Opinion

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Editorial

Less-Textured News

A

s Israel nears its 60th birthday,
getting its story out fairly and
accurately to Americans is
becoming increasingly difficult.
That's because, according to Hadassah
Magazine, almost every news organization
has shut down its full-time bureau in Israel.
Only the New York Times, Los Angeles Times,
Washington Post and Associated Press
remain.
The reasons are economic. Every
American newspaper and television net-
work is looking for ways to scale back
operations in the face of declining revenue.
The easiest decision is to consolidate or
eliminate overseas bureaus. That wipes out
a major business expense and avoids layoffs
of newsroom staff in the United States.
This is the downside of the Internet
explosion. Fewer readers and viewers for
these news organizations translate into
lower ad revenues and the need for econo-
mizing. It also means a reduction in com-
petition and in clarity in the stories coming
out of places in which the cutbacks occur.
Reporters from these organizations still
show up in Israel when a major story is
going on. But the background that led to
these stories, the perspective, the sense of
texture and nuance are lacking. Bureau
cutbacks also means there will be less news
overall coming out of Israel because editors,

naturally, are inclined to run stories pro-
duced by their own staff of reporters.
The vast majority of American newspa-
pers are running fewer international stories
anyhow. The Iraq War eats up most of the
space devoted to such news and editors say
their surveys indicate readers overwhelm-
ingly want more local news.
But that begs the question: What is local
news? In the Detroit area, hundreds of
thousands of people, both Jewish and Arab
Americans, think of news coming from
Israel as vitally important to their own lives.
It is local news in every regard.
All of this is a big part of the reason why
recent coverage about Gaza has been so
muddled, glossing over the bombardment
of Israeli cities and inadequately explaining
why retaliatory strikes were needed. The
latest event in the news cycle gets the play
and the background goes dark.
Many American news organizations now
rely on stringers for coverage. But that can
be a two-edged sword.
Some of these part-time correspondents
are knowledgeable about Israel and have
lived there for many years. But there is
always a question about their journalistic
skills and the biases they may be harboring.
It's almost impossible for a stateside editor
to figure that out.
"The days are past when you could

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A U.S. PRESIDENT

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UP NIGHTS THESE
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WHO WON'T/

www.drybonesblog.com

count on news from Israel in your home-
town accent:' concludes the story in
Hadassah.
But concerned Jewish readers will con-

tinue to track down sources, including this
newspaper, that provide them with the
news they need. What about the others,
though? What will they be told? ❑

I surely would get on these
stories. The first call came
in from the woman on the
Boulevard. It turned out she
was a precursor of Ronald
Reagan's notorious Welfare
Queen. The widow of a fairly
well-to-do minister, she was
gaming the system and draw-
ing benefits to which she
was not entitled — to put it
mildly.
She was not happy with me because she
knew the game was up. In writing about
the Face of Poverty I had unintentionally
derailed her gravy train.
I had written, in the florid style of an
eager 23-year old reporter, that her smile
"lit up the dark corners of the old house"
on the Boulevard. "I ain't smilin' now, you
unprintable she yelled at me. "I ain't gni-
& now."
Unfortunately, my second example was

scant improvement. A man who owned a
car wash on 12th Street called up and said
the person I wrote about had a habit of
refusing to show up for work and so had
to be fired. He would have been happy to
give him a job, he said, but the guy didn't
seem to want one.
I kind of felt bad about all this. In all
fairness, the paper hadn't given me much
time on this assignment. It was a case of
"We don't want it good; we want it Friday"
Nonetheless, I felt duped. My big story
was a big flop. No one seemed to notice at
the paper, though. They felt they had done
their duty in the war on poverty and if
poor people persisted in living in Detroit it
was no fault of theirs.
A few years later, when the city went up
in flames, I was a baseball writer. I liked
that a lot better. H

Reality Check

Getting It Wrong

S

ometimes the media gets it
wrong — although not quite
in the way fans of the indicted
mayor complain about. But I do speak
from personal experience.
In 1964, I was called upon to help stamp
out poverty. President Lyndon B. Johnson
had just unveiled plans for a war on pover-
ty as part of his Great Society. My editors
at the Free Press were astonished to learn
that there were poor people in Detroit.
They were determined to get on top of
this story before it was too late and there
were no more of them around. So I was
sent out to find some deserving poor
people and tell their stories.
This was a challenging assignment,
mostly because I didn't know any. I didn't
think that driving around the city, knock-
ing on doors and asking people if they
were poor was an especially effective way
of dealing with the problem, either.
Fortunately, someone came up with a

list drawn from the welfare rolls.
Armed with this, much like a
salesman with a list of hot pros-
pects, I began making phone
calls.
I came up with two likely can-
didates. One was a woman living
around West Grand Boulevard
and Warren. The other was a guy
who resided on Gladstone and
12th Street.
They weren't quite sure why
I wanted to interview them and I obfus-
cated a bit, telling them it had something
to do with the Great Society. That seemed
to satisfy them, as it would any patriotic
American.
So I wrote their stories and the paper
gave it a pretty good ride. They even ran
my mug shot with the headline "The Face
of Poverty" next to it. I am sure this was
unintentional.
I sat back and anticipated the feedback

George Cantor's e-mail address is

gcantor614@aol.com .

April 10 • 2008

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