Trib vs Tribe, Part II: Shooting Blanks?

A mysterious study of the Tribune's Middle East coverage is being kept under wraps in Chicago, though if you can wait eight months all will be revealed in Louisiana. It's a study the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago commissioned last year to back a charge many Chicago Jews passionately believe: that the Tribune has maligned Israel and romanticized the Palestinians during the latest intifada.

 

Apparently the study didn't produce the empirical evidence the Jewish Federation was looking for. Its leaders have now read the study, as have top editors at the Tribune. The editors don't object to its being made public, but the federation's leaders do. "It's the basis for constructive engagement and dialogue," says Michael Kotzin, the federation's executive vice president. "On that basis it's not a public report. We felt the likelihood of it continuing to be a constructive engagement was for it to be a working document."

 

Has he seen a change in the Tribune's coverage?  "I wouldn't want to evaluate that," he says. "They reviewed it. They've taken it into account."  "I can say unequivocally we have no objection to its release," Don Wycliff tells me. Wycliff is public editor of the Tribune, and he's not aware that the Tribune's doing anything differently. When I say I'm not sure what the federation means by "constructive engagement," Wycliff replies, "To be frank, I don't either."

 

Barbie Zelizer, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, conducted the study. She compared the Tribune's Middle East coverage with coverage in the New York Times and Washington Post over several months of 2001. Her contract with the Jewish Federation allows her to make academic use of her research, and that's why she feels free to discuss her conclusions this coming November at the National Communication Association conference in New Orleans. But she won't discuss them with me.  She says, "I'd love to talk to you."

 

People like me who'd heard of the federation's research project months ago and then forgotten about it were reminded by the column Wycliff published on February 28. He was fresh from a "vitriolic"-his word-confrontation between Tribune editors and the congregation of North Suburban Synagogue Beth El in Highland Park. "What struck me most forcefully in the exercise," he wrote, "was that, in a very real sense, we stand on opposite sides of a vast gap or gulf in our perceptions of the personalities and situations in the Middle East."

 

Wycliff stood his ground. "The greatest gap is in our perceptions of what a newspaper is supposed to be and do," he wrote. "The ideal to which a paper ought to aspire is to give an account of the news that an unbiased observer would recognize as true and honest if thrust into the situation himself or herself."

 

Journalists are generally terrible at making their principles sound transcendent, and Wycliff was no exception. He seemed to be saying that no one can appreciate unbiased coverage but an unbiased reader of the coverage, which critics of the coverage by definition can't be. But his stab at lofty rhetoric isn't what caught anyone's eye. It was his allusion to an "academic study" commissioned to measure the Tribune's "putative bias." He went on, a bit teasingly, "The results of the study have been shared with Tribune editors on a confidential basis, but for reasons not explained publicly the sponsoring organization has chosen so far not to make them public."  Wycliff obviously meant the Jewish Federation.

 

A small Jewish peace group called Not in My Name, which believes the Tribune's sympathies for the Palestinians don't go far enough, spotted the reference and set out to rattle the federation's cage. The founder, Steven Fuerstein, E-mailed his "friends" the federation's phone number and contact person, and commented,"I believe that we should argue strenuously (and perhaps do so in a public way, organizationally) that after so many leaders of the Jewish community have publicly expressed criticism of the Tribune (with an implication,sometimes made explicit, of anti-Semitism), it is incumbent upon the Federation to release this information so that everyone can see the results. We should, in essence, call the bluff of the Federation and have them admit that independent analysis cannot validate their criticism."  No one who hasn't read the report can say for sure what Zelizer's analysis can or can't do, or for that matter whether it deserves to be taken seriously.

 

Doni Remba is someone who wonders. Remba is coordinator ofChicago Peace Now, a local affiliate of the Peace Now movement in Israel,which supports a two-state solution and claims adherents in Yasir Arafat's administration as well as in the Israeli government. Remba might be presumed to admire the Tribune's coverage, but in fact he despises it. He attended the meeting at North Suburban Synagogue Beth El, read what he'd describe as Wycliff's "self-serving and outrageous column" discussing it,and composed a long "cri de coeur" that he submitted to the Tribune's Perspective section.  Like Fuerstein, Remba reached out by E-mail to his "friends," sending them his lament accompanied by a note that explained he'd written it out of frustration with many Tribune editors--not all, he carefully noted—over their "anti-Israel positions and utter failure to understand some of the central issues."

 

Remba hadn't read Zelizer's study, but he'd spoken with people who had, and his note shared what he'd heard. "I understand that it did confirm bias in the way pictures and headlines were handled by the Trib...but did not bear out the charges of bias in the news stories themselves; I don't believe the study considered the content of the opinion columns....However, any careful reader of the Trib who cares about Israel has amassed his or her own file full of examples of inaccurate or biased news coverage which cannot be explained away. I have seen enough cases myself that no study in the world would convince me to deny the evidence of my own senses: what I myself can clearly see."  Remba's cri de coeur was an angry analysis of the word "terrorist" as the Tribune applies it, and declines to apply it, in the Middle East. He accused the Tribune of holding to "a fool's idea of fairness." He tells me Perspective rejected the piece but invited him to write an essay on terrorism and the peace process, leaving the Tribune out of it.