Neutral News and the 'Times' in Jerusalem

This weekend’s New York Times’ public editor column was yet another doozy, covering the semi-recent news that the paper’s Jerusalem bureau chief’s son recently joined the IDF (before he traipses back to America to go to college). That the kid is going to great lengths to undermine his father’s longstanding career is fascinating but we’ll leave that for their family therapy sessions, about which: whew, good luck. Hoyt’s column is unbearably dull until near the end, when he suddenly takes a side: “The Times sent a reporter overseas to provide disinterested coverage of one of the world’s most intense and potentially explosive conflicts, and now his son has taken up arms for one side.” That’s both rather stirring and accurate! Still it doesn’t have too much meaning beyond emotional appeal.

Particularly because Hoyt’s reasoning along the way, once again, for the removal of Ethan Bronner from his post in Jerusalem, stopped making sense:

Alex Jones, director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy and a former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The Times, took a different view. “The appearance of a conflict of interest is often as important or more important than a real conflict of interest,” he said.

It is? It is not! How is an actual undermining conflict of interest devaluing news ever possibly worse than something that people might see as such but isn’t?

In any event, the paper’s executive editor responds with a long-winded no-thanks to the offer to retire the bureau chief.

In the Times, there’s not much coverage of the IDF anyway-there’s one story in the last 30 days that isn’t related to Israeli misgivings over aid to Haiti. That one story was about Israel’s preparation to issue a response to a UN report (with which Israel refused to participate) that said that the IDF’s official policies were clearly intended to terrorize Palestinians in last year’s attack on Gaza.

The story covering the Israeli reaction is a he said/he said to the nth degree. The UN report says that Israel deliberately bombed a sewage treatment plant and the only flour mill in Gaza. Also 4000 homes. And killed 1400 people. Israel says that Hamas actually blew up the plant and everything else was an accident. One of those things is certainly true (I dunno, I have some suspicions!) but Bronner, now more than ever, must present objective, neutral copy (see also: teaching the controversy) or else he’ll be accused of shilling for his son, so it’ll take us a long time to get the truth, at least from the Times.