The Fanonite

by Richard Falk and Howard Friel
Verso, 352 pp., 2007, 978-1844671090  

If the Enlightenment challenge to monarchy found fruition in the  US constitution, then its express republican tenets aimed at pre-empting autocracy have clearly failed. A fine ideal the US system of checks and balances might have been, it never materialized into a tangible challenge to the whims of the politically ambitious. Iraq may be the most telling and obvious example, but in the long history of US interventions abroad the legislature or the judiciary have rarely asserted their authority to prevent breaches of the constitution. With the unrivalled constitutional protections conferred on US media, one could be forgiven for thinking that the so-called Fourth Estate would provide the kind of vigilance that ensures accountability should the rest fail. Sadly, not only has it been remiss in its responsibilities, but has actually enabled breaches of the constitution by avoiding references to it in its reportage on national security (e.g., the NSA wiretapping case), and to International Law in its reportage on foreign policy (e.g., Iraq).

Of all US media, none come close to the influence wielded by one institution: the New York Times. It is not so much the paper’s credibility amongst American citizens — only 21% of whom find it entirely reliable, while 14 per cent believe absolutely nothing that appears in its pages (Pew, 2005) — as it is its prestige in the US media establishment that makes it important. For more than a century, the so called ‘paper of record’ has set the agenda for the rest of the media in the United States. Wire services are known to send out notes to editors around the country pointing out news items considered newsworthy by the Times. In this respect the fidelity of the information appearing in its pages takes on the kind of significance that can only be ignored at one’s own peril.

In The Record of the Paper: How the New York Times Misreports US Foreign Policy, their previous study, Richard Falk and Howard Friel identified some consistent patterns in Times’ coverage: while International Law is routinely invoked when judging the actions of countries deemed hostile or unfriendly to the US, it never figures in reports or editorials on US foreign policy. As a consequence readers are deprived of an important consideration in judging the merits of the given policy. Judging the merits of foreign policy by using International Law as a standard, an important constraint is placed on policy-makers that ensures prudence, Falk and Friel argued. By failing to stress its importance – or for that matter relevance – the paper bears a share of the responsibility in several historical misadventures, they assert.

Israel-Palestine on Record: How the “New York Times” Misreports Conflict in the Middle East, Falk & Friel’s new tour-de-force applies the same standard to the paper’s coverage of the Middle-East’s most intractable conflict, and the picture that emerges is even more damning. Whereas the paper’s coverage of Iraq was marked by its long-standing policy of ‘non-crusading centrism’, the paper dispenses with all notions of balance in the case of Israel-Palestine. Given the sharply divergent narratives of both sides, Falk & Friel argue that International Law provides an incontrovertible and neutral standard by which to judge the merits of their claims. That the paper chooses to dispense with International Law arguments could only mean that it has no interest in presenting an objective portrait of the conflict’s realities. Moreover, as the authors argue, ‘the liberal image of the Times gives the American government added room for manoeuvre when it takes such one-sided positions that correspond with the imbalances of American foreign policy.’ International Law is clear, as the authors show, on the illegality of Israeli occupation, the application of the Fourth Geneva Convention, the rights of the refugees to return to their homes, the illegality of the settlements, the illegality of torture — but, admitting these realities would reveal to the American reader a reality which, while obvious to the rest of the world, has been long obscured by this skewed coverage: that Israel is an illegal occupying power engaged in grave and sustained breaches of International Law.

Falk and Friel’s methodology is watertight: by using established principles of International Law, they reveal how the paper ignores continued breaches by Israel, whereas each act of Palestinian violence comes in for inordinate scrutiny. The quantitative imbalance is put in stark contrast by the fact that Times devoted 50 front page stories and 25 front section stories to Palestinian violence, while the far more numerous Israeli acts of violence never make it to the front page. On numerous occasions, Israeli violence goes unreported altogether until the silence is broken by the inevitable Palestinian response. There is a similar qualitative difference which the authors highlight by contrasting Times’ reports with respected Human Rights organizations — Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, ICRC and B’Tselem — as well as the British and Israeli press. As they show, like International Law, Human Rights organizations have limited utility for Times: they are useful insofar as they can be used to demonize official enemies. In the case of Israel, they never make an appearance. The only exception, as they point out, was a series of six articles by one journalist, who subsequently departed Times for another paper. A comparison with the British and Israeli press reveals an equally damning picture: the kind of detail and sensitivity with which critical issues are at times covered by the British and Israeli, despite all their flaws, has no comparison in the Times. Two extended case studies dealing with the Times coverage of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the assault on Gaza in 2006 lend further support to the argument. The aforementioned case studies, and a comparison of two prominent figures, Noam Chomsky and Alan Dershowitz, who are cast in the roles of extremist and expert the Times, despite the former’s insistence on using International Law as a standard for judging each side’s behaviour, and the latter’s total disdain for it, is conclusive indictment of a deeply ideological paper which has to resort to an inversion of morality — and reality — in order to sustain its self-image as an impartial observer of the conflict.

This otherwise excellent book is undermined by an omission of its own. No one even with a remote interest in the conflict could have overlooked the developments that have taken place since John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt published their influential essay on the Israel Lobby in the London Review of Books. The fact that two respected mainstream political scientists should have had to cross the Atlantic to have something like that published in itself merits scrutiny. But the developments since — the deluge of commentary, negative as well as positive; the smearing of the authors; the opening up of the debate; the Baker-Hamilton commission report; Carter’s intervention — can hardly be overlooked. The other important question that is overlooked is why is it that when there could be room for the odd critical report or commentary on Iraq, no such criticism ever appears relating to Israel. Leaving aside these, the book is a timely and important indictment of an institution that has for too long enjoyed a reputation it does not deserve. It may have tried to deflect attention from its serious failures by playing up the Jayson Blair affair and the ostentatious breast-beating, but in their two books Falk and Friel have cracked the veneer of the New York Times credibility and if the paper had any concern for its reputation, it would take their recommendations and make them integral to its journalistic guidelines.

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad is a member of Spinwatch. His regular commentaries appear on The Fanonite