Do you think it the proper role for an AIPAC official to seek the removal — not a correction, not a meeting between AIPAC officials and the editorial board — but the removal of a newspaper editor by distributing a memo based on their own spy’s — oops, sorry, observer’s — account of a speech given at a picnic run by other legitimate Jewish organizations, and the political assumptions made by whomever commissioned and/or wrote the memo?

Remember, Rosen didn’t pass around a list of innaccuracies or even indicators of bias based on the reporting we published. He never sought a meeting with me or my publisher. In fact, if Eisenberg didn’t characterize the nature of Rosen’s complaints, it was because AIPAC was never able to detail exactly what errors, if any, Larry had made — their complaint was never that the articles were incorrect, but that a Jewish newspaper had dared to print them. Even when the “lobby” (okay, its chief spokeswoman and its chief counsel)asked me to remove Larry from a story, their complaint was not that his previous reporting was biased or inaccurate, but that some of this stories had been cited by AIPAC’s opponents in legal action against them — and thus he was “too close” to the story (an interesting point, although a little like asking Seymour Hersh to stop reporting on Abu Ghraib or My Lai because his articles had become exhibits in the government’s subseqeunt investigations).

Rosen didn’t even pass around examples of my reporting, editorials or the like, of which there were many, and out of which, if we had a difference in “opinion,” he could presumably have made a case for my “bias” or incompetence. No, he passed around a memo attacking me for having spoken at a picnic, and told a reporter that as a member of an “alternative” crowd, whatever that is, I was unfit to edit a Jewish newspaper.

The fault for demoting me rests on the shoulders of the newspaper’s publisher. But I’ll ask again — if AIPAC or any lobbying group has a problem with a reporter, do you think the problem is best handled by a/ addressing the publisher or editorial board directly with a sheaf of evidence of bias or innaccuracies or b/ seeking an editor’s firing through the distribution of material gathered in secret and distributed behind the scenes?

Do you think it the role of AIPAC or any lobby to use its considerable powers of persuasion to insist that reporters at a Jewish newspaper subscribe to a certain political view, and that newspapers only hire those who do?

1. Accusations in the third person invisible (“the lobby”) tend to discredit the accuser, in this case the writer of the story, Eisenberg, and Carroll himself for not being more careful with what he publishes.

2. It is never stated whether the problem Rosen brought to Carroll was due to perceived bias by Cohler, or due to a difference of opinion between Rosen and Cohler as Carroll seems to want us to beieve.

This leaves the careful reader thinking the piece might be a smear job, not responsible journalism.