Sadat's Visit in America's
Kaitz, Merrill
SADAT'S VISIT IN AMERICAS PRESS MERRILL KAITZ The Sadat visit to Israel was a television event. Walter Cronkite helped bring the leaders together; all three networks brought them to us. If...
...The article cited "senior Middle East diplomats" and "a well-informed envoy of a major Middle East nation...
...Volumes could be written about the variant translations and their significance, and no doubt there are offices in Israel, Egypt, and elsewhere where many hours have been spent in close analysis of the original texts...
...They will necessarily be slow, private, and less visually dramatic than the events of November...
...After several introductory paragraphs the LA Times presented alternating quotations from Sadat and Begin on the occupied territories, Jerusalem, and the Palestinians (to whom Begin did not refer directly...
...Louis Post-Dispatch on November 21st, you might not have realized that historic speeches had been made at all...
...The Inquirer on the same day in the same position printed, SADAT ENTERS THE ENEMY LAND...
...The amount of coverage was very nearly proportional to the population of the city each newspaper served...
...Sunday's headlines in the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer can be seen as representative of the range of approaches that was open to newspaper readers...
...While some newspapers showed obvious care in balancing treatment of Sadat's action with Israeli responses, the courage of Egypt's reaching out with the warmth of Israel's welcome, others, such as the Philadelphia Inquirer in its story on Sunday, November 20, clearly presented more information about the Egyptian side and less about the Israeli...
...So the difficulty in following the Sadat story in American daily papers was much more a problem of inconsistency than of either incompetence or bias...
...Meir in the receiving line, said there was no kiss...
...Deadlines and space considerations frequently overwhelm considerations of comprehensiveness or even breadth and continuity, not to mention accuracy...
...However, the Los Angeles Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer may have played it too safe...
...If so, what you learned would have been dependent on where, you live and which newspaper you relied on...
...Louis Post-Dispatch, relying on the Associated Press, reported the kiss and quoted Sadat with a slight difference: "Madame, I have waited a long time to meet you," thus making more sense of Meir's reply...
...Presi-| dent, I have waited a long time to ? meet you.' Mr...
...The translation problem is important for casual readers as well as intelligence agents, however, particularly' when a translation lapses temporarily into nonsense, as in this sentence from the Philadelphia/myMi'rer's quotation of Sadat: " 'The problem is not that of Egypt and Israel because any unilateral peace and Israel and any country . . . and any one of the confrontation countries and Israel will not be conducive to the establishment of a lasting and durable peace.' " Some readers might pause, surmise the sense, and continue, but no doubt many gave up trying...
...The Los Angeles Times, which had not reported Sadat's arrival on Sunday, reported the speeches in its lead story on Monday...
...Meir replied, 'Mr...
...And if we have been spoiled, now, and the TV people insist on covering the events as if they were the next act in a continuing spectacular, TV could end up making news by unmaking peace...
...While the New York Times stated in a sub-headline that "Neither leader offers any concessions, but each avoids harshness," the Philadelphia Inquirer called Begin's speech "a generally hard-lined reply...
...Coverage varied enormously from paper to paper, not merely in frills and packaging, but in inclusiveness and accuracy concerning the facts...
...The Times headlined: SADAT ARRIVES TO WARM WELCOME IN ISRAEL...
...Readers of the Inquirer, the Post-Dispatch , or the LA Times would all have missed pieces of the story if they were relying exclusively on one of those papers...
...The Inquirer story on that Sunday was labeled "From Inquirer wire services...
...Wide differences also appeared in basic matters of interpretation...
...A close friend of Golda's said that Golda had said there was no kiss...
...The fact that these details are selected and ordered for readers is an advantage as well as a disadvantage...
...But the next steps toward peace will not be taken before a mass audience...
...LA and NY printed the full texts of Sadat's and Begin's speeches while Philadelphia printed about half and St...
...The newspapers differed in comprehensiveness, selection, and interpretation at every stage of the visit...
...Among the details of Israel's welcome to Sadat, the receiving line in which he greeted Moshe Dayan and Ariel Sharon as well as Golda Men-was not trivial...
...For example, there was the problem of Golda and the Kiss...
...What had been front page news in the New York Times and many other papers was perhaps too small an incident to support the weight of international scrutiny and assigned significance...
...Secret Sadat-Begin Pact," the headline read, implying an important scoop or exclusive report...
...On Monday, AP issued an 11-paragraph story documenting the confusion, focusing on the question of whether there actually was a kiss...
...Security agents, the size of the crowd, and chaos stood between reporters and the actors in the drama...
...Television may have delivered instant replays of some events, but one advantage of print has always been that you can replay it for yourself, conveniently, any number of times, thinking about the text in any number of ways...
...Despite their unevenness, we will do better to follow the story—the real story—in the newspapers...
...The Inquirer did not mention Sharon, Dayan, or Meir...
...Readers of the Boston Herald-American on Tuesday the 22nd got an unexpected—and unwarranted—extra...
...Every gesture, facial expression, and verbal utterance was noted and reported...
...If a lasting peace is to be achieved in the Middle East, its major steps will not, and should not, be brought into our living rooms live via satellite...
...The New York Times exploited this advantage of print com-mendably on Monday, November 21, by arranging much of its extensive coverage that day in a section designed to be pulled out and saved...
...If you watched the receiving line for Sadat on television, for example, you may have formed your own opinion on the Kiss, but chances are you wouldn't have known there was a controversy...
...A box would have directed you to the speech excerpts inside, but neither of the Post-Dispatch's two lead news stories on Sadat reported the speeches or even mentioned them...
...Sadat bent over and kissed her on the cheek.'' The St...
...The story was not continued by the Herald-American or picked up elsewhere...
...So newspapers like the Los Angeles Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer, which did not mention the incident at all, apparently had taken the safest course...
...Israeli Minister of Industry Meir Amit, who had been near Mrs...
...But the Kansas City Star, also using the Associated Press on the same day, had Golda replying, "But you didn't come...
...The day the speeches were reported, Monday, November 21, 1400 column inches in the New York Times were devoted to some aspect of the Sadat visit, 750 inches in the Los Angeles Times, 595 inches in the Philadelphia Inquirer, and 520 inches in the St...
...If you were reading the front page of the St...
...neither reported anything about the receiving line that greeted Sadat at Ben-Gurion Airport...
...The arrival and the departure, the tour of Jerusalem and the addresses to the Knesset, the interpretation of the speeches and the private talks, all were subject to the vagaries of slant and space that go so far in determining the nature—and quality—of our daily newspapers...
...Louis less than half...
...Sadat i said...
...The quality and slant of the coverage varied, but not in any clear pattern...
...In its lead story on Sunday, November 20, the I New York Times reported under its | own subhead, "A Special Greeting | for Golda Meir: 'I have wanted to J meet you for a long time,' Mr...
...Sadat in Israel was an advanced test for reporters and correspondents...
...Sadat's press secretary, Saad Zahloul Nasser, was quoted on the front page ('"It's wonderful' "), but Yigal Allon was not allowed to speak until the continuation on page 15...
...Television, by contrast, in its coverage of live events, selects almost at random and cannot edit...
...Each paper used a different translation...
...Choice of words and details for headlines, front pages and lead sentences subtly color what the reader learns, due far more to the newspapers' voracious need to select and digest than to any conscious daily exercise of a viewpoint...
...If working hours somehow kept you from watching either the original or the replays, if your trinitron was languishing in the repair shop, or if you still refuse to recognize the existence of TV, you might have had to follow the Event in the papers...
...On the other hand, the newspapers do provide their readers with a sea of detail—or, at least, a pond...
...On Monday and Tuesday the Inquirer lead stories were by-lined James McCartney, and they showed a great deal more balance...
...A study of the newspaper coverage of the Sadat visit to Israel confirms in bolder face than usual much of what we should realize more fully about the assets and liabilities of the medium...
...An Israeli reporter said he could swear he had seen it...
...Sadat's arrival and welcome were major portions of the entire story, and American newspaper readers were given widely differing servings...
...Louis Post-Dispatch...
...We will need reporters who can penetrate where lights and cameras cannot reach and who can report on a sequence of events that is too subtle to be photogenic...
...The major point of the secret pact appeared to be a definite agreement to reconvene the Geneva Conference in December, 1977...
...The Sadat visit to Israel was political theatre, an almost melodramatic psychological show, perfect for TV, and aimed at a diverse international audience...
...Print is a lasting medium, whether in the scrambling and sometimes scrambled mode of the daily journalist, or in the careful, sometimes immobile prose of the academic analyst...
...SAYS HE HAS SPECIFIC PROPOSALS FOR PEACE...
Vol. 3 • January 1978 • No. 3
