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Message: <br /><br /> If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/15317/full/15317/british-media-accused-of-pro-palestinian-bias/ <br /><br /> <b>British media accused of pro-Palestinian bias</b> <br /> Friday, March 23, 2001 | by <p>RICHARD ALLEN GREENE </p> <br /><br /><p>LONDON—As clashes between Israel and the Palestinians continue for a sixth month, many Jews in the United Kingdom are concerned that Israel is not getting a fair hearing in the British press.<br /><br /> The Guardian newspaper has been the subject of the harshest criticism, but another daily newspaper, the Independent, and the BBC have also raised concern.<br /><br /> In an unusual move, Canadian publishing magnate Conrad Black publicly attacked one of his own columnists for expressing a hatred for Israel that Black described as "irrational and an offense to civilized taste."<br /><br /> Much of the British Jewish community shares Black's concerns.<br /><br /> "Israel is portrayed as a brutal regime interested only in hurting Palestinians," said Hagai Segal of the World Zionist Organization. Segal was a speaker at a recent panel on the topic, "Does Israel get a fair hearing in the media?"<br /><br /> The British press sees "Israel as a superpower and the Palestinians as poor people who want peace, and neither perspective is remotely accurate," Segal said in an interview.<br /><br /> Part of the problem, he said, is that the British press in general tends to side with underdogs.<br /><br /> D.J. Schneeweis, the Israeli press attaché in London, agreed.<br /><br /> "There is a tendency in many quarters of the media to go softly on the perceived weaker side in any conflict—in this case, the Palestinians," he said. "The presumption is that if more Palestinians than Israelis are being killed, it must be the Israelis using force."<br /><br /> Yet emphasizing the number of fatalities—without saying which side is initiating the attacks—leads to bias in articles, Schneeweis said.<br /><br /> Segal said the problem has gotten worse since the Palestinian uprising broke out at the end of September.<br /><br /> After the Oslo peace process began in 1993 "there was more neutral, balanced, non-emotive reporting," he said.<br /><br /> The paper that has come in for the strongest condemnation is the Guardian, a London daily that is the choice of the left-leaning intelligentsia. Last month it was the target of an email campaign begun by a group called HonestReporting.com.<br /><br /> Started by a couple of young Londoners last October to monitor what they saw as anti-Israel bias in the press, Honest Reporting was soon taken over by Media Watch International, a new group based in New York.<br /><br /> When the Guardian reported that a man who killed eight Israelis by plowing his bus into a group of soldiers and civilians in mid-February was seen "in the Gaza Strip as a sort of Palestinian everyman who finally snapped," Honest Reporting encouraged its 12,000 email subscribers to write to the paper to complain.<br /><br /> "It places no blame whatsoever on the Palestinians. In article after article, and editorial after editorial, The Guardian places sole blame on Israel, on Israel's new prime minister, or on the Israel Defense Force," the monitoring group charged.<br /><br /> The campaign got an immediate response from the newspaper.<br /><br /> Four days after the Honest Reporting petition went out, the Guardian's comment editor, David Leigh, wrote an article saying that hundreds of emails had come in from around the world about the bus driver article.<br /><br /> Leigh traced the campaign back to Honest Reporting and Media Watch International. He linked both groups to the Orthodox group Aish HaTorah, which he described as "widely regarded as right-wing extremists, not people entitled to harass the media into what they would call 'objectivity.'"<br /><br /> Sharon Tzur, the director of Media Watch International, said that some people associated with her group are also associated with Aish, but there are no institutional links between the organizations.<br /><br /> She also said she was disappointed that Leigh responded with an attack on the messenger rather than to the substance of the group's complaint.<br /><br /> Leigh did not respond to inquiries. Guardian policy does not permit journalists to speak to the media about the newspaper.<br /><br /> But Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, said he found the complaints baseless, pointing out that the Guardian has published pieces by Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and writers Amos Oz and David Grossman—leading leftists who have been highly critical of Israeli policy.<br /><br /> "We are very careful to make sure Jewish and Israeli voices are heard," he said.</p> <p> </p>

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