Double Vision
How the Press Distorts America's View of the Middle East

It is a matter of record that Israel is the subject of far more political and media scrutiny than its Arab neighbors. Indeed, of all countries, Israel is second only to the Soviet Union in the amount of air time and newsprint it receives in the United States. That in itself is not a matter of concern. But, Ze'ev Chafets charges in Double Vision, much of this attention is distorted or biased.

Chafets, an American native who emigrated to Israel in 1967, became director of Israel's Government Press Office, a position that afforded him an opportunity to witness first-hand the way American journalists cover Mid­dle Eastern politics. His conclusions are disturbing. Since 1973, he writes, each of the three key American groups—press owners, journalists, and politicians—has, for reasons of its own, chosen to distort the Arab-Israeli conflict.

To begin with, the companies that own the television networks, the newsmagazines, and the great newspapers have become huge corpora­tions with wide-ranging international interests. Long ago they shed their sen­sitivities about advertising revenues from local department stores. Today they are vitally concerned with "forces at play in the national and international economy. And since 1973, none of these forces has been more dramatic, and more influential, than the economic and financial power of the Arab world." Chafets isn't claiming the existence of a conspiracy, but simply the evident self-interest of media companies adopting an "even-handed" approach to the region.

As for journalists, they too turned against Israel, though not for economic reasons. It is no secret that as a group they are to the left of the general population, voting, for example, for George McGovern in 1972 at twice the rate of the population at large. When the American role in Vietnam came to an end in 1973 and the left needed a new cause, it settled on the Palestinians. Through what Chafets calls a "left-wing trickle-down effect," many jour­nalists picked up on this new crusade. Israel came to be seen not only as an oppressor of Palestinian rights, but also as an outpost of imperialism.

Finally, the United States govern­ment added its weight to the anti-Israel orientation when Jimmy Carter came to office in 1977. Believing that stability in the Middle East depended on resolu­tion of the West Bank problem, the President took "a hitherto relatively obscure issue—Jewish settlement in The West Bank—and turn[ed] the search­light of American national interest on it."

West Bank control, necessarily a dif­ficult issue for Israel, became the pivotal Middle East question for the United States—and not Arab recogni­tion of Israel, bilateral U.S.-Arab ties, or any of the many other alternative emphases.

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Political bias aside, American coverage in the Middle East is affected by a staggering array of other problems. One of them is that American journalists are underprepared and over­burdened, as Chafets describes in a delightful anecdote. In September 1980 he visited Jonathan Broder, the Chicago Tribune's Middle East correspondent, just after Broder's editor had requested he leave immediately for Turkey to cover the imposition of mar­tial law. Broder, "who had never been to Turkey, didn't speak Turkish, and didn't know a soul there," had been traveling for several months and had fallen behind with his clippings:

Half a year's worth of unmarked and un­cut newspapers were stacked precariously against one wall. We divided up the pile into four smaller stacks and the four of us—he and his wife, I and mine—started frantically leafing through the papers in search of stories about the country. Time was running out, and in desperation he turned to my daughter—seven years old at the time and just learning to read—wrote the word Turkey on a piece of paper, and handed her a stack of newspapers to peruse. Six hours later he was on a plane.

Such difficulties are hardly surprising, given that the Middle East, a region roughly the size of Europe, is (outside of Israel) covered only by about thirty American journalists. This, Chafets wryly notes, is fewer than the number of sportswriters at the New York Daily News.

To make matters worse, every Arab country except Lebanon and Egypt is a closed society with no independent press of its own; there is no way, then, for foreign journalists to depend on their local counterparts for indepen­dent reportage. News collection is fur­ther impeded by the fact that some of the countries in what Chafets calls the "arc of silence"—including Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq—prohibit foreign cor­respondents from even living in their territories, which makes the cultivation of unofficial sources next to impossible.

The Syrian government goes further yet, engaging in violent intimidation of journalists. In the most thoroughly documented portion of his book, Chafets tells of the Assad government murder of several Lebanese, American, and German journalists—surely one of the most shameful acts in recent press history—how these killings were subse­quently covered up in the Western press, and finally how they inhibited subsequent news coverage from Lebanon.

The paucity of Arab coverage, in contrast to the presence of a "small ar­my of foreign correspondents" in Israel, gives reporting from the Middle East an imbalance: Thus, "an Arab hunger strike in an Israeli prison in the summer of 1980 got more atten­tion than the mass murder of political prisoners in Syria about the same time [and] riots in the West Bank came in for more coverage than the Iraq-Iran war."

Double Vision provides an extraor­dinary catalogue of Middle East news howlers:

• Jonathan Randal, one of the worst American journalists to cover the Middle East.

  The Detroit News no less than three times—on November 23, 25 and 26, 1979—carried news stories that declared the mosque in Mecca rescued from the rebels who had taken it over and never explained the discrepancies in these accounts.
• Ned Temko of the Christian Science Monitor, in his eagerness to find an American hook for a news story about the PLO, asked the PLO spokesman about his organization's reaction to the death of Elvis Presley.
• Yasir Arafat, so carried away by his own dovish rhetoric, replied to Barbara Walters when she read a clause from the Palestinian National Covenant about the need to destroy Israel, "I do not remember that."
• David Ottoway of the Washington Post compared Saddam ("The Butcher of Baghdad") Hussein to an "American politician on the election hustings."
• Ottoway's colleague Jonathan Randal found benefits resulting from it large-scale massacre in Syria in February 1982: "What emerged from the Hama rubble, according to local residents, was a respect for the govern­ment in large part born of fear but also of a feeling of avoiding even greater catastrophe. Some analysts have argued that the destruction of Hama ... marked the birth of modern Syria."

Double Vision combines wit, style, and intelligence to produce a devastat­ing indictment. If it is true that in­formed citizens cannot, alas, avoid the press, this book provides a vivid reminder of just how vigilant we must be.