HonestReporting

HonestReporting is a media lobbying group which says it is "dedicated to defending Israel against prejudice in the Media". They "aim to provide educational tools and resources to anyone wishing to advocate for Israel". The organisation was set up by Aish Hatorah and also acts as a client to Israeli ambassador, Lenny Ben-David.

Honest Reporting describes its mission as follows:

Israel is in the midst of a battle for public opinion – waged primarily via the media. To ensure Israel is represented fairly and accurately HonestReporting monitors the media, exposes cases of bias, promotes balance, and effects change through education and action.

When media bias occurs, our worldwide base of subscribers takes action by contacting news agencies, drawing issues of bias to their attention, and requesting changes. Media outlets, correspondents, and editors are now held accountable for biased reporting and are becoming more aware of the need for factual, impartial and fair reporting. Our subscribers also make use of our Communiqués to bolster their own knowledge and understanding of the often complex issues.

The work of HonestReporting yields results. Since 2000, the organization prompted hundreds of apologies, retractions, and revisions from news outlets. These efforts are changing the face of the media and reporting of Israel throughout the world.

As an organization dedicated to defending Israel against prejudice in the Media, we aim to provide educational tools and resources to anyone wishing to advocate for Israel. Our materials provide people with information that is helpful when responding to the Media, in their dealings on Campus or in the work place, and in any other sphere where having credible, considered background material is of value.

Why is the struggle for media fairness so important? The media sways public opinion, which directly affects foreign policy towards Israel and in turn the lives of her citizens. One person alone may not impact this struggle, but thousands united can!

Visitors to the website can subscribe to updates from HonestReporting. In July 2006 HonestReporting said that it had 140,000 subscribers, 3,000 of whom are in Britain.

History

The following is HonestReporting's description of its founding:

It was Yom Kippur, 2000. The Intifada had just broken out and a huge wave of terror had suddenly descended upon Israel. The media in Europe was twisting the story to brand Israel as a bad guy! Jews in the UK were in shock and felt under attack. A few idealists decided enough was enough.

So there were 4 or 5 of us British university students, kicking ideas around, frustrated and wondering what we could do to help Israel. We came up with the idea of encouraging thousands of e-mails to some of the publications in order to make our complaints heard. But in order to create an email protest, we had to have a website. Otherwise people couldn't respond, and we couldn't communicate with a base of supporters. So we just decided to go ahead and do it: design a simple, basic website. The whole project took only a couple of weeks – you know, when you have 4 or 5 people working together, all of whom are really committed, you can get almost anything done.

According to the HonestReporting website, the Jerusalem Fund of Aish HaTorah was instrumental in HonestReporting's founding. It helped "build a website, develop materials and grow the subscriber base even further".

Activities

HonestReporting identifies four 'case studies' of its successful intervention in media reporting by CNN, Ithaca Journal, Reuters, and The Dubliner.

Lobbying CNN on Jenin

In the case of CNN, HonestReporting says:

CNN's coverage of the Middle East had been a continual bone of contention since the September 2000 outbreak of Palestinian violence against Israelis. HonestReporting maintained the pressure on the cable news station, highlighting inaccuracies, bias and lack of objectivity.

HonestReporting objected to CNN's repeating what it called a "big lie ... spread by Palestinian spokesmen" that 500 Palestinians died in Jenin in 2002. The Jerusalem Post reported how HonestReporting's efforts paid off:

HonestReporting.com readers sent up to 6,000 e-mails a day to CNN executives, effectively paralyzing their internal e-mail system. The consultant, who was present at several meetings with watchdog groups initiated by CNN, says the top CNN executives had, until then, failed to appreciate the strength of public feeling on the issue.

"At the beginning," says the consultant, "the executives didn't believe there was a problem, mostly out of ignorance of what was going on [in the field]. They were not aware of how often the big lie [that 500 Palestinians died in Jenin in April] was spread by Palestinian spokesmen, and seemed shocked when we told them there were 30 cases in 10 days. They were not watching this narrow little part of CNN's operation – they have to watch what's going on in a massive empire, and suddenly this corner started biting them in the backside."

The upshot was:

HonestReporting was invited to enter into dialogue with executives at CNN's Atlanta headquarters, who demonstrated a genuine sensitivity to HonestReporting's concerns... the network certainly made efforts to improve its reporting.

Lobbying CNN on Israeli settlements

According to a report by Rachel Coen in FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Broadcasting), HonestReporting may have played a part in successfully lobbying CNN to stop using the terms "settlers" or "settlements" to describe Israeli-occupied territories. Instead, CNN was persuaded to describe the settlements as "neighborhoods". The FAIR report, using the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz as its source, says that the original edict for rebranding the settlements as "neighborhoods" came from "a member of the Israeli cabinet" to the Israel Broadcasting Authority, which in turn passed the order on to its editorial departments.

Coen comments:

According to Ha'aretz, "it is not clear if the editors will obey the order." What does seem clear is that settlements - housing built on land illegally seized by Israel after the 1967 war - are such a contentious issue within Israel that the Israeli government would like to stop reporters from even saying the word.

Coen remarks on the irony that an Israeli paper is more open about Israel's settlement policy than the US media:

the opinion pages of an Israeli paper like Ha'aretz often show a franker debate over Israel's aggressive settlement policy than one can generally find in mainstream U.S. media. Government interference doesn't seem to have been necessary to convince some major U.S. news outlets to avoid honest investigation of settlements, and sometimes even to avoid the word itself.

Coen says that this may be due to the activities of pressure groups in the US, including HonestReporting:

Take the case of Gilo, an Israeli settlement that some pro-settler groups have used as a focal point for their campaigns to eliminate the term "settlements" in favor of "neighborhoods." In September 2001, CNN changed its policy on how to characterize Gilo: "We refer to Gilo as 'a Jewish neighborhood on the outskirts of Jerusalem, built on land occupied by Israel in 1967.' We don't refer to it as a settlement," said the order from CNN headquarters. CNN denies that its decision was a concession to outside pressure, but according to veteran Middle East reporter Robert Fisk (London Independent, 9/3/01), sources within the network said that the switch followed "months of internal debate in CNN, which has been constantly criticized by CNN Watch, honestreporting.com and other pro-Israeli pressure groups."

Film Production and Distribution

Honestreporting were involved in the production and distribution of the film Obsession, which was described by critics as "Islampohobic" and "hate propaganda".

Criticism

Robert Fisk Critique

Writing in The Independent, Robert Fisk gives the following account of Honest Reporting:

Several papers, including The Independent, have been bombarded by hundreds of letters and e-mails from supposedly outraged American "readers" ­ most of them from parts of the United States where The Independent, for example, is not on sale and many of them written in vitriolic, even violent language. A number have been written in answer to an appeal from an outfit called "honestreporting.com", which carries a series of misleading and, in some cases, untruthful statements about my own articles.

Fisk went on to say:

But honestreporting.com's supporters whose letters often reveal that they've never actually read anything I've written ­are in a class of their own. Only last month, I wrote a comment-page article in The Independent describing the way in which any serious journalist who criticised Israeli policy ­the operation of death squads, for example, or the building of illegal Jewish settlements on stolen Arab land ­was reviled as "anti-Semitic". This, the most disgraceful of the accusations made against Western journalists, permeates many of the letters provoked by honestreporting.com.

There's no doubt what prompted this revealing deluge of purple prose. Honestreporting.com urges its supporters to read The Independent's website. It would like, somehow, to close down The Independent's Middle East coverage ­ and, to be fair, The Guardian's as well ­ and return Americans to the bland, generally pro-American (and thus pro-Israeli) reports of the US press. Much of my ordinary mailbag ­ I'm not counting the lobby boys ­ now comes from the US. University departments are asking me and other European journalists to lecture in the States, where our discussions tend to be a lot more straight-talking than that of our American colleagues.

But honestreporting.com's methods are themselves revealing. In one "communiqué", it manages to quote my 1982 description of a Palestinian woman's face as that of a Madonna and a Lebanese friend's (described by the outfit as a Palestinian) weeping at the departure of the PLO from Beirut. What they don't mention is that they were weeping because they feared that in the absence of Palestinian fighters, they would be massacred by Israel's brutal Lebanese allies ­ which is exactly what happened a few days later.

Then it quotes from my article of 17 April this year, in which I remarked that some Israeli leaders had been "bestializing" [sic] Arabs, referring to my account of how Palestinian taxi drivers are humiliated as they approach Israeli checkpoints on Arab land. But honestreporting.com ­ and the "honest" bit is a joke in itself ­ didn't mention that the quotes come from two different articles. The "bestialisation" story referred to Israeli leaders who had at various times called Palestinians "serpents", "two-legged beasts", "cockroaches in a glass jar", and "crocodiles". Of course, honestreporting.com erased all mention of that in its "communiqué".

American Journalism Review

Writing for the American Journalism Review Barbara Matusow criticised media monitoring on both sides of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. She said of Honest Reporting:

"Frequently, these so-called media monitors, who say they are only interested in fairness and balance, will seize on a word or a phrase and leave out the context. Take the case of a Philadelphia Inquirer editorial that called both PLO leader Yassir Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon "pigheaded and destructive." In a communiqué urging readers to complain to the Inquirer, HonestReporting.com omitted the reference to Arafat to make the editorial sound like a one-sided attack on Sharon".

People

As of December 2009:

• Simon Plosker - reporting senior editor
• Mike Fegelman - executive director of HonestReporting Canada

Endorsements

The HonestReporting website gives endorsements from the following people and organisations. The descriptions are HonestReporting's as of December 2009:

• Natan Sharansky - Former Prisoner of Zion, and Diaspora Affairs Minister
• Gary Bauer - Renowned Christian Leader; American Values, President
• Bob Diener - Founder Hotels.com; Founder and President Consumer Club
• The Jerusalem Report

Resources

• Honest Reporting 'Case Studies', cited on 24th April 2006
• HonestReporting 'Our Mission' cited on 24th April 2006
• Khody Akhavi, Film on “Radical Islam” Tied to Pro-Israel Groups, CommonDreams, 27 March 2007.
• Honestreporting.org: Monitors HonestReporting 'This website's purpose is to expose the misleading, sloppy and sometimes downright deceitful information dished out frequently by HonestReporting.' http://www.honestreporting.org/

Contact

US Website: http://www.honestreporting.com/

UK Website: http://www.honestreporting.co.uk/

HonestReporting blog: http://backspin.typepad.com/

USA address

HonestReporting

63 W. 38th St.

Suite 1103

New York, NY 10018

Phone: (646) 654-0316

Fax: (212) 944-1712

Israel address

HonestReporting

1 Shvut Road

Old City, Jerusalem

Israel