MEDIA MONITOR
Why I 'Took'
On the Arabs
At an American Arab convention, the
author discovered that U.S. Arabs
distrust news media as much as
American Jews do.
ARTHUR J. MAGIDA
Special to The Jewish News
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or decades, many
American Jews have
been convinced that
the press treats them and,
especially, Israel unfairly.
What I discovered last Fri-
day was that many Ameri-
can Arabs harbor equivalent
suspicions — if not rage —
about the Fourth Estate.
Journalists, say some Arab
Americans, are anti-Arab,
pro-Jewish, pro-Israeli and,
on the whole, a pretty un-
savory lot.
This displeasure with the
press became apparent while
I sat on a panel last week at
the ninth annual convention
of the Arab-American Anti-
Discrimination Committee
in Washington. My col-
leagues on the panel were
not reputed to be especially
fond of Israel: Christopher
Hitchens, a columnist for
The Nation; Norman
Solomon, a media critic who
specializes in bias in the
media; and Saul Landau, a
senior fellow at the left-
leaning Institute for Policy
Studies in Washington.
Moderating was the ABC-
TV news anchor, Peter Jenn-
ings, whom Jewish groups
have charged is anti-Israel.
The panel's ostensible
purpose was to address
"Sensitivity Without Cen-
sorship," which meant that
we were supposed to discuss
ways to report news so that
it did not violate individual
or group rights or impinge
upon freedom of the press.
As with many panel
discussions, that agenda was
largely ignored by the
panelists and the audience.
In his opening comments,
Mr. Jennings assumed the
audience wanted to "vent its
spleen" about the news
media. He was right. Once
past the panelists' opening
comments, there was a bar-
rage of venting, and, ap-
parently, a goodly supply of
spleen.
Opening remarks had a
certain predictability. Saul
Landau drew parallels bet-
ween police actions against
blacks in Los Angeles and
Israeli police breaking the
bones of Palestinians during
the intifada. Norman
Solomon chastised the press
for its "good job" of covering
certain pro-democracy
movements abroad, while
under-reporting similar
movements in Gaza and the
West Bank.
From Mr. Hitchens, whom
I had expected to be the most
uncompromisingly
ideological of the panelists,
came a few surprises. He
called for "self-criticism,"
maintained there had re-
cently been an "enormous
shift" in news media's depic-
tion of "the Arab cause,"
and advised the audience not
to blame the news media
that "the Arab world is seen
as silent, ambivalent, hypo-
critical about the treatment
of the Kurds" or that author
Salman Rushdie is in hiding.
That, he said, is the "fault of
the Arab intelligentsia in j
the Middle East."
And from me came an
effort to create a common
ground. All of us, I said, —
American Jews, American
There was a
barrage of venting,
and, apparently, a
goodly supply of
spleen.
Arabs, journalists and, even,
TV anchors —are "victims of
the press — sometimes.
"What may be emerging,"
I said, "is a larger commun-
ity of the aggrieved, the
mass of which always seems
to be defined by those who
subscribe to the concept that
`their' story is not being
told."
I proposed that Jewish-
American and Arab-
American journalists travel
together to Israel, Gaza and
the West Bank. This might
lessen, I suggested,
"objectifying the other" and
help journalists "see the
other as fully human and not
as this abstraction of 'Jew'
and 'Arab.' "
When Mr. Jennings asked
for questions from the au-
dience, the very first, as it
turned out, was the Arab
parallel to Jewish claims
that the ABC anchor was
anti-Israel.
"You are a participant in
dishonest reporting from the
Middle East," a woman told