The Boston Globe

February 9, 2003, Sunday ,THIRD EDITION

SECTION: MAGAZINE; Pg. 10

HEADLINE: Mark Jurkowitz is the Globe's media critic.;

BLAMING THE MESSENGER WHEN THE PRO-ISRAELI GROUP CAMERA SEES NEWS FROM THE MIDDLE EAST THAT IT DEEMS UNFAIR OR WRONG, IT TARGETS THE MEDIA - AND DOESN'T LET GO.

BYLINE: By Mark Jurkowitz

In late September, phone calls and e-mails began pouring in to the ever-vigilant Boston office of CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America. The topic of conversation and concern was the news that National Public Radio was about to unveil an ambitious seven-part series called The Mideast: A Century of Conflict. And that was the cue for CAMERA's associate director, a former physics scholar named Alex Safian, to go to work.

Tipped by the details on a press release, Safian spent a weekend researching the roster of experts interviewed for the NPR project. And before the first syllable of the series hit the airwaves on Monday, September 30, he had launched a preemptive strike posted on the CAMERA Web site (http://www.camera.org).

Methodically, Safian indicted several of the NPR specialists - from Oxford historian Avi Shlaim to Israeli author Tom Segev to Columbia University professor Edward Said - for words and deeds opposing Israel and its policies. Calling NPR "the taxpayer-funded radio network known for its flagrant pro-Palestinian bias," he wrote that its "panel of experts includes at least four quite extreme Israeli critics of Israel, at least four extreme Palestinian critics of Israel, one American critic of Israel, and three experts who could be characterized as supportive of Israel. . . . This exactly mirrors the bias found in NPR's Mideast coverage generally.

"The conclusion?" he said. "Listeners beware."

His warning might well be a motto for CAMERA, a self-styled media watchdog organization that has been sniffing, barking, and occasionally biting at big media for two decades. From The Boston Globe to The New York Times, from ABC to CNN, from the BBC to NPR, few players of any influence in Middle Eastern coverage have escaped its scrutiny, its letters, or its phone calls.

In a relentless Mideast conflict in which media images are a crucial battleground, CAMERA has become a major com bat ant. It has been a driving force behind an underwriter boycott of public radio, felt most acutely at the powerful Boston outlet WBUR-FM. It has generated countless corrections, numerous letters to editors, and an impressive number of op-ed columns. It lobbies reporters, editors, and network officials. It raises enough money to function as a de facto publishing house, regularly churning out glossy critiques of Middle East coverage. It serves as a research library, resource center, and philosophical soul mate to supporters of Israel looking to validate their concerns about bias in Middle East coverage. And, perhaps most important, it has battled its way into the psyche of the mainstream media, which may not appreciate or agree with CAMERA but which ignore it at their peril.

Little wonder that the Jewish newspaper the Forward recently named CAMERA's executive director, Andrea Levin, to its list of America's most influential Jewish citizens, sandwiching her between the New York Times's Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Thomas L. Friedman and newly elected Minnesota senator Norm Coleman.

"Media-monitoring was the great proxy war of the last year, and its general is Andrea Levin," the paper declared, calling her "the bane of newsrooms from Jerusalem to Atlanta."

CAMERA's modus operandi is to focus on its work with Columbo-esque doggedness, under the theory that the devil is in the details. "It's completely a question of factual reporting," says Safian.

To many in the media, however, CAMERA is no watchdog but an advocacy group trying to impose its pro-Israeli views on mainstream journalism. And in newsrooms and TV studios across the country, journalists of varying stripes can agree on one thing: When CAMERA comes calling, it's not good news.

CAMERA was born in the early 1980s as a Washington-area citizen volunteer group, largely to monitor coverage of Israel's invasion of Lebanon. That was the first Israeli war not considered strictly defensive, and it began to transform the country's image from sympathetic victim into more of a controversial aggressor. Media coverage grew more critical.

Criticism of the Globe's Mideast reporting of the first Palestinian uprising in the late 1980s became a catalyst for the creation of the Boston chapter, which eventually became the group's headquarters. (Today, there are no other formal chapters.) In 1988 and 1989, CAMERA took out a memorable series of ads in The Boston Phoenix with headlines that read: "Would a Great Newspaper Distort the News About Israel? The Boston Globe Does."

The Boston organization's coming-out party occurred in October 1989, when about 1,000 people, paying $25 a head, turned up at a CAMERA conference in the Park Plaza Hotel to listen to speakers decry unfair treatment of Israel in the media. The headliners included Harvard law professor and attorney Alan Dershowitz and a former US representative to the United Nations named Alan Keyes, who would later go on to fame as a talk-show host and fringe African-American Republican candidate for the presidency. Keyes wowed the Park Plaza crowd with his passionate defense of the Jewish state.

By the early '90s, CAMERA had launched a national membership drive and became what Levin calls "a much more serious professional operation." It currently has annual revenues of $1.8 million, amassed through dues and contributions, some of which stretch into five figures. The organization employs about 20 staffers, serves about 40,000 dues-paying members, and represents a constituency of supporters of Israel who are mad as hell at some - if not much - of the media.

Today, the CAMERA operation produces a signature publication, the glossy Media Report, and reaches about 400 institutions of higher learning with another magazine called CAMERA on Campus. It publishes a series of monographs analyzing coverage and disseminates a media directory with the names, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses of editors, producers, anchors, and columnists. It runs advertising campaigns in major media outlets and presents conferences in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Recently, CAMERA hired a former editor of Washington Jewish Week to become its Washington director for "whatever congressional dimension there is to our work," says Levin.

But more than anything else, CAMERA is busy scrutinizing, analyzing, and often antagonizing media outlets. And it is not shy about going after some of the industry's biggest names; one media giant that has landed on CAMERA's radar screen with notable frequency is The New York Times, the parent company of The Boston Globe.

In CAMERA's 35-page summer 2002 Media Report, the cover story is headlined "Times Warp" and accuses the paper of skewing its coverage toward the Palestinians during a violent period of Israeli-Palestinian confrontation from late March to early April 2002. "The Times's distorted presentation of events is especially troubling given the paper's influence on its readership, policy makers, and other members of the media," CAMERA writes.

Another conspicuous target over the years has been ABC News anchor Peter Jennings. "We've long considered him anti-Israel," says Levin flatly.

Jennings came into CAMERA's cross hairs on October 2, 1995, when ABC's World News Tonight aired a story asserting that Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu had called Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin "a traitor because of his deals with Yasser Arafat." Three days later, Levin wrote to ABC News president Roone Arledge stating that Netanyahu had never used such language. On October 6, Jennings issued a correction of sorts but still asserted that "there are numerous references to [Netanyahu using such language] in press reports from the region."

One week later, Levin wrote to Arledge asking him to identify those reports. On October 31, ABC News senior vice president Richard Wald wrote to Levin citing The Des Moines Register and the Edmonton Journal as the sources of those reports. CAMERA tracked back to those two publications - and further, to the sources they had used - and found that there were actually no original press reports stating that Netanyahu had made the traitor charge.

The network never amended its October 6 correction. But CAMERA never let up, dashing off correspondence on the subject for at least six months. Vindication came when the Columbia Journalism Review, in its March/April 1996 issue, criticized ABC for erroneously reporting the traitor story.

In its pursuit of the matter, "CAMERA would not rest," the journal noted. Adds Safian: "The moral of the story is you keep on them for a year and maybe something good happens."

C AMERA's no-quarter approach is exemplified by its battle with NPR. "We consider NPR to be the most seriously biased mainstream media outlet," Levin says, reciting a mantra that has clearly gotten under her target's skin.

The friction between them goes back at least a decade; NPR and WBUR executives have met with CAMERA representatives on numerous occasions over the years. (Posted on the CAMERA Web site are more than 50 critical analyses of public radio's Mideast coverage, stretching back to 1992. A particularly tense period in the relationship was ushered in with the September 2000 outbreak of the second Palestinian intifadah. CAMERA fired a major volley with a lengthy report titled "A Record of Bias," analyzing NPR's coverage of the first two months of the intifadah. The analysis concluded that there was "a disproportionate reliance on Arab/Palestinian and pro-Arab speakers compared to Israeli and pro-Israeli speakers." (The study found that 56 percent of the guests represented the Arab side and that they were "afforded" 77 percent more words than the Israeli perspective. CAMERA concluded that there was "chronic amplifying of Palestinian grievances and perspective" and "de-emphasizing or omitting of Israeli concerns." (One example: "Palestinians or other Arabs were described by NPR reporters or guest speakers as 'frustrated' 16 times, while Israelis were only said to have such feelings four times.") At the same time, the report cited "the unabashed partisanship of NPR reporters."

That kind of relentless critique has resonated with a number of Israeli sympathizers and American Jews who are deeply concerned about the deteriorating situation in the Mideast and acutely sensitive to Israel's portrayal in the media. "They are operating in an atmosphere of a lot of anger and frustration in the Jewish community," says Abe Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. "The atmos phere is ripe for CAMERA's message, and, therefore, they're effective."

Perhaps the most potent measure of that effectiveness is the underwriter boycott of WBUR that began in 2001 when two prominent businessmen - WordsWorth Books president and CAMERA board member Hillel Stavis and Cognex CEO and CAMERA member Robert Shillman - became so convinced of that bias that they withdrew their financial support for the station. (Stavis said he had donated "tens of thousands" to WBUR over the years; Shillman said his company had doled out more than $120,000 in the previous five years.) WBUR says it has lost a total of seven key underwriters, including Brandeis University, and between $1 million and $2 million in funding.

At NPR's Washington headquarters, the heat over the broadcaster's Mideast coverage has been a factor in its moves to post online transcripts, initiate a series of "internal assessments" of its reporting, and expand its outreach to the Jewish community. NPR's decision to fly a public relations staffer to Boston to monitor a WBUR protest last August - when marchers outside the station carried signs that read "NPR: National Palestinian Radio" - suggests just how seriously it is treating the furor that CAMERA helped ignite. On January 13, NPR president Kevin Klose and WBUR general manager Jane Christo addressed a mostly pro-Israeli crowd of about 900 in a debate over NPR bias at Boston's Temple Israel.

"Economic blackmail" is the term Klose uses to describe CAMERA's tactics. " CAMERA is essentially an advocacy group that calls itself an umpire but only calls foul balls," he adds.

For years, the relationship between CAMERA and Christo was quite cordial. But she now says the group's message boils down to this: "Report our point of view, or we're going to shut you down."

In September, a crucial effort to stanch the bleeding took place inside WBUR's Commonwealth Avenue offices. Christo and Klose sat down with a small group of WBUR funders, including some who had withdrawn their support. Klose says the meeting was "very satisfactory" and "made clear the complicated reality of doing what we do." But other reports say it was tense and adversarial and didn't exactly end with a meeting of the minds.

Shortly thereafter, the antagonism worsened. Levin sent a letter to Christo complaining that an "outrageous" September 19 broadcast of The Connection, the call-in talk program, "had stacked the deck against mainstream Israeli views and in favor of Palestinian or pro-Palestinian opinion. We regret to say that the problems we see continuously on NPR are not confined to the network but occur all too often on The Connection as well."

Christo's response omitted any diplomatic niceties. "You say you stand for 'accuracy,' but your monographs are polemics," she wrote to Levin. "To imply as you do that WBUR and NPR somehow line up with the forces in the world that want to see the destruction of Israel - or the persecution of Jews - is unconscionable."

That generated another letter from Levin, contending that the program cut off the "sole speaker" who could have responded to "serious charges and insults against Israel." Christo shot back, saying, "We reject the notion that CAMERA can speak for the Israeli government, mainstream Israelis, US 'policy makers,' or others." Levin then asserted that while the Connection guests all endorsed international intervention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a recent poll indicated that just 17 percent of Israelis supported such an approach. "We oppose the abuse of power apparent when media outlets promote their own political perspectives," she added.

At its core, the dispute between public radio and CAMERA has each side accusing the other of that most serious of journalistic sins: censorship.

"I think Americans make the best decisions when they're well informed about the issues," says Klose. "I think [the CAMERA campaign] is aimed at boycotting the marketplace of ideas. I think it's a divisive tactic."

Safian responds by charging that the NPR lineup in the history series is "terribly skewed to one side." He adds, "Who is closing down the marketplace of ideas? They're the ones who have a monopoly on the microphone."

On the surface, Levin and Safian make a rather odd team. She is tall, lanky, and blond. He is short, compact, and dark. But they share an unflagging dedication to their work and routinely put in 12-hour days, often staying at the office until 10 p.m. (For security reasons, they prefer to keep their workplace location a secret. Manhattan-born Levin, 57, grew up as an Army brat, once taught English in the Philadelphia public schools, and later worked at the Kennedy School of Government as an associate editor of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. "I was really interested in international affairs," she says. "All my life, I was a total news junkie."

Levin's involvement in CAMERA began in 1988 when she wrote an article for the Boston-area weekly The Tab, criticizing the Globe's coverage of the first Palestinian intifadah, which had begun a year earlier. Suddenly, she found herself tapping into a reservoir of widespread sentiment. "I was not very acquainted with the established Jewish community," she recalls. But after that piece, "the phone started ringing."

Safian, 44, a Columbia University graduate, came to the area to go to Harvard graduate school and started as a CAMERA volunteer in the early 1990s after he got involved researching an anti-Israeli op-ed piece in a community newspaper. Like Levin, he calls himself "a news junkie" and says the trauma of following the news from Israel as a schoolboy during the 1967 war - when that nation's fate hung in the balance - was a "formative experience."

Given the drive and commitment it takes to devote a career to monitoring and confronting the news media - a task not for the faint of heart - Safian and Levin don't come off as the firebrands you might expect. They are not the type to launch into sweeping soliloquies about the importance of their work or even about their feelings toward Israel. Perhaps wary of being characterized as ideologues, they often sound more like lab researchers.

"It motivates me when I see people misrepresenting things," says Safian simply.

Levin and Safian operate out of CAMERA headquarters in a Boston neighborhood, overseeing a warren of busy offices brimming with tapes, transcripts, and clippings and adorned with maps, posters, and such books as Arafat: In the Eyes of the Beholder and The Media's War Against Israel. Its corps of researchers scrutinizes every paragraph and camera angle of Mideast reportage, counting sources, checking facts, and monitoring tone.

Organization is key. It takes Levin all of about 10 seconds to locate a copy of an October 6, 1993, New York Times story claiming that Israel had arrested men in the Gaza Strip for carrying sliced watermelons, which feature the green, red, and black Palestinian colors. (The December 3, 1993, Times correction is appended to it.) Piled in a corner are about 100 boxes filled with files and tapes from CNN, the BBC, and NPR. With roughly 50 videos per box, you do the math. And CAMERA's newly revamped Web site is a model of crisp efficiency, cross-referencing subjects by the journalist's name, his or her media outlet, and the nature of the issue. (Once you locate the journalist, you're a mere mouse click away from seeing the corrections he or she generated. In one room, research analyst Chana Shavelson is writing a letter to the editor of - of all places - the Marie Claire fashion and beauty magazine, citing problems with a November 2002 article that dealt with the impact of war on women and children. In another, staffer Ricki Hollander is carefully listening to tapes, comparing the tenor of that day's BBC report about suffering Palestinian children in the West Bank town of Jenin with the previous day's coverage of a bus bombing that killed Israeli children.

"We were struck by the fact that on a day that Israel is burying children who were blown up on buses, the BBC chose to air this report," she says.

Meanwhile, researcher Deborah Passner is celebrating the recent publication of a column she wrote in Florida's St. Petersburg Times. In it, she rebutted a Times columnist who had written about a UN report critical of Israel's treatment of Palestinian children. "What is disingenuous about the report, but typical of the whitewashing of Arab misconduct, is that it ignores the unconscionable child abuse perpetrated by the Palestinian Authority," Passner wrote.

Nancy Levy, a communications graduate, works in CAMERA's constantly humming letter-writing department, sending out e-mail alerts to a team of several thousand volunteers. The idea is to highlight problems with media coverage that will inspire letters to the editors and calls for corrections. (The group frowns on form letters or copycat e-mails, favoring a strategy of peppering news outlets with individual sentiments. "On a good week, we might have 500 to 600 letters," Levy says. "You'd actually be surprised how many people get published."

CAMERA's publications are proudly filled with pages of corrections induced by its calls or letters. Last summer's Media Report, for example, lists 34 such transgressions, ranging from the Los Angeles Times misreporting the age of a Jewish teenager shot dead in the West Bank to a Reuters story that erroneously characterized the northern Israeli town of Kiryat Shmoma as a settlement.

Levin offers staffers some pragmatic advice about the persistence required to get the attention of decision makers at media outlets. "You have to be polite, but you have to be quite on them, sometimes," she says. "Expect to fax things about three times."

To its supporters, CAMERA is figuratively - and perhaps literally - doing God's work, battling insidious anti-Israeli bias in the media. But its detractors see CAMERA as a myopic and vindictive special interest group trying to muscle its views into media coverage.

No one is more explicit in that belief than the public radio officials who have borne the brunt of CAMERA's ire and focus. Whereas CAMERA assails NPR's Mideast history series as flagrantly skewed against Israel, Kevin Klose attacks CAMERA for its desire to demonize the proj ect simply because it doesn't agree with some of the speakers.

Unlike NPR, most media outlets tend to be reluctant, if not unwilling, to respond publicly to CAMERA's allegations. Requests for comment for this article from CNN, another occasional CAMERA target, went unanswered. ABC's answer to the group's concerns about the network, and about Jennings in particular, was a statement saying, "We always welcome feedback from our viewers."

Asked about CAMERA's criticism of its coverage, a New York Times spokeswoman says the paper tries to cover "all sides . . . with scrupulous impartiality. .. . If occasionally the facts of a particular news situation seem likely to provide more satisfaction to one side than to others, our policy is to restore the balance promptly in our overall coverage."

The nature of these responses speaks volumes about much of the news media's relationship with CAMERA. For starters, there is little appetite on the part of news outlets to engage in the kind of point-counterpoint debate that is CAMERA's home field. Many also view CAMERA's lobbying as an emotion-driven response to coverage of a bloody Mideast conflict that stokes the passions of viewers, listeners, and readers in a way that very few stories do. And news organizations seem loath to give too much public credibility to an organization they consider an advocacy group, not an independent media monitor.

"It's important to make a distinction between advocacy groups that pose as watchdogs and watchdog groups doing independent and open-minded critiques of media performance," says Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a nonpartisan Washington think tank.

As if to illustrate the philosophical chasm between themselves and their critics, CAMERA officials have little regard for broad arguments that they are themselves biased or for arguments that defend the media's performance on First Amendment grounds. To them, it's all about examining the words and pictures. "Our problem with that line of accusation is that it does not address specifics," says Andrea Levin of her critics. "We're looking at the actual breakdown of the coverage."

Even among pro-Israeli groups, CAMERA's tactics and values are not universally shared. Somewhat diplomatically, the Anti-Defamation League's Abe Foxman points out how his organization diverges with CAMERA. "Where we part company is certainly on boycotts," he says. While "there are problems in the media, [CAMERA has] a very broad brush. . . . They are a one-issue organization, which makes it easier for them to focus with intensity on their issues, and they don't have to balance other issues, other concerns, other sensibilities."

That intensity, that single-issue focus, may be a source of unending tension between CAMERA and the journalists it targets. But friend and foe alike understand that it is also the key to the organization's undeniable impact, its ability to distinguish itself in a universe of ad hoc, self-appointed media critics.

Ahmed Bouzid, executive director of the pro-Palestinian Palestine Media Watch, criticizes CAMERA for wanting news outlets to adopt "value judgments on the conflict." But he acknowledges that "they are well financed. They are well established. Pro-Palestinian groups have not understood how important the PR game is in the United States."

With a hint of weariness, Christo acknowledges that the CAMERA forces are "in a league by themselves. There has never been anything this organized."

And CAMERA supporter and erstwhile WBUR underwriter Robert Shillman observes that "if you're on the pointy end of the stick, they don't seem so nice." He adds: "Number one is perseverance. These people . . . don't let go."