Transcript
Jenin “Massacre”?
June 1, 2002
BOB GARFIELD: From WNYC in New York this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. On April 2nd, in response to a series of deadly Palestinian attacks, the Israeli Army invaded the West Bank town of Jenin in search of terrorists. Twenty three Israeli soldiers died in heavy street fighting there, as did a substantial number of Palestinians. The actual number of Palestinian dead, however, was unclear for weeks. A spokesman for the Palestinian Authority claimed the figure to be in the thousands. Soon there were reports of mass graves and the stench of decomposing flesh, and people began speaking of the "Jenin Massacre."
BOB GARFIELD:Two months later, it is clear there was no such massacre. The number of Palestinians who died in the Israeli operation was at most 56 in separate firefights. But throughout the world, the unskeptical reports of a massacre and of Israeli war crimes were commonplace. American news organizations were generally circumspect and cautious, but according to UPI senior news analyst Martin Sieff, the Europeans were particularly careless. According to Sieff, the restrictions on press access to Jenin led the media down a dangerously speculative path.
MARTIN SIEFF: The widespread assumption that media people had was that the Israelis were keeping them out because they had something to hide. But there was another level to this as well. You find that Israeli officials in the first weeks of April are very cautious in their response about this themselves, because they hear the Palestinian claims, they know heavy fighting is going on in Jenin, and they themselves do not know how many people have died.
BOB GARFIELD:Now there was another complicating factor in that while the press couldn't get into--to Jenin because the Israelis had closed it off--
MARTIN SIEFF: Right.
BOB GARFIELD: -- there were a couple of apparently neutral sources -- the human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and the United Nations itself, all of which were speculating about widespread death and destruction. To what extent did the press depend on these outside reports to rush to judgment?
MARTIN SIEFF: These people played a very significant role in this, and one of the lessons we should learn, and the media on both sides of the Atlantic should learn from this experience is: you cannot trust blindly. I don't say not trust at all, but you cannot trust without independent verification what organizations like even Amnesty and the UN come out with. Here the human rights organizations which have been too slow to blow the whistle in other situation, blew it too fast.
BOB GARFIELD:You, you talked about the Atlantic Ocean. Let's talk about that for a moment because I'd like to understand its calming influence. [LAUGHTER] Why is it that the lack of information resulted in one kind of reporting in the European press and 3,000 miles away in the United States the press was far more restrained, far more responsible and far less inclined to believe accusations of a massacre?
MARTIN SIEFF: In the European print media you have lots of different competing newspapers in Britain, Germany, Italy, France and other countries which have very clear ideological positions. The concept is the truth will emerge in the free market and through open debate. If you have a left wing paper reporting from one area, you know there are right wing papers which will look to expose the holes in the reporting and vice versa. In many respects, this makes for complex and rich and nuanced reporting in general. But there is a profound underlying aspect to it, and that is that reporters whether or right or left tend to see themselves as ideological crusaders first. By contrast in the United States, you have single large newspapers of record like the L.A. Times, obviously, New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post -- and the dominant them in the American media is: keep your cool; get the facts first; don't get carried away with ideological crusading.
BOB GARFIELD: Is there an undercurrent of anti-Semitism in the reporting among these major European newspapers?
MARTIN SIEFF:In some cases, yes, definitely. You have the columnist, who is not a reporter, at Jenin, but a London columnist, A.N. Wilson, very respected literary figure, in the Evening Standard accuses the Israelis of poisoning the water of the Palestinians. Now there is no evidence this occurred. Not the slightest! But it, it ha--has very disturbing echoes of one of the accusations which was used as an excuse to slaughter Jews for hundreds of years in the Middle Ages --that the Jews are demonic figures and cowardly figures who poison water!
BOB GARFIELD:Is there any evidence that the European press has been abashed by this situation? - that they've learned their lesson and will in the future try to behave more responsibly and to moderate whatever ideology may be the underpinning for what turned out to be dangerously irresponsible reporting?
MARTIN SIEFF: I think the-- the honest answer to that, and as accurately as we can get is -- yes, and no. Yes, there are papers like Le Monde in Paris, The Daily Telegraph in London, Il Foglio [sp?] in Rome and what is to me without - a very important example, an admirable example, The London Guardian which did something which is extremely impressive and extremely morally courageous in my opinion--
BOB GARFIELD: That, that's The Guardian in the United Kingdom?
MARTIN SIEFF: Precisely.
BOB GARFIELD: Made the extraordinary move of, of, of apologizing for its errors.
MARTIN SIEFF:For people who don't know, it's, it's the main left of center quality newspaper in Britain, and I think they came out of this as a result certainly without a loss of honor, and basically without a loss of credibility. But at the same time as people have also pointed out, there seems to be no example of any reporter being re-assigned because of this. Nobody has been disciplined. I doubt a single career will come under a cloud. And I'm not looking for people to be fired. I mean I think in glass houses should not throw stones -- all of us in the media know how difficult and challenging it is. But at the same time it's important to have some standards there. And when you have here claims of massacres or hundreds of bodies being buried and it turns out there was only one individual young Palestinian being cited as a source for the story, not just in one newspaper, but in half a -- 3 or 4 newspapers in Britain and half a dozen other newspapers in Western Europe - and that there is no independent corroboration of this except this one source?! That's inexcusable. In situations like this where the harm can be so great, there has to be some accountability.
BOB GARFIELD: All right. Well Martin Sieff, thank you very much.
MARTIN SIEFF: Well thank you.
BOB GARFIELD: Martin Sieff is the senior news analyst for United Press International. [MUSIC]
Correction: Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, wrote in with a correction. He says “On the Media was wide off the mark when it accused Human Rights Watch of “speculating about the widespread death and destruction” in the Jenin refugee camp.” Roth writes, “Human Rights Watch kept quiet until our own investigators arrived on the scene and interviewed scores of eyewitnesses. Only then did we release our 50-page report which showed conclusively that no massacre of the size alleged by some had occurred, but the Israeli Army had committed serious violations of the laws of war.” We apologize to Mr. Roth and Human Rights Watch for the error.