(An open letter to Deborah Howell, ombudsman of the Washington Post.)Over the past two years, you defended the decision to publish op-eds by representatives of Hamas, a terrorist organization. It is a decision that cannot be justified. Still, you defended your position. In defense of your 2006 decision to publish Ismail Haniyeh’s op-ed you wrote:
Good editorial pages and commentators enlighten and provoke readers to broaden their thinking.
Except that, as James David Besser later reported, Ismail Haniyeh didn’t write the op-ed. It was written by American supporters of Hamas. So instead of publishing the undiluted views of the leader of Hamas, you published a slickly produced piece of propaganda.
The only possible justification for publishing the op-ed then, is that was the opinion page. It’s a very weak justification. Still, I suppose, it’s better than publishing propaganda for Hamas in your news pages. That is exactly what you did last week.
In her article “Israel to Intensify Strikes If Rocket Fire Continues, Ellen Knickmeyer reported:
Also, a 42-year-old Palestinian high school chemistry teacher was killed when a shell hit a school just before classes started in the morning, said Jamil Suleiman, director of the hospital in the Gaza village of Beit Hanoun. Three 16-year-old Palestinian boys, all students, were wounded, Suleiman said.Israel denied targeting the school, saying it was firing at rocket teams that use the border village as a base for attacks on Israel. On Thursday, fighters fired at least seven rockets at the southern Israeli town of Sderot, wounding one person, the Israeli military said.
The problem is that Israel didn’t just deny targeting the school. What happened is not a matter of dispute. Ms. Knickmeyer found a nice quote from the Egyptian foreign minister dismissing the significance of the Qassam attacks because they gave Israel an excuse to attack Gaza, but somehow she missed the AP report that it had actually photographed rocket launchers near the school.
(It’s possible that one of the AP reports available on the Washington Post website included this bit of information. However, according to my search of your website, Ms. Knickmeyer’s report was the most recent. Since it carried the byline of you reporter and it’s the one that appeared in your print edition it’s the most significant.)
There is no excuse for failing to report the presence of the rocket launchers near the school. As blogger Elder of Ziyon noted, placing armaments in close proximity to civilian institutions is a war crime.
Instead of presenting a “conflicting viewpoints” version of the news, your reporter had an obligation to present the evidence that the Israeli version was accurate. Failing to do that in the original news story, there should have been a followup with the relevant information omitted from the original story.
The New York Times mentioned the AP report, so the information was available to be reported.
In this case the Post failed in its obligation to provide undistorted news. You owe your readers a correction.
ps I am posting this on my blog in anticipation of a response, which I will publish (if I receive it) uncommented on afterwards.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
