This week, former Associated Press journalist Matti Friedman leveled some serious charges of censorship, omissions, and systematic bias against the wire service.
AP spokesman Paul Colford quickly issued a denial. But that denial is unraveling in the face of fact-checking.
One of Friedman’s biggest accusations is that AP reporters were banned from quoting Professor Gerald Steinberg, who founded NGO-Monitor. His organization tracks the activities and funding of non-governmental organizations hostile to Israel.
Friedman wrote:
Around this time, a Jerusalem-based group called NGO Monitor was battling the international organizations condemning Israel after the Gaza conflict, and though the group was very much a pro-Israel outfit and by no means an objective observer, it could have offered some partisan counterpoint in our articles to charges by NGOs that Israel had committed “war crimes.” But the bureau’s explicit orders to reporters were to never quote the group or its director, an American-raised professor named Gerald Steinberg.* In my time as an AP writer moving through the local conflict, with its myriad lunatics, bigots, and killers, the only person I ever saw subjected to an interview ban was this professor.”
Colford denied the blacklist:
There was no “ban” on using Prof. Gerald Steinberg. He and his NGO Monitor group are cited in at least a half-dozen stories since the 2009 Gaza war.
But two interested journalists kept digging.
We’ll start with Lori Lowenthal-Marcus of The Jewish Press. She talked to veteran journalist Mark Lavie, one of Friedman’s colleagues in AP’s Jerusalem bureau.
Lavie corroborated Steinberg’s blacklisting.
The Jewish Press asked Lavie whether he knew if there was an AP ban on quoting Prof. Gerald Steinberg around the time of Operation Cast Lead.
Lavie said he did.
He said he knew there was such a ban because, when he put a quote from Steinberg in one of his articles sometime in 2009, the AP Jerusalem bureau chief made him remove it. That editor then told him that AP reporters “can’t interview Steinberg as an expert because he is identified with the right wing.”
It doesn’t get any more unequivocal than that.
Meanwhile, Adam Kredo of the Washington Free Beacon was in touch with Colford about the articles where AP did quote Steinberg. Kredo writes:
Steinberg has further petitioned the AP to prove its claim that NGO Monitor was not banned during the 2008-2009 war in Gaza by providing a list of stories mentioning the group and the date they were published.
When asked about Steinberg’s request, the AP’s Colford provided to the Free Beacon six stories published since June 2009 that mention Steinberg and his organization.
Only one article is from the disputed time period, and its focus is on Hamas war crimes, not crimes regarding the Israeli side. The AP routinely publishes reports authored by NGOs critical of Israel.
(The AP articles that Colford sent Kredo are links one, two, three, four, five, and six.)
Professor Steinberg issued a statement about the censorship and criticism of NGOs. But I’m giving the last word to Friedman, who took to Facebook his own reaction to AP:
The only worthwhile aspect of the AP’s response to my Atlantic article is the point it makes about the contradiction at the heart of the idea of a journalistic corporation. Journalists have to tell the truth; corporations have to protect their corporate interests and the reputation of their product. The AP’s product is news, and the corporate reputation in this case is threatened by a journalist doing his job. The executives at the AP face a choice between behaving like journalists and behaving like a corporation; they‘ve chosen the latter, which explains why they think it necessary to categorically reject the message and smear the messenger.
Featured image: CC BY-NC-SA HonestReporting, flickr/Surian Soosay, Jared Rodriguez/truthout (via flickr); Lavie via YouTube/IBA News VOD
