions on C-SPAN during a presidential election and then the news coverage of it. What does he thing about the coverage of the voucher decision? The AP article I read via AOL Instant Messanger was heavily biased on the side that it was establishment of religion.

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