Middle East TV Coverage: Not All of It's for Boobs

By Richard H. Curtiss

"Sixty more disturbing minutes on Israel," the Jewish Week of Queens, NY headlined an article by Mitchell G. Bard, editor of Near East Report, the weekly newsletter of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Morley Safer of CBS's "60 Minutes," Bard charged, "was sent to prove the intifada has demoralized the country. By omitting salient facts, Safer may have succeeded in perpetuating this myth."

Out of Control

Israel's American lobby, for which Bard writes, is disturbed because, although the Columbia Broadcasting System's news division has been far more reluctant to air news unfavorable to Israel than the other commercial networks, AIPAC can't get the network's (and America's) most widely viewed news program, "60 Minutes," under control.

Despite the fact that CBS Board Chairman Laurence A. Tisch is, like his brother, Reagan administration Postmaster General Preston R. Tisch, a pillar of America's pro-Israel establishment, some of CBS's media stars insist on going their own way.

First it was "Sixty Minutes's" Mike Wallace, who is of Jewish background. He reported several years ago that the Jewish community in Damascus was suffering more from Syria's economic stagnation than Arab persecution. That set off protests at home that he had been brainwashed. So Wallace went back to see where he had gone wrong. Instead of doing a mea culpa follow-up report, however, Wallace said that in general he'd been right, although having so many American journalists, congressmen and publicity-seeking rabbis coming around to ask Damascus Jews about Syrian persecution makes Syrian security officials nervous.

Angering AIPAC

What really ticked off AIPAC, however, was Wallace's piece just before the 1988 election revealing that AIPAC had targeted Senator John Chafee of Rhode Island for defeat. Like most Republican senators, Chafee had voted to support President Reagan's successful effort to sell AWACS defensive aircraft to Saudi Arabia in 1981. As a result, AIPAC Director Tom Dine boasted that his organization would "get" Chafee at reelection time, 'just as it "got" Senator Charles Percy of Illinois in 1984 for exactly the same offense, Wallace reported.

In the few days between the "60 Minutes" expose of AIPAC's campaign and election day, Chafee came from behind in the polls to defeat his opponent, Lt. Gov. Richard Licht, a former money raiser for the Jewish National Fund.

Harry Reasoner, another veteran "60 Minutes" reporter, has also been critical of Israel on occasion. Now, AIPAC's Bard reported, Safer, also of Jewish background, was saying such things as "Israel's determination not to negotiate with the PLO makes any hope of immediate peace unlikely."

AIPAC now is out to "get" "Sixty Minutes."

Since then, "60 Minutes" carried a Feb. 24 report by Ed Bradley on Israel's conviction of Ukrainian-born John Demjanjuk that left little doubt in viewers' minds that he was not the notorious guard known as "Ivan the Terrible" at the Treblinka death camp. Whatever evidence remains nearly half a century after Demjanjuk's capture by German forces in World War II indicates that, if Demjanjuk worked for the Germans as anything other than a slave laborer, it would have been nowhere closer than 100 miles from Treblinka.

Informing the American public about who is and who isn't an obstacle to peace in the Middle East, and the nature of the "justice" meted out to non-Jews in Israel's court system, is the last thing Israel's powerful American thought police want any network to do. AIPAC now is out to "get" "60 Minutes.

More than Bottle Caps

Andy Rooney, the sardonic 71-year-old sage of "60 Minutes," seldom discusses anything more controversial than child-proof medicine bottle caps, which, like any normal adult, he has trouble opening. In 1987, however, he refused to cross a picket line of television script writers (he used to be one himself) and missed several programs. Subsequently, he also wisecracked that Yasser Arafat should hire a Jewish public relations firm to help him get his message across to Americans.

Then, early this year, he criticized homosexuals. In a follow-up interview, a reporter for a gay rights magazine alleged that in an unrecorded interview Rooney told him, "most people are born with equal intelligence, but blacks have watered down their genes because the less intelligent ones are the ones that have the most children."

Rooney denied that he said any such thing, and pointed to personal opposition to racism strong enough to get him arrested for defying a Florida bus segregation ordinance when he was a young GI in World War II, and arrested again in Mississippi while doing a story on the 25th anniversary of the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers. CBS News President David Burke nevertheless suspended Rooney for three months. Rooney didn't take it lying down. He wrote in his syndicated newspaper column:

"The accusation against me came from an angry gay organization which had decided that, while the media might be relatively indifferent to the complaint of gays that they have been wronged, it is difficult for any news organization to stand up against a charge of racism."

The result was a blaze of criticism, and not just from competing networks, denouncing CBS censorship. More devastating to CBS than the talk, however, was the fact that "60 Minutes" lost in the weekly ratings battle to an NBC show in the same Sunday time slot for the first time in years. Rooney was reinstated on March 4, after only three weeks off the air.

Since Senator Chafee took on the Israel lobby and won a year ago, he has become a major spokesman in the Senate on behalf of human rights for the Palestinians under Israeli occupation. Perhaps, having learned, like Wallace, Safer, Reasoner, and Bradley, that he's bigger than the network when he's got truth on his side, Rooney might follow suit and report on something more controversial than strangers who order him to "have a nice day." He might, for example, compare the evening half-hour news shows on his own and other networks.

The Evening News

CBS, which dominated the ratings when Walter Cronkite was its anchorman, now consistently trails both ABC and NBC in audience share for the evening news. It's ironic, since CBS anchor Dan Rather is paid $3 million a year, while ABC's Peter Jennings and NBC's Tom Brokaw each are paid a bit over $1 million. (Rooney gets $800,000.)

Middle East coverage by Jennings, who regularly reported from the Middle East while based in London for several years in the 1970s, is more complete, authoritative, and balanced than that of his competitors. By contrast, NBC's Brokaw seems to understand little about the Middle East. Perhaps that is by choice, in order not to endanger that seven-digit salary. However, NBC commentator John Chancellor can, on the same program, be very hard-hitting in criticism of Israeli extremism, and of Arab extremists as well when they deserve it. Thanks in large measure to Chancellor, NBC evening news programming on the Middle East is therefore fairly even-handed. As a result, the pro-Israel US media snipes at Chancellor personally every chance it gets.

By contrast, Rather shows the same respect for the big guns of AIPAC that he showed for Russian artillery when he did his "on the scene" coverage of the Afghanistan war from several meters inside that embattled country. Rather's eyes mist a little when he speaks of Israelis, which is as seldom as possible now that they're the bad guys, and he manages a tiny sneer in an otherwise expressionless face when he mentions the Palestinians, which is virtually never.

Can those little actors' tricks be related to the trick of keeping the highest network salary when your show has the lowest network ratings'? Whatever Rather's feelings on the Middle East, his declining ratings may reflect the American public's feelings about manipulation of the news.

There is other recent good news and bad news for network watchers hoping for even handed coverage of the Middle East. PBS, normally the most timorous of any television network when it comes to criticism of Israel, telecast a one-hour program entitled "The Faces of Arafat" in its weekly "Front Line" series narrated by Judy Woodruff. In a one hour program written and reported by London Sunday Times correspondent Marie Colvin and produced by Anthony Geffen of the BBC, PLO Chairman Arafat came across effectively on American television, perhaps for the first time. In the past, he has been hampered by weak English, little understanding of the American audience, and an unwillingness to use an interpreter. As a result, in live interviews he would answer questions he didn't fully understand with the same confusing cliches that kept Palestinian rivals off his back, but turned American audiences off his cause.

In this objective history of both the PLO and its chairman, both the writer and the producer, and the Palestinian, American, and British participants did a good job, despite a US printed word blackout so thorough that The Washington Post, with an extensive daily television section, never got around to telling its readers the Arafat program was on the evening schedule, although it had been scheduled weeks earlier.

It was the second truly informative "Front-Line" presentation on the Middle East in less than 12 months. In May 1989, a "Front-Line" program produced by Andrew Cockburn, "The Covert Connection," exposed world-wide machinations of the Mossad, Israel's CIA. Just one example was footage of Israeli Colonel Yair Klein (who still has a key general staff position in the IDF reserves and is not "retired" as the Israeli Government pretends) teaching Colombian narcotics traffickers how to carry out assassinations, The film also showed Israeli government spokesmen denying that Israelis are doing any such thing in Latin America, and then interviews with Klein and other Israeli officers boasting about their military training activities there.

On the down side, CNN transferred Robert Wiener, its Jerusalem bureau chief after, according to the Washington Jewish Week of Feb. 1, "Dr. Yossi Olmert, head of the [Israeli] government Press Office," expressed to Weiner "concern about recent professional and personal attacks against him in the Israeli press." The newspaper reported that "the allegations, reportedly made by some former CNN employees and others who were quoted anonymously, include that of an anti-Israel bias."

The real story was that CNN, once the only US network willing to defy very heavy Jewish advertising pressure to tone down critical coverage of Israel, caved in completely when the Anti-Defamation League brought pressure to bear on CNN headquarters in Atlanta. The official complaint was that the network had used archival footage of Israeli soldiers beating children in the early weeks of the intifada to illustrate current reports of killings and beatings. The report of the firing in the Washington Jewish Week neglected to mention that, since Israeli military authorities have banned camera crews from filming the continuing violence in the West Bank and Gaza ever since April 1988, any network seeking to provide objective coverage of what's going on behind the Israeli censorship blackout is forced to fall back on stock footage.

While CNN's Ted Turner is no Israel Firster like CBS's Lawrence Tisch, fear of a hostile takeover, combined with advertising pressure seems to be turning CNN's Middle East coverage into a clone of what passes for such coverage on CBS. Perhaps Andy Rooney would like to predict whether or not ratings for CNN's evening news now will follow the downward trend at CBS. Apparently even Americans who don't know a dum dum bullet from a child-proof bottle cap do know when they're being conned.

Richard Curtiss is chief editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and author of the newly-issued Stealth PACs: How Israel's American Lobby Took Control of US Middle East Policy," available from the AET Book Club.