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Marchers for peace should be peaceful Editor -- What does it say when a group of people need to be protected from "peace" demonstrators ("Thousands march in S.F. protest," April 21)? Is someone unclear on the concept of peace? The threatening "peace" demonstrators were Palestinians, Arab immigrants and their supporters. The endangered persons carried Israeli flags and were dispersed by the San Francisco police "for their own safety." No one was ever imperiled by Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. Those leaders based their movements for social justice on the principle of nonviolence and were recognized for holding the moral high ground. If the Arab Muslim world were to produce a leader who could persuade with the principles of nonviolence, the moral equation would be turned upside-down to its favor. However, that possibility is unlikely, given a culture that glorifies the terrorist Osama bin Laden as a great hero. People who say that they are for peace, but intimidate with violence, are merely unprincipled thugs who are probably too benighted to recognize the hypocrisy of their own actions. Persons who demonstrate in the name of peace should act in peace.
DANA GARCIABerkeley A PEACEFUL CROWDEditor -- While I appreciated The Chronicle's coverage of stories this Sunday on historical atrocities in South America, I was disappointed with the cover photo of the rally held last Saturday portraying it as extremist and hateful. I was at the rally all day -- I'd set up a place for people to paint their own signs and it was wonderful: teenagers cautiously approached and painted, people needing more tape came over, people adding peace symbols to signs they already had, even a homeless person painted his own sign -- and I never saw anything as full of hate as your photo made it out to be. I really worry about our city, our home, when the truth of our rally is subserved by profit or bias through a photo of one burned flag in a peaceful crowd of more than 20,000.
VICTORIA ASHLEYOakland A SENSE OF FAIRNESSEditor -- I am glad to see that readers' representative Dick Rogers acknowledged the serious oversight of The Chronicle (Opinion Pages, April 21) to provide equal coverage to a pro-Israeli rally (received no coverage) and a pro-Palestinian rally (received front-page coverage). However, if The Chronicle is weighing the opinions of the readers in its decisions as implied in Rogers' article, The Chronicle will continue to lose a sense of fairness. That is because of a simple fact; Palestinians and many Arabs are taught hatred from childhood and do not possess a sense of fairness and will always say that the news is biased against them. Jews, on the other hand, are taught fairness, tolerance and compassion. That is why some Jews speak out against Israel. That is why Jews fought for the cause of civil rights for American blacks. You don't see any Palestinians condemning terrorism. What you see is rationalization.
RICK KOHLLos Gatos INSIGHT ON POLICYEditor -- Saturday, thousands of protesters with anti-Israel and anti- American sentiment marched in San Francisco. Their pictures and story dominated the front page of The Sunday Chronicle. Last week, a similar number of pro-Israel, pro-American demonstrators rallied in San Francisco. The Chronicle gave that rally not one word, not one picture of coverage. One reason for this, Chronicle readers' representative Dick Rogers suggests, is that the pro-Israel rally was not violent. I guess that was our mistake: Perhaps we should have attacked police or tried to burn some buildings. Thank you, Mr. Rogers, for such illuminating insight into Chronicle reporting policy.
SCOTT ABRAMSONSan Mateo |
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When my phone rings these days, it's a good bet I'm about to hear one of two things: The Chronicle's Mideast coverage is pathetically pro- Palestinian, or The Chronicle's Mideast coverage is pathetically pro-Israel.
One reader demands to know: "Why do you call Hamas a militant group when President Bush says they are terrorists?" Another reader, equally fervent, can't abide the fact that we refer to Israeli soldiers as soldiers at the same time as we call rifle-carrying Palestinians "gunmen."
In the superheated atmosphere of the Mideast crisis, every word, paragraph, graphic and image comes under a microscope. The placement of stories on a page is seen as evidence of the paper's tilt, or worse, its campaign to twist public opinion.
The other day The Chronicle carried a front-page story under the headline "Sharon says 'terror' justifies assault." An East Bay reader, angered by the single quotation marks around the word terror, scolded us for reporting that "harmonizes well with Palestinian propaganda, which tries to divert attention from the terrorist campaign against Israel (which enjoys almost unanimous support among Palestinians, all the way from Yasser Arafat to the 10-year-old who dreams of blowing himself up one day), and instead describe Israel's military moves as groundless, evil bullying tactics."
The explanation that the headline writer used quotes for the conventional reason -- to signal that Sharon used the precise word -- carried no weight.
Here, as in newsrooms across the country, one person's neutrality is another person's bias. So, while we can listen to the hundreds of calls and read the hundreds of e-mails that have come in during the past two weeks, it's not likely that The Chronicle will satisfy each of its readers no matter how it alters its coverage, its use of language and its selection of photos.
But before you come away thinking that this is just a sanctimonious defense of my employer, here's a confession:
The paper made a bad call last week.
Last Sunday, thousands of pro-Israel demonstrators from San Francisco to the Salinas Valley gathered at Justin Herman Plaza here to rally peacefully. The event was news (just a week before we carried a report on a pro- Palestinian demonstration with far fewer people). Yet last Monday, the paper didn't have a word on the pro-Israel rally. This wasn't fair and balanced coverage.
There isn't a good explanation for the decision. The event was judged by the usual standards in a city where demonstrations are as common as coffeehouses. The city desk mistakenly decided that it wasn't all that big. And there was no violence. Those may be valid criteria in some cases, but not this one.
At least one reader cites the lapse as evidence of deeper bias. She goes so far as to accuse the paper of fomenting anti-Semitism. (It should be noted that The Chronicle also did not cover a smaller pro-Palestinian rally that same day.)
I understand the emotion, but I don't buy the argument. From my corner of the newsroom, The Chronicle has tried to present as many aspects of the story as possible. Most often it succeeds. A few weeks ago, in response to allegations that our photo coverage was one-sided, I invited five readers to take a deeper look. The readers had diverse backgrounds and starkly differing views of the Mideast situation. We asked them to look at 79 photographs published between January and March and tell us whether they thought that the pictures reflected sympathy toward Palestinians or Israel, or whether they were neutral.
One reader saw a big pro-Palestinian tilt. Another saw the opposite. Two detected a slight shading toward the Palestinian side. The fifth considered the photographs largely neutral.
But added together, the individual judgments came out almost exactly equal - - one-third pro-Palestinian, one-third pro-Israel and one-third neutral.
There was nothing scientific about our experiment. But it shows that five people can look at the same things and come away with very different reactions.
And it shows something else: If the paper is trying to mold public sentiment on the Mideast, it's not doing a very good job of it.
So let us know what you think. But understand that sometimes we'll just have to agree to disagree.
Dick Rogers is the Readers' Representative at The Chronicle. If you have comments on The Chronicle's coverage, standards or accuracy, please e-mail readerrep@sfchronicle.com.