Fascinating: Too Close to Home

[cali]

By CLARK HOYT
Published: February 6, 2010

LATE last month, a Web site called the Electronic Intifada reported that Ethan Bronner, the Jerusalem bureau chief of The Times, has a son in the Israeli military. Others, including Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a liberal media watchdog group, demanded to know if it was true and, if so, why it did not create an unacceptable conflict of interest for Bronner and The Times.

Bill Keller, the executive editor, confirmed that Bronner’s son enlisted in the Israeli Defense Forces and said, “He’s a 20-year-old who makes his own decisions.” Bronner told me his son joined in late December for roughly a year of training and six months of active duty before he returns to the United States for college. Bronner said he had alerted his editors, as the paper’s ethics guidelines require. Keller said the editors discussed the situation “and see no reason to change his status as bureau chief.”

Bronner occupies one of journalism’s hottest seats, covering the intractable conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. As the top correspondent for America’s most influential newspaper, everything he writes is examined microscopically for signs of bias. Web sites like the Angry Arab News Service have called him a propagandist for Israel. I have received hundreds of messages heatedly contending the opposite: that his coverage is slanted against Israel. Sometimes the “evidence” is a single word in one news article. Sometimes it is his “failure” to show how one side or the other is solely to blame for what is happening.

“No place, date or event in this conflicted land is spoken of in a common language,” Bronner wrote in The Times last year after the three-week Israeli assault on Gaza, intended to stop rocket fire into southern Israel. “Trying to tell the story so that both sides can hear it in the same way feels more and more to me like a Greek tragedy in which I play the despised chorus.”

<snip>

read the public editor's full piece here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/opinion/07pubed.html