MediaWatch: March 1991
Table of Contents:
Janet Cooke Award: Palestinian Whitewash
Most Palestinians supported Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War, and as The Boston Globe reported, "They cheered from their rooftops when Iraqi missiles fell on Israel." That violent hatred was only one factor ignored by NBC's Dennis Murphy when he retraced the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict in a February 20 Today report.
Instead of providing a full history of the region, Murphy presented the Palestinians' historical view as the only view. He could have at least noted the decades of Palestinian terrorism and its many innocent victims, but he never mentioned the PLO or uncomfortable facts like Palestinians killing Palestinians. For this unbalanced reporting, Murphy earned the March Janet Cooke Award.
Today host Bryant Gumbel set the tone, announcing: "Foreign editor Dennis Murphy is in Amman, Jordan this morning with the sad story of a much-abused people....Too few Americans even understand the plight of the Palestinians, who lost their home-land after refusing to accept its forced division by the United Nations." Murphy continued with the 'divided homeland' theme, declaring, "After the horror of Europe in the Second World War, the idea of a Jewish state sounded like simple justice. The slogan was 'a land without people for a people without a land.' But sadly it wasn't a land without a people, people had lived there for a thousand years, and they called themselves Palestinians."
It's ironic to speak of 1,000 years of Palestinian history and ignore 3,700 years of Jewish culture and civilization based in Israel. The UN's "forced division" of Palestine came in 1947, when the UN Special Commission on Palestine suggested the division of the area into two homelands, one for the Palestinians, one for the Jews. But the Palestinians have never accepted a homeland for the Jews, apparently preferring "homeless" status to a peaceful solution for both peoples.
For Murphy, Israel's creation in 1948 equaled the oppression of the Palestinians: "One people moved in, and another moved out -- 725,000 Palestinians fled to crude refugee camps. Jewish terrorists had massacred entire families in the civil war. A mostly peasant culture was overwhelmed."
Once again, the real history wasn't so simple. First of all, there had been efforts since the 19th century to reestablish a Jewish state and many Jews had moved into Palestine long before the establishment of Israel. According to the Near East Report, 375,000 Jews moved to Palestine between World War I and World War II. Second, Murphy's emphasis on Jewish terrorists was bizarrely one-sided: he never mentioned that six Arab nations launched what Arab League Secretary General Azzam Pasha called "a war of extermination" in 1948. To call this a "civil war" and dwell on the death of Palestinians and not Israelis isn't dealing in history, it's dealing in advocacy.
Murphy told the story of one Palestinian who "has tried to get home to Jerusalem and his family seven times. During the war, the Israelis are letting in only a handful of Palestinians every day, even though the occupied territories of Israel is where they live." Again, Murphy told one side of the story without any context: the Israelis are slow to admit Palestinians at least in part because of their terrorist activities.
Murphy cast the Palestinians as ignored: "The Palestinians have been asking the world to listen to their story for four decades now." With a PLO seat at the UN and international media attention focused on the intifada, the Palestinians have gotten more publicity than any other group protesting occupation. Unfortunately, the Palestinians' perverse way of drawing attention through violence worked. Nations oppressed under the gun for decades without a voice, like the Baltic nations, may never catch up.
To complete his portrait, Murphy visited the home of a Palestinian family, the Sroujis, noting their children "watch the Gulf War along with the cartoons on Israeli TV." Their mother said in broken English: "From now they are starting thinking about the West and about the Americans and how bad they are and how they are killing Arabs and how they are killing children. This thing is in them from now." Murphy didn't mention what their parents might not be putting "in them": a respect for democracy, for innocent civilians attacked by the PLO on buses or planes, or for the right to disagree with other Palestinians without being killed.
MediaWatch asked Today for the name of someone to discuss the piece and for a phone number for Murphy in Amman. Our requests went unanswered. Today spokesperson Lynn Applebaum would not discuss the specifics of the story, saying only that "NBC News covers all aspects of the issue, and has a reputation for covering everything fairly."
In the middle of a war, few reporters are ever given the time to put breaking events into a historical context. Murphy had the chance, but he blew it.
