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NPR Probed
National Public Radio may be monitored on
Israel; Jewish reaction is cautious optimism
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32
ord that the head of the
federal corporation over-
seeing public radio and tel-
evision is mulling a proposal to begin
monitoring National Public Radio's
coverage of the Middle East for bias is
being met with cautious optimism by
Jewish officials and U.S. legislators.
"This is something we've been call-
ing on the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting to do for years," said
Alex Safian, associate director of the
Committee for Accuracy in Middle
East Reporting in America. "It's
potentially a move in the right direc-
tion, depending on what kind of
analysis the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting does."
Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., rec-
ommended the move when the cor-
poration met in Washington last fall.
At the time, he suggested that about
$50,000 be earmarked for a study of
NPR's Mideast coverage.
Long criticized by some as reflexive-
ly anti-Israel, NPR ought to be striv-
ing for a balance in its Mideast cover-
age where "half the story's comments
are favorable to the Israeli govern-
ment and half are opposed," Sherman
said.
"Ethnic balance" — in which equal
numbers of Arabs and Jews are inter-
viewed — is insufficient, he insisted.
"Plenty of Jews are harshly critical of
Israel," he said, adding that while
there may be Palestinians who sup-
port Israeli policies, "they're all dead,
so you can't interview them."
A spokesman for the corporation
said "no one was available" to com-
ment on the NPR situation.
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Most recently, according to the corpo-
ration's Congressional testimony, its
polling data demonstrated that nearly
80 percent of people who listen to
public radio believe Middle East cov-
erage is balanced. Eight percent think
it has a pro-Israel bias, while 5 per-
cent feel it favors the Arabs.
In April, the corporation created
two new positions to independently
assess public programing, but not
necessarily related to the Middle East.
According to a report in the New
York Times, the corporation's chair-
man, Kenneth Tomlinson, believes
public television programming is
tainted by a liberal bias and is waging
a campaign to correct it.
Late last year, the Times said,
Tomlinson talked to S. Robert
Lichter, president of the Center for
Media and Public Affairs, about look-
ing into the balance of NPR's Middle
East reporting. The corporation has
not yet gone ahead with the project.
One shouldn't assume that all
American Jews oppose NPR's cover-
age of Israel, said Martin Raffel, act-
ing executive director of the Jewish
Council for Public Affairs. "The com-
munity's not monolithic in its
approach to NPR," he said. "There
are some people who believe that
NPR's coverage is just fine."
For his part, Raffel believes "there is
an issue here that needs to be
addressed — or a series of issues."
In 2003, Sherman, Rep. Eliot
Engel, D-N.Y., and nine other U.S.
legislators asked that NPR assess its
own coverage of the Middle East.
"We have concluded that we are fair
and we refuse to give you the data
underlying this report," was
Sherman's characterization of NPR's
response. But in the past year or two,
he believes NPR's coverage of the
Middle East "may have been amelio-
rated just by them covering the Arab-
Israeli conflict less.
"If one of your indicators is the
number of times I hit the roof, the
roof of my apartment and my office
has been dented less in the last 12
months than during the 12 prior
months," he said.
CAMERA's Safian said his group
has done several studies on NPR's
coverage of the region and has found
that the programming not only offers
a preponderance of Palestinian voic-
es," but tends to give those voices
longer chunks of air time.11:
"