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

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

...Israel came to be seen not only as an oppressor of Palestinian rights, but also as an outpost of imperialism...

...Six hours later he was on a plane...

...Political bias aside, American coverage in the Middle East is affected by a staggering array of other problems...

...To make matters worse, every Arab country except Lebanon and Egypt is a closed society with no independent press of its own...

...The Syrian government goes further yet, engaging in violent intimidation of journalists...

...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...

...Ottoway's colleague Jonathan Randal found advantages resulting from a 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...

...And since 1973, none of these forces has been more dramatic, and more influential, than the economic and financial power of the Arab world...

...Today they are vitally concerned with "forces at play in the national and international economy...

...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...

...The paucity of Arab coverage, in contrast to the presence of a "small army of foreign correspondents" in Israel, is giving 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...

...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...

...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...

...That in itself is not a matter of concern...

...Through what Chafets calls a "left-wing trickle-down effect," many journalists picked up on this new crusade...

...Finally, the United States government added its weight to the anti-Israel orientation when Jimmy Carter came to office in 1977...

...Double Vision combines wit, style, and intelligence to produce a devastating indictment...

...DOUBLE VISION: HOW THE PRESS DISTORTS AMERICA'S VIEW OF THE MIDDLE EAST Ze'ev Chafets/William Morrow/$16.95 Daniel Pipes It is a matter of record that Israel is the subject of far more political and media scrutiny than its Arab neighbors...

...panies adopting an "even-handed" approach to the region...

...Chafets isn't claiming the existence of a conspiracy, but simply the evident self-interest of media comDaniel Pipes, associate professor of strategy at the U.S...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...His conclusions are disturbing...

...Long ago they shed their sensitivities about advertising revenues from local department stores...

...But, Ze'ev Chafets charges in Double Vision, much of this attention is distorted or biased...

...When the American role in Vietnam came to an end in 1973 and the left needed a new cause, it settled on the Palestinians...

...One of them is that American journalists are underprepared and overburdened, as Chafets describes in a delightful anecdote...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...Some analysts have argued that the destruction of Hama . . . marked the birth of modern Syria...

...This, Chafets wryly notes, is fewer than the number of sportswriters at the New York Daily News...

...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...

...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...

...Naval War College, is the author of In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power (Basic Books) and editor of the Harvard Middle East Papers...

...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...

...As for journalists, they too turned against Israel, though not for economic reasons...

...David Ottoway of the Washington Post compared Saddam ("The Butcher of Baghdad") Husayn to an "American politician on the election hustings...

...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 silence1-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...

...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 did not remember that...

...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...