Summary
Matusow discusses how the correspondents and news organizations cope with their situation of being the targets of condemnation in their Middle East coverage. No topic elicits so much bitter criticism as coverage of the Middle East as hard-line supporters of Israel and the Palestinians wage a proxy war via electronic mail, threatening phone calls, and demonstrations to news organizations. Furthermore, several cases of this kind of assault are presented.
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Extract
Caught in the Crossfire
The Zionist Organization of America didn't wait long before declaring war on the Philadelphia Inquirer's new editor. The leaders of the ZOA's local chapter were polite when they called on Amanda Bennett last year, less than three months after she took over, but the message they delivered was blunt. Bennett says the chairman, Michael Goldblatt, told her the organization was going to continue its efforts to hurt the Inquirer economically, while the president, Leonard Getz, laid down the terms for ending the ZOA's boycott. "He said Israel was the victim, and that we should approach all stories from this perspective," Bennett says. "And if we did this, they would call off the boycott, and our circulation would rise."
The delegation also presented Bennett with a scathing report on her brief tenure titled "New Era but the Same Errors: The Philadelphia Inquirer's coverage of the Middle East in the first 60 days of the Amanda Bennett Era.""We concluded that things have been at least as bad, if not worse, than they were under Walker Lundy, the previous editor," Steve Feldman, executive director of the local chapter, said in an interview. "The Philadelphia Inquirer is poisoning hundreds of thousands of people every day. If the surgeon general had newspapers under his bailiwick, ...See the full content of this document
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