Few local newspapers editorialize on the crisis in Lebanon

by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

Sidebar Article: What’s an editorial anyway?

Local Jews worried over how Israel is being portrayed on the editorial pages of daily newspapers can take solace in the fact that — in New Jersey at least — few of the state’s editorial writers are even tackling the issue.

Meanwhile, the state’s largest circulation daily, The Star-Ledger, has published several editorials on the current crisis that, while challenging some of Israel’s strategies, are otherwise sympathetic to its war on Hizbullah and harshly critical of the Lebanon-based terrorist group.

In an editorial Monday following an Israeli air strike that killed 54 civilians in the southern Lebanon village of Kana, the Newark-based Star-Ledger called for a “cease-fire to protect civilian lives” (an idea that has not won popular support among Israelis or Jewish groups) and added that “[e]ach day Israel’s attacks savage Lebanon, it loses support for a political agreement to ensure its security.”

At the same time, the Star-Ledger editorial criticized as “unhelpful” United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s call for a Security Council resolution condemning Israel’s attack, and squarely blamed Hizbullah for the humanitarian toll in Lebanon: “[I]t’s ultimately Hizbullah that has invited those attacks and ultimately Hizbullah that needs to be destroyed as a free-lance army working in a democratic state.”

The July 31 editorial advanced a theme, found in an earlier Star-Ledger editorial, that there is no military solution to the current conflict, but that the United States and the international community need to get behind diplomatic efforts to neutralize Hizbullah and stabilize Lebanon.

What the Star-Ledger hasn’t done in its editorials is condemn Israel for the high civilian toll and infrastructure damage in Lebanon. Nor have many newspapers around the country, according to an informal survey of editorials by the newspaper trade publication Editor & Publisher.

In an article criticizing his colleagues, E&P editor Greg Mitchell writes that “it’s a disgrace that few have expressed outrage, or at least condemnation, over the extent of death and destruction in and around Beirut — and the attacks on the country’s infrastructure, which harms most citizens of that country.”

Deborah Jerome-Cohen, the deputy editorial page editor, who writes the Star-Ledger’s editorials on the subject, suggested her own paper is neither biased against Israel, as some have charged, nor silent about Israel’s faults, as Mitchell describes her colleagues.

“To say we are in support for Israel is a little bit too broad,” she said in an interview. “We are sympathetic to Israel but we are very much sympathetic to a two-state solution. We earnestly believe as a paper that Israel has an absolute right to exist and [we are] unsympathetic to any point of view that suggests Israel should not be there.

“However,” Jerome-Cohen added, “we also feel that while the Palestinians have brought on troubles of their own, Israel has also exacerbated the Palestinians’ suffering in ways that are not helpful to Israel or the Palestinians.”

Speaking before the Israeli air strike in Kana, Jerome-Cohen said she expected that “there will probably be a point when the question of Lebanese suffering — which has been mentioned in our editorials — will come up into sharper relief. But on the one hand, yes, you want to say to Israel: ‘Be careful,’ but you also sort of know that Israel is trying to be careful. The fact is that unless the international community is willing to help Israel, I don’t know what Israel is supposed to do.”

Etzion Neuer, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s New Jersey region, said, “This is a time when we’ve asked people to pay attention to the importance of newspaper coverage and its ability to sway public opinion. Poor media coverage can swing the hearts and minds of people.”

To Neuer, counteracting negative impressions of Israel is even more difficult when it comes to dealing with television news broadcasts, most notably those depicting civilian deaths in Lebanon.

“Once you’re done explaining, you’ve already lost,” he said. “The images are so powerful and so emotional and so wrenching, it becomes increasingly difficult to make the case. The longer this campaign goes on, it will become much more difficult for Israel to stay on message and for sympathies to stay with her.”

But the ADL leader said it is “the responsibility of those in the pro-Israel camp to continue to articulate her message, to remind people about the history of the region and how Hizbullah are the aggressors here. But absolutely, with time it becomes a much more difficult process politically, and internationally, and how this plays with American support.”

Location, location

For editorial writers at other state dailies, the silence about the Middle East is not a question of bias but priorities.

“Let’s face it,” said Fred Snowflack, editorial page editor of the Daily Record in Parsippany. “People are not going to read the Daily Record to see what we want to say about the Middle East. I know it sounds very provincial. Our thinking is that by-and-large, we want our editorial opinion to stick to local — and when I say local, I mean New Jersey — issues.”

Charles Paolino, executive editor of the Home News Tribune in East Brunswick, also said his newspaper rarely takes editorial stands on global issues.

“It’s not as though we have never written about international issues, but we consciously focus on New Jersey and north Jersey because there is so much punditry going on on TV these days and on the Web,” he said. “We are not really sure what we can contribute to this that’s going to matter one way or the other.”

Randy Bergmann, editorial page editor at the Asbury Park Press, has not yet written on the subject, either. “We generally tend to stick to local and regional issues. We don’t do too much in the way of foreign policy, primarily because we obviously don’t have the reporters who cover it, and we don’t feel like we’ve got the expertise needed to jump in on certain topics.”

Readers care

As editorial page editor at The Star-Ledger, Fran Dauth said she “absolutely disagrees” with editors at other papers who limit their editorial expressions to state and local matters. “We write editorials, and you can tell from the letters that our readers care about them,” she said. “It’s a vehicle for opinion.”

Dauth, who supervises Jerome-Cohen and the paper’s other editorial writers, said the policies of the Star-Ledger’s eight-member editorial board are not set by “a show of hands. It is sort of a general consensus. Just like on the news side of a newspaper, people have beats and on the part that is their territory they would take the lead. We discuss things.”

At the state’s most widely read newspaper, with a daily circulation of 400,000 that expands to 600,000 on Sundays, Dauth said, the current crisis was not producing a flood of letters, and with less response from Arab and Muslim than from Jewish readers.

“Generally speaking, letters to the editor and calls to the editor happen when people don’t like what they read. If they like what they read, they don’t call and they don’t write.”

Dauth said she believes that “absolutely” there will be more editorializing on this subject as days go by.

“We try to write editorials on what we think are the hot issues of the day, and this is a hot issue.”

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What’s an editorial anyway?

THE NATIONAL CONFERENCE of Editorial Writers defines editorials as the (usually unsigned) opinions that “represent the views of a newspaper’s top management, often the publisher, editor, or owner.” The purpose, according to the NCEW, is: