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NPR’s psychological warfare technique

Wednesday, March 7th, 2007

By Vic Rosenthal

National Public Radio (NPR) is a personal bête noir. I used to be a regular supporter of my local Public Radio station, but stopped because of what I felt was biased coverage of Israel and related issues from NPR. Organizations such as CAMERA and Honest Reporting have documented this bias for some time.

NPR was generally criticized on the basis of which events they chose to cover (they somehow ignored the 2002 Passover Seder Massacre in which Hamas murdered 30 people), and the relative amount of time they gave to pro- and anti-Israel voices. In response, NPR started providing free transcripts of their Mideast coverage from major news programs in 2002. They also appointed an ombudsman, Jeffrey Dvorkin, to deal with complaints about biased reporting.

So when I woke on February 27 to another anti-Israel segment from NPR’s Linda Gradstein, describing an Israeli incursion into Nablus [Shechem] on the West Bank, I planned to obtain the transcript and complain about it to the ombudsman. Unfortunately, as of today the transcript has not appeared (they usually are provided within a couple of days at most). And Dvorkin, the ombudsman, apparently doesn’t work there anymore. An automatic reply to my email of March 2 said that his assistant would read all mail until a new one was hired, but as of today I have received no response. I’ve transcribed it myself, and it appears below.

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What NPR didn’t ask Carter

Thursday, January 25th, 2007

Jimmy Carter was interviewed this morning on NPR. The interviewer pressed him on his use of the word ‘apartheid’, an obvious and reasonable question. However, there are a few other questions, also obvious and reasonable that were not asked. For example:

  • Do you think that you were influenced in any way by the millions of dollars you personally and the Carter Center received from Arab sources?
  • You said in your book that the Arabs must recognize Israel’s right to exist in peace. Don’t you think that it’s reasonable to expect an end to terrorism before Israeli concessions are made that compromise her security? Wouldn’t it be irresponsible for the Israeli government to give up territory while rockets are falling?
  • The thrust of your arguments is that Israel is responsible for the conflict as a result of her occupation of ‘Palestinian land’ in 1967. How do you account for the Palestinian terrorism against Israel (and the pre-state Jewish presence) since at least 1920? Don’t you think that the Arabs — both the Palestinians and Israel’s neighbor states — must bear some responsibility for the sustained terrorism and war that they’ve waged against the Jews over the years?

Update [25 Jan 1453 PST]: Read Kenneth Stein’s review of Carter’s book. Stein was Executive Director of the Carter Center from 1983 to 1986, and the Center’s Middle East Fellow until 2006, when he resigned in protest of the book.

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NPR distorts the facts yet again

Monday, January 8th, 2007

This morning I was awakened to NPR’s Linda Gradstein reporting as follows:

“…while Olmert was meeting President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt in trying to push through a prisoner exchange…Israeli troops in an arrest raid killed four Palestinian civilians in the Center of Ramala, wounded about 20 others, embarrassing Olmert.” — NPR

Olmert was embarrassed, but in fact the four ‘civilians’ were armed guerrilla fighters, probably from the ‘moderate’ Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah faction.

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