When I first started getting interviewed by foreign media outlets as The Jerusalem Post’s political analyst more than 20 years ago, I was very impressed by the size of the Jerusalem bureaus of CNN, BBC, and Al-Jazeera.
But over time, their offices have gotten smaller and smaller. CNN’s bureau, which is located in a building owned by The Jerusalem Post, surprises interviewees when they see how tiny it is.
However, the shrinking of these media premises is not because of the rising rental costs in Jerusalem. The international media reports less on Israel nowadays, as hopes for peace with the Palestinians have faded, Gaza operations have become repetitive, and even elections can be covered by parachuting in a star reporter for a day.
Attention has shifted to Ukraine, China, and the sites of the latest natural and man-made disasters. The pandemic reduced efforts to report from the field, and the industry has never quite recovered. Media outlets around the world have lost advertising and subscription revenues in the Internet age and have been forced to cut their overseas bureaus, with Jerusalem among the first to go.
Those trends have all resulted in the increased dominance of the two largest international wire services – Reuters and the Associated Press. Reuters employs more than 3,000 journalists in 200 locations around the world. Its articles are used by more than 2,000 news outlets in 128 countries, and its website boasts that one billion people worldwide read or see Reuters news every day. AP operates in 100 countries, and its articles and broadcast reports reach more than 1,300 media outlets. The news organization employs 3,300 people.
Why is it harder to correct a mistake in reporting on Israel around the world?
That is why when AP or Reuters makes a mistake in its reporting on Israel, the damage this causes reverberates around the world and is much harder to correct.
Just this week, an AP article on former US president Jimmy Carter’s 99th birthday mistakenly referred to “Carter’s negotiations with Israel’s Anwar Sadat and Egypt’s Menachem Begin on the Camp David Accords.”
UPDATE: Following our request for correction, @AP has corrected their error. https://t.co/6pz0GXipzv pic.twitter.com/a4niKg2XN6
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) October 1, 2023
That obvious error went unnoticed and was printed around the world, from the Washington Post to the New Zealand Herald. Even after AP fixed the mistake following a complaint by media watchdog HonestReporting, outlets from ABC7 in New York to The West Australian did not heed alerts from AP to update their articles.
If it is that difficult to fix wire service articles with unprofessional errors, imagine the challenge of getting corrections in articles plagued by anti-Israel bias.
When Henriette Chacar started writing for Reuters in January of 2022, HonestReporting revealed her alarming history of spreading misinformation about Israel, including accusing the country of “blatant and systemic racism.”
Chacar defended the Palestinian Authority’s “pay for slay” program that provides stipends to convicted terrorists and their families, endorsed the so-called right of return of millions of Arabs into Israel, and called the Israeli security agency the “S**t Bet.”
Eight months ago, The Jewish Chronicle published internal emails in which Chacar asked then-Reuters Jerusalem bureau editor-in-charge Jeffrey Heller: “Can we conclusively say that Palestinians have mostly targeted civilians?”
“Many Israelis are either in active or reserve duty, and with the prime minister encouraging citizens to carry their guns, the line between civilians and combatants is quite blurred, so I do think it’s a tricky thing to highlight,” she wrote.
Heller replied: “This line of thinking is outrageous, and I will be raising it with our superiors.” But Chacar continues in her job as a Reuters correspondent in the Jerusalem bureau to this day.
That bureau has gone through recent structural changes that have made it less independent and more reliant on decisions made by its Gulf-based Middle East team, especially when it comes to multimedia coverage.
It’s no wonder that last month, when Reuters’ official podcast analyzed “the legacy of the Oslo Accords,” marking the 30-year anniversary of their signing, only Israel was blamed for their demise.
“Cheers from the White House lawn in 1993 as Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat shake hands,” the podcast said. “But immediate protests [broke out] back home and Rabin – who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize with Arafat in 1994 – was assassinated the following year by a far-Right Jewish Israeli opposed to the deal.”
There was not one word about the thousands of Israelis who were killed during and after the Oslo process by Palestinian terrorists, including more than 100 in March 2002 alone, when there were almost daily attacks and suicide bombings in Israeli cities. There was no mention of the many subsequent Israeli offers to the Palestinians nor of their leader Arafat masterminding the Second Intifada.
The AP has not done much better lately with its historical backgrounders. In a reference to the 1972 Munich Olympic attacks in its “on this date” history feature last month, AP lumped together the 11 Israeli victims with their Arab murderers. Such moral equivalence between perpetrators and victims would never happen with the deceased terrorist hijackers in the 9/11 attacks.
When the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) revealed that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas justified the mass extermination of Jews during the Holocaust in a speech to his Fatah Revolutionary Council in August, most media outlets had no issue seeing his remarks for what they really were: gross antisemitism.
But AP said he was merely “accused” of despicable rhetoric with its headline “Palestinian leader’s comments on Holocaust draw accusations of antisemitism from US and Europe.”
AP’s recent coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has also been increasingly problematic, consistently framing Palestinians as victims and Israel as an aggressor. Palestinians who fired upon or stabbed Israeli civilians or soldiers are not identified as “terrorists” or even “gunmen” in their headlines, just as Palestinians. The AP consistently depicts Israel as a foreign element that criminally infiltrated its land. Just last month, an AP article warned that Israel’s decisions could end “the Zionist dream of a Jewish homeland in historic Palestine.”
If this is what people are reading about Israel in 100 countries, it is no wonder the Jewish state is still fighting an uphill battle for its international image.
As trends in the media continue and AP and Reuters become even more dominant in their coverage of Israel and the wider Middle East, readers must be more vigilant than ever in holding the wire services accountable. ■
The writer is executive director and executive editor of HonestReporting. He served as chief political correspondent and analyst of The Jerusalem Post for 24 years.