A closer look at AP “analysis”

It’s time for a lesson in yellow journalism, which I learned at my editor’s knee while in college. The lessons I learned in college are being applied throughout the mainstream (and non-mainstream) media today. It’s not just bloggers who cherry-pick data to make their arguments. It’s the paid journalists, too.

Here’s how you do it: First, decide on the angle of your story—in this case, settlement growth is not “natural growth,” it’s a huge influx of people from elsewhere. Next, strengthen your case with quotes and statistics that back you up, while denigrating the other side of the argument so that your reader is left with little choice but to nod his head in agreement with your thesis. And last, make sure that you trick the reader into thinking your facts are relevant and up to date, even if they aren’t.

Let’s take a look at how the AP skews the article about Israeli settlement growth. First, the headline:

Migrants boost Jewish settler numbers in West Bank

Interesting choice of word, “migrants.” It makes you think of people swooping into the West Bank from all over the rest of Israel, not merely moving from, say, Tel Aviv to Ma’ale Adumim, a suburb of Jerusalem. But that is the word they’re using to encompass all “settlement” growth. Next, the lead:

Israelis moving to the West Bank accounted for more than a third of settler population growth in recent years, undercutting Israel’s argument that it is continuing settlement construction only to accommodate growing families already living there.

That’s a pretty damning statement, also written to make you believe that people are simply flocking in to Palestinian areas of the West Bank. But what “settlements,” exactly, are they talking about?

Opponents say the government invokes “natural growth” as a cover to build thousands of houses across the West Bank, including hundreds that Palestinian laborers are building in Maaleh Adumim, a major settlement outside Jerusalem.

Ah, Ma’ale Adumim. About that “settlement“:

Approximately 6,000 people live in surrounding settlements that are included in the Ma’ale bloc. Israel has long planned to fill in the empty gap between Jerusalem and this bedroom community (referred to as the E1 project). The corridor is approximately 3,250 acres and does not have any inhabitants, so no Palestinians would be displaced. According to the Clinton plan, Ma’ale was to be part of Israel.

The AP doesn’t go into Ma’ale Adumim’s history. But they do supply a quote from the Palestinians.

“The Israelis are playing a game of deception by what they call natural growth,” said Yasser Abed Rabbo, a senior aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Not a single Israeli official is quoted in the article. But there are plenty of other people quoted to support the AP’s thesis.

Yossi Navon, the foreman who spoke of the Embassy personnel, said apartments were going for about half of what a comparable apartment in Jerusalem would fetch.

That quote is deliberately placed without context to make you think that apartments in Ma’ale Adumim are priced low to attract people to the town. Try this thought exercise: Replace “Jerusalem” with “New York” and “Ma’ale Adumim” with “Hoboken” for context, and you see the way that the reporter and editor are slanting this piece to go along with the thesis. Of course apartments cost less outside of Jerusalem. My rent in Montclair, NJ (12 miles west) was far, far less than a comparable apartment in Manhattan.

Now let’s look at the way AP manipulates the facts. Let’s analyze the data they present.

Data from Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics supports that argument, showing that in 2007, 36 percent of all new settlers had moved from Israel or abroad.

It’s 2009. Have we got any data that’s more recent, perhaps?

More recent data, including for the period since Netanyahu’s government took office in March, is not yet available, but there are few reasons to think Israel has reversed the trend, said Hagit Ofran, a settlement expert for Peace Now, a settlement watchdog group.

No, we don’t have more recent data. But it’s all right to use two-year-old data. We have a quote from an opponent of settlements who says that two-year-old data can be relied on because, well, she says so. That’s some pretty awesome fact-checking, AP!

And then they back that up by using building statistics that aren’t broken down or contextualized.

Amid the influx of people drawn to cheaper housing in settlements, construction has continued—more than 5,500 new apartments have been completed over the past three years in the West Bank, bureau figures show.

So, from 2006-2009, that many new apartments have been completed. The data they are using ends sometime in 2007, so they’ve already neutralized one year of the data. How many were built in the last 18 months? How many in the last three months, since Netanyahu took office? The story doesn’t give that data. Why not? Well, it may not be available—or maybe it undercuts their arguments, in which case, a good reporter, working on slanting an article, knows better than to quote those facts. Again, standard practice when you want to slant an article. And so is analysis disguised as news, such as the following:

Settlements are a major obstacle to peacemaking because Israel has used them to extend its de facto boundaries into the West Bank and to cement its claim on east Jerusalem. The Palestinians claim both territories, captured by Israel in 1967, for a future state, along with the Gaza Strip, and want the Jewish construction there to stop.

Under the 2003 U.S.-backed road map peace plan, Israel promised to halt all settlement construction, including for natural growth. But the building has gone on.

Once again, use facts that support your argument, while ignoring inconvenient facts that would balance it. For instance, the fact that Palestinians are obligated to end terror and incitement in the first phase of the Road Map is never mentioned—only Israel’s obligations to halt settlements.

You’d think that objectivity might surface somewhere in the article. But you would be wrong.

Last week, Netanyahu grudgingly yielded to President Barack Obama’s demand that Israel endorse Palestinian independence, albeit shackled by a series of conditions. But he flatly resisted Obama’s pressure for a settlement freeze.

That’s a lie. Obama didn’t demand that Netanyahu endorse Palestinian “independence.” And Israel has had three Prime Ministers who agreed to Palestinian statehood. But the AP has to keep on slinging the mud at Bibi.

Netanyahu pointedly dropped the politically charged “natural growth” phrase for “normal lives.”

That wily Jew! Now he’s just messin’ with us! Like we’re messin’ with the statistics!

But the linguistic slight of hand doesn’t mask the fact that migration—and not just the growth of families—is a major factor in settler population growth.

Migration from Israel and abroad accounted for 5,300 of the 14,500 new settlers in 2007, the last year for which bureau data are available.

And 2007 wasn’t a random blip. Migration accounted for between a third and half of the population growth in each year between 1999 and 2007, save 2005, when numbers were skewed by Israel’s withdrawal of 8,500 settlers from the Gaza Strip.

Now you see how far back the AP is willing to go to bolster their argument. They have no statistics for 2008, which would be far more relevant, but that’s not stopping them from reaching back ten years for old data. And note how they don’t even mention the removal of settlements from Gaza. Because that would completely undercut their argument that Israel wants to keep every square dunum of land it got in the Six Day War.

To sum up: The AP has not made its argument. It has manipulated data, extrapolated it to explain current trends without any physical evidence to back up that extrapolation, quoted settlement opponents, chose only relevant facts from the Road Map, and used negative adjectives to describe everything the Israeli Prime Minister had to say, and put as negative a spin as possible on what “natural growth” really is.

And that, boys and girls, is how you manage to demonize Israel in the everyday news.