Misleading Reporting

Times' editorial boilerplate burns Israel again

A recent independent assessment of the Palestinian security forces found them in a state of utter disarray and nearly impotent as a law enforcement unit. What went wrong? The NY Times' Steven Erlanger reported:

The essential problem for the Palestinian Authority, the report says, is that its security forces were established on "an ad hoc basis without statutory support and in isolation of wider reforms," a lasting legacy of Mr. Arafat's policy of duplication and promoting rivalry within his organization.

Erlanger quotes the head of the Jerusalem office of the organization that drafted the report stating that 'continuing structural reform is the only way to build a credible Palestinian security that can provide internal order and a reliable relationship with Israel that could lead to a permanent peace.'

But that conclusion from the report's own authors, conveyed by a Times reporter, wasn't good enough for the Times' editorial board. Today's Times editorial - 'Nourishing the Palestinian Police' - responds to the report by blaming Israel alone for the unfortunate state of the Palestinian police force:

The tattered nature of Palestinian Authority security forces - including police officers and soldiers - has been evident since Ariel Sharon essentially destroyed those forces three years ago, during the Palestinians' ill-advised intifada. Yet senior Israeli military officials, as well as Israeli politicians like Mr. Sharon, now insist that Mr. Abbas has sufficient manpower and arms to dismantle the militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad if he would just decide to do so. Adding insult to irony, Israel has refused requests by Lt. Gen. William Ward, the American-appointed coordinator of the effort to overhaul the Palestinian security apparatus, to allow the Palestinians to import new armored vehicles and fresh supplies of arms to do that very job.

This editorial falls squarely within the astutely noted 'template' for NY Times Mideast editorials presented by Mediacrity:

1. Whatever The Problem, Blame Israel. This is the cornerstone of the template. These editorials always maintain a pretense of even-handedness ("the failure of Israeli and Palestinian leaders"), but the message of the editorials is almost invariably that Israel gets the lion's share of the blame for whatever happens to be going awry at any particular point in time.

The Times editorial board's commitment to blame Israel has now overridden the very news item it comments on. Times editors are showing their true colors here -- it's not a question of subjective perspective, it's an institutionalized bias that grants legitimacy only to information that conforms to their fixed position.

In this case, the independent report's overview of PA security chaos is fine and admissible, but that very report's conclusion of internal Palestinian culpability is ignored, omitted, and rejected.

From Backspin