On Thursday night an advocacy and research group called “If Americans Knew” visited campus, speaking to a packed, tense audience in the Public Affairs Center about journalistic integrity and what the perceive as skewed reporting in the Israel-Palestine conflict. The speech was given Alison Weir, the founder and director of the group.
The talk focused primarily on what Weir described as discrepancies between reported deaths and actual deaths in the region. She pointed to what she claimed was an disproportionate emphasis by American newspapers on Israeli deaths as evidence of a pervasive pro-Israel bias in American media, one that distorts and omits crucial information concerning Palestinian perspectives on the conflict. Weir employed a number of different strategies to make her case, including presenting a trailer for an upcoming “If Americans Knew” documentary and recounting stories from her own time spent in the Palestinian territories.
“When I first visited the Middle East in 1951, I was greeted with open arms,” said James Akins, a former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia quoted in the trailer for the documentary. “The notion that they would hate us as much as they do now didn’t even enter our minds—it was just as alien as the notion that we might be welcome over there today.”
The trailer also cited a statistic that became instrumental in Weir’s analysis of the current situation: the $10 million per day Weir says that Washington gives to Israel. Weir argued that, since this money is taken primarily from American taxpayers, American citizens are directly responsible for Israel’s actions in the conflict, and so it is doubly important that domestic news organizations paint an accurate picture of the region.
“We need to know what it is we’re fueling,” she said.
From the collected stories of these news organizations, Weir constructed a tally of reported civilian deaths on both sides, in contrast with the total number of civilian deaths. She reported finding a large disparity between the two. According to Weir, Israeli deaths were often over-reported, listed twice or in higher numbers than they actually were, whereas Palestinian deaths were often downplayed or omitted entirely. She investigated a separate series of statistics for children’s deaths and claimed there was a similarly large gap between what was reported and what occurred.
“In 2001, NPR reported 89 percent of Israeli children’s deaths, but only 20 percent of those suffered by Palestinian children,” Weir said. “At the time, newsgroups were accusing NPR of being biased against Israel. When we looked at the actual numbers, we found the opposite to be the case. They had simply reported equal numbers of deaths on both sides to appear ‘balanced,’ when in fact there were far more Palestinian deaths to cover.”
At the end of the lecture, however, much of the audience was skeptical. Weir held a question-and-answer session that incited many students to raise their objections, ranging from small factual errors to greater philosophical concerns.
Julien Burns ’10 expressed dismay that a tragedy spanning thousands of years was being boiled down to a few contemporary statistics.
“I’m just not sure that the best way to look at this conflict is through graphs and numbers,” he said.
Some of Weir’s responses to these questions seemed to provoke the audience more than her actual presentation. When responding to questions regarding how it would be possible for an entire nation’s news media to unanimously ignore the Palestinian perspective, she produced a PowerPoint slide quoting Joel Bleifuss, reporter for “In These Times.”
“The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of history,” Bleifuss was quoted as saying.
The number of raised hands in the room more than doubled after this slide was presented.
Students also expressed skepticism regarding Weir’s sources. LaurenEllen McCann ’09 pointed out that her argument was founded on a single set of numbers reporting “actual” deaths in the region, a statistic she feels is almost impossible to keep objective.
“No one source knows for sure how many people are dying over there,” McCann said. “Her source could be just as biased as the newsgroups she argues against.”
Andrew Mulkey ’09 was critical of her perspective as well and felt it affected the credibility of her argument.
“She was ignorant of so many aspects of the conflict, notably Israel’s foundation, that it severely hurt her argument for me,” Mulkey said. “I felt that she didn’t understand the context of the situation in a solid way.”
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