The U.S. Press and Lebanon

THE U.S. PRESS AND LEBANON William A. Dormán and Mansour Farhang H I ot all of the battles following Israel's June 6 invasion of Lebanon were fought in Beirut. A heated skirmish waged with words broke out in the United States over American press coverage of Israeli actions, and the often acrimonious debate shows no sign of abating now that the dispersal of the Palestine Liberation Organization has become fact. For instance, former U.S. senator James Abourezk, a founder of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination League, writing a week or so after the invasion began, asserted that "the American media, with few exceptions, have joined in an Israeli propaganda effort that would have made Joseph Goebbels proud."1 His angry view was echoed by Alexander Cockburn in theJune 22 Village Voice, who wrote ofa "heartlessness" in U.S. print coverage that surpassed anything he could remember "since the early days of the Vietnam war."2 The highly regardedjournalist, Seymour Hersh, had a two1 . James Abourezk, "The Double Standard on Lebanon," a Pacific News Service dispatch, the Chicago Tribune, June 23, 1982. 2.Alexander Cockburn, "Press Clips," Village Voice, June 22, 1982. William A. Dormán is professor of journalism at California State University, Sacramento. Mansour Farhang teaches in the Department of Politics at Princeton University and is a visiting fellow at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson Center for International Studies. Mr. Farhang was Iranian ambassador to the United Nations from December 1979 to May 1980, where he established the commission of inquiry to investigate the taking of the American hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Dormán and Farhang have written extensively on the press and the Middle East for such publications as the Columbia Journalüm Review and The Nation. They are presently working on a book dealing with American press coverage of the Iranian revolution. 65 66 SAIS REVIEW word assessment of early invasion coverage, which he felt was particularly uncritical of Israel: "It's garbage."3 An altogether different assessment came from Moshe Arens, Israeli ambassador to the United States, who in a mid-July press conference accused the American media of providing a distorted picture of dissent within Israel over Prime Minister Menachem Begin's war policies, and spoke of a U.S. "campaign of vituperation and slander of unprecedented proportions" against Israel.4 The August cover story in the New Republic by its editor, Martin Peretz, was similarly blunt: "Much of what you have read in the newspapers and news magazines and seen and heard on television about the war in Lebanon is simply not true. . . . Reportorial fare has been wrenched out of context, exaggerated and distorted."5 In a September article for Encounter, entitled "The Journalists' War against Israel," Professor Edward Alexander spoke of the media's "scandalous disregard for truth" and of a "deplorable lack of self-critical professionalism, once the hallmark of good foreign correspondents ."6 How well did the American news media do with the Lebanon story? How is it that partisans on both sides could be so furious with the press? How did coverage compare to the media's treatment of past Arab-Israeli confrontations in general and the Palestinian question in particular? Perhaps most important, if there was a change in press performance, what caused it? A textual analysis of the first month and a half of mainstream press coverage following the June 6 invasion, taken together with observations based on a longer-range study of the American news media's treatment of the Middle East, suggest that, at least in the case of Lebanon, critics from both sides of the issue miss the mark. Except for the first week of coverage, when the media seemed to accord Israel its usual "most-favored-nation" status, the American press—based on our sampling of clippings from the prestige press, wire services, and news magazines—presented a fairly balanced picture of the agony of Lebanon. Indeed, for the first time in several decades, the press portrayed a conflict between Israelis and Palestinians as something other than a morality play pitting the righteous forces of Israel against the terror of the plo. Given the historical record, Abourezk...