Congress should investigate the Washington Post and the New York Times

Nathan Lewin is a Washington, D.C., attorney with a Supreme Court practice who has taught at leading national law schools including Harvard, Columbia, Georgetown and the University of Chicago.

(JNS) Reporting on Hezbollah’s confessed rocket strike that killed 12 children on a soccer field in a Druze town on the Golan Heights, the Washington Post’s July 29 front page featured a huge photo of grieving shawl-draped women and a wailing teenager surrounding a framed picture of one of the murdered victims.

Below the photo was the banner headline across three columns: “Israel hits targets in Lebanon.” Under the photo was the name of the pictured victim, identifying her as living in the “Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.” A subheadline declared that “international calls for restraint” had “muted” Israeli “strikes against Hezbollah installations.”

The totally false impression conveyed to the multitudes who glance at daily newspapers in supermarket racks was that Lebanese mothers were weeping over the murder of their Arab children by the Jewish state’s military, which had been forced to “mute” its “strikes.”

The truth was just the opposite: Hezbollah’s rockets had murdered Druze children in a Druze village.

The overall message conveyed by how the Post’s editorial and layout staff covered this news story was hatred of Israel and Jews. Hezbollah was supposedly not to blame because the caption to the photo said that Hezbollah “denies connection to the attack.” But there was clear proof that Hezbollah had launched the Iranian falek-1 rocket.

Protests poured into the Post’s offices, including the American Jewish Committee’s assertion that, rather than journalism, the Post’s front page was “a dangerous distortion of reality.”

An “editor’s note” appeared the following day. It did not retract but said the front-page coverage “did not provide adequate context.”

The New York Times on July 29 had a front-page five-column aerial Reuters photo of a huge crowd surrounding 10 coffins of children “killed in a rocket strike from Lebanon” against a village in “the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights.”

The accompanying story was headlined: “Diplomats race to reduce risk of a wider war.” The story identified a “rocket from Lebanon” as having caused the children’s deaths. There was no mention of Hezbollah—which was already acknowledged as the perpetrator—other than to say that “Israel blames Hezbollah and retaliates.”

The impression—albeit not as pronounced as in the Post’s reporting—was that this tragedy was all Israel’s fault. The Times issued no corrective note.

These are not isolated cases of poor reporting or careless misimpressions conveyed by honest journalists working under extreme time pressures to report events to a public eager to learn what is happening in the world. Nor are they expressions of opinion regarding Israel and/or Jews by the papers’ owners on their editorial pages.

They are telling proof of a deliberate design by the two nationally prominent daily publications that mold public opinion to manipulate their news reports to encourage hatred of Jews and the Jewish state. Indeed, past instances of deliberately slanted reporting and outright lying by the Post and the Times have been documented by many media critics.

These newspapers should finally be brought to account in a public forum, just as the country’s leading universities were finally compelled to confront, in live appearances broadcast nationally, the antisemitism that had long been festering on their campuses.

Newspapers and universities have many common legal features. Both engage in activity that is shielded by substantial constitutional and legal safeguards. Broad liberty is granted for education and sweeping protection must be accorded to the written expression of opinion. Newspapers must be free to promote unpopular views.

However, readers are alerted to expressions of opinion by their placement on editorial pages. Incorporating them surreptitiously into biased news reports should be recognized as deceptive by honest journalists.

University presidents were interrogated in the televised hearings of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, subjected to dogged questioning by representatives such as Elise Stefanik. Two were forced to resign. They were held responsible for conditions on their campuses that they did not create but only tolerated.

Newspaper management should surely have to account similarly for Jew-hating attitudes and conduct that they not only tolerate but personally promote with improper management of their news reporting.

Students at the universities and the institutions’ donors followed the televised hearings with lawsuits. Legal proceedings against the Post and the Times by subscribers are unlikely because readers will not have the legal “standing” to sue for false reporting.

But there are committees in the House of Representatives that can legitimately subpoena the responsible officers of nationally distributed newspapers such as the Post and the Times in order to demand, in a public forum, that they explain how and why they are promoting Jew-hatred by corrupting their news reports.

Voters should flood their representatives with requests to see that those subpoenas are filed.