On Bronner: Goldblog puts it…
Much pithier than I would.
The whole issue of whether Ethan Bronner's son's service in the IDF compromises the New York Times reporting is so outrageous (Uri summarizes it here), that I've been holding back because it's liable to push me off the deep end into a lengthy screed.
Thank heavens (and The Atlantic) for Jeff Goldberg who gets it just right, in considerably less than 2,000 words, especially here:
This is a somewhat obvious point except to propagandists, reporters are capable of actually separating out their personal interests from their coverage. I've worked with Palestinian reporters in Gaza and the West Bank, many of whom have had family ties to Fatah and, in one case, even to Hamas, but without fail they've functioned as professional news-gatherers interested only in getting the story before the competition. I don't think the Times should stop using Palestinian reporters in the West Bank and Gaza, because if it did so, its coverage would suffer. And its coverage of Israel would suffer immeasurably if the Times bent to the pressure of anti-Israel propagandists and removed Ethan Bronner from his post.
I used to think Ali Abunimah, who started all this, had a few good ideas, but now I wonder if he bothers thinking at all. This initiative is a big fat welcome mat for folks who want to marginalize and even criminalize Palestinian reporting, a phenomenon I addressed here.
Listen up: This is a standard that would essentially kill the concept of the "local hire," rob us (the global "us") essential insights into conflicts around the globe, and reduce media credibility just when it needs as much reinforcement as it can get.
As I've written elsewhere, an organic involvement in one society or the other on either side of a conflict -- and having a son enlist is as organic as it gets in Israel -- does not detract from reporting; it enhances it.
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ASC
02/08/10 09:10 PM
“An organic involvement in one society or the other on either side of a conflict—and having a son enlist is as organic as it gets in Israel—does not detract from reporting; it enhances it.”
Unless it doesn’t.
Western news organizations tolerate, as opposed to prefer, “local hires” because they are affordable; they have certain skill sets --language, mostly, and hard-won experience on the ground—that their own home-grown staff do not; and they have access to areas that are hostile or inaccessible to outsiders.
The whole concept of a “foreign correspondent” was for decades based on the idea that we send one of “ours” over “there.” The fact of his or her “otherness,” it was long felt, would only enhance the reporting—they would presumably have the skills to tell the country’s story, but keep a critical distance by dint of their “foreignness” and thus tell their story more objectively and dispassionately than a local hire could be expected to. In fact, it was seen as an occupational hazard were a reporter to “go native.”
Ron, you are suggesting a different model—a globalized newspaper, that instead of sending its own staff overseas outsources its reporting to “local hires.” I’m not sure I see the difference between that and merely carrying dispatches from other foreign news outlets. Why shouldn’t the Times just close its Israel bureau and translate articles from Maariv or Haaretz in some sort of reciprocal arrangement? It would be cheaper, and certainly the average Israeli native reporter has more “essential insights” into the region than a guy who has been imported from outside, even if that guy was there for a number of years.
If media had infinite means and universal access to hotspots, they would certainly eschew the whole notion of local hires, and prefer instead to dispatch correspondents who were hired, trained and promoted according to the same standards of its local and national staffs. Local hires are a capitulation to reality, not a journalistic ideal by any means.
In the case of the TImes bureau chief, I don’t think you have to be a “savage partisan,” to use Bill Keller’s phrase, to worry that a transplanted American reporter who has become fully integrated into a society might be in danger of losing his or her critical distance. Or to suggest that local hires may not be the ideal way to cover a conflict.