ESSENTIAL READING at Mideast Dig: Is Reuters’ Jerusalem Bureau Chief Luke Baker Biased Against Israel?

Richard Behar is an investigative journalist for Forbes who has allowed HonestReporting to publish an excerpt from his and Gabriel Davis’s significant expose of Reuters Jerusalem Bureau Chief Luke Baker. Read the full article on the Mideast Dig website.

Part One – TEN QUESTIONS for Gene Foreman: Ethics Textbook Author

In late June, we received an inquiry from Simon Plosker, the managing editor of an organization named HonestReporting (HR), whose mandate is “Defending Israel From Media Bias.”

Mr. Plosker asked if we knew how best to reach Stephen Adler, the President and Editor-in-Chief of Reuters, in order to send him a complaint.

By way of background, Thomson Reuters is the world’s largest international multimedia news agency; in 2008 it purchased the London-based Reuters Group, which has been in operation since the 1850s. The wire service boasts nearly 2,500 journalists in about 200 locations worldwide, as well as more than 2.5 million print stories in 16 languages published in the year 2015 alone.

In today’s struggling print-media industry, those are staggering numbers – rivaled only by the likes of Reuters’ nearest competitors, Associated Press (AP) and Agence France-Press (AFP).  As such, the importance and impact of Reuters cannot be overstated, and there’s hardly a major newspaper worth its salt that isn’t one of its customers. It bills itself “the world’s most trusted news organization” and boasts of a “reputation for speed, impartiality and insight.”

Moreover, it dedicates itself to upholding the Thompson Reuters Trust Principles, which call for “freedom from bias in the gathering and dissemination of information and news.”

Mr. Plosker’s beef pertained to a series of tweets by a British journalist named Luke Baker, who in July 2014 became Reuters’ bureau chief in Jerusalem. In that role, he oversees a 60-strong multimedia team covering Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Given the immense global reach of Reuters, Mr. Baker is one of the most powerful and influential foreign journalists (undoubtedly among the Top 10) in what is one of the world’s top hotspots.

(We address those specific tweets below in our Q&A.  But first, we hope Mideast Dig readers will find this lengthy introduction to be of some value.)

Mr. Plosker wished to direct Mr. Adler’s attention to a post on the HR website that criticized seven tweets made by Mr. Baker. The pro-Israel media watchdog group believes that the tweets are evidence of “open disdain and dislike for Israel” — in violation of the wire service’s Trust Principles.

Mr. Baker has been at Reuters since 1999, just four years after getting his BA from the University of North Carolina. Over his career, he’s reported for the wire service from Italy, Iraq, the UK, Brussels and other countries.

He is a prolific tweeter, and often spoiling for a fight. He’s dispatched 7,907 tweets since he joined the online social networking service in 2012, and has roughly 18,100 followers. In contrast, the feed of Josef Federman — AP’s bureau chief in Jerusalem — shows 1,231 tweets and 1,213 followers. None of Mr. Federman’s tweets seem to be opinionated, let alone controversial or contentious.

Mr. Baker also served from until recently as the chairperson of Israel’s Foreign Press Association, which claims nearly 500 members from the media outlets that cover Israel and the Palestinian territories. In that capacity, he spoke in February before a panel of Israel’s parliament (Knesset) that was convened to examine the issue of media bias against Israel. He drafted a statement on behalf of the FPA, which referred to the hearing as akin to “witch-hunts.” Mr. Baker sweepingly declared — with no exceptions — that “I don’t see lack of balance in the foreign press… The claims of bias in reporting are annoying.  If there are mistakes, they are corrected as soon as possible. I reject the claim of lack of balance.”

We’ve never communicated with Mr. Baker, until he rejected our request three days ago to discuss the claims against him by HonestReporting. (Reuters executives also declined.) Mr. Baker’s unwillingness to engage on these subjects with his professional peers is disheartening, particularly since he zestfully clashes swords on Twitter with pro-Israel activists.

While I [Behar] know Reuters’ chief Steve Adler professionally, I nonetheless suggested to HR’s Mr. Plosker that he instead direct his complaint to Alix Freedman, who I also know. Since 2011, she has served as Reuters’ Global Editor, Ethics and Standards. “I would contact Alix and be sure to tell her I recommended it,” I wrote him. “She will take you seriously. I have great respect for her from her WSJ days.”

Indeed, Ms. Freedman, during a lengthy career at the Wall Street Journal, had proven herself to be one of the world’s best investigative business reporters. (Among her journalism awards was the Pulitzer Prize, the highest honor in the newspaper industry.)

I was confident she would give Mr. Plosker a fair hearing, and a fair response.

On May 31, Ms. Freedman sent a formal 75-word email to Mr. Plosker, stating that Reuters takes his concerns “seriously,” that it is committed to its Trust Principles “to telling all sides and taking none” – and that it strives to be “tonally neutral on all our platforms.” She added: “I want to emphasize that we are proud of the accuracy and fairness of our coverage from Israel which Luke Baker oversees.”

Mr. Plosker, as we know, sees it differently: “Baker is not only the bureau chief of one of the main wire services, he also occupies a position of influence in the FPA [as a board member], even though he’s no longer running it,” he tells Mideast Dig. “But more than that, this is someone who makes no secret of his antipathy towards Israel on his own personal Twitter feed and elsewhere, and that cannot do anything but influence his reporting.” Moreover, he points out, “so many papers are getting their stuff from the wire services [i.e. Reuters, AP, AFP] because they don’t have the money to have their own people overseas.”

I told Mr. Plosker that I was disappointed in Ms. Freedman’s response to him, and that I would reach out to her. Given Reuter’s size and her important role, maybe she’s inundated with complaints  — some viable, but most of them perhaps not — on any number of topics related to any number of bureaus. Or perhaps she didn’t see an upside in engaging in any detail with a pro-anything advocacy group in the Middle East.

I left Ms. Freedman a voicemail, stating that I was “surprised” by her response to Mr. Plosker and found it “pro forma”  — as in a letter provided to outsiders as a courtesy to satisfy minimum requirements. I said the subject intrigues me enough to consider writing about it for the Dig. I told her that I found some, but not all, of HR’s complaints to be “pretty strong and compelling.”

I added: “Can we talk maybe off-record, and down the road maybe on-record on something? Maybe I’m off-base and, if I am, I want to hear it.” But I was quite clear in my message to her that I felt “some of the stuff is disturbing for a Reuters guy.”

While I have my own views of Luke Baker’s tweets, I still wanted that reality check. So I reached out to Gene Foreman — a member of Mideast Dig’s advisory board and a former editor with a distinguished career in the news business. I asked him to opine on the specific Baker tweets that had been brought to Ms. Freedman’s attention. When we connected, Ms. Freedman and I spoke for about ten minutes, part of it spent just catching up with one another on life and work — as it’s been many years since we met or talked. And then I got down to business. I again asked for an off-record ‘reality check.’ She declined the offer, and I respected that.

Mr. Foreman is the author of “The Ethical Journalist: Making Responsible Decisions in the Pursuit of News,” a 2009 textbook that was described as a “GPS for sound decision-making” by James Naughton, the retired president of The Poynter Institute — home of the highly-regarded PolitiFact fact-checking operation.  Gene Roberts, a former Executive Editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Managing Editor of the New York Times, has called Mr. Foreman’s book “the definitive work on journalism ethics and practices” that “should be a basic text in every school of journalism.” (A second edition was published by Wiley-Blackwell in 2015.)

Mr. Foreman joined the faculty of Penn State University’s College of Communications in 1998 after retiring from the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he managed newsroom operations for more than 25 years under various titles — Managing Editor, Executive Editor and Deputy Editor. During his tenure, the newspaper won 18 Pulitzer Prizes.

His 41 years in newspaper journalism included serving as Managing Editor of the Pine Bluff (Ark.) Commercial and the Arkansas Democrat in Little Rock; and as the senior editor in charge of news and copy desks at Newsday. Mr. Foreman served as president of the Associated Press Managing Editors in 1990 and was a board member of the American Society of Newspaper Editors from 1995 to 1998.

 

Herewith, our Ten Questions For Gene Foreman:

1. Gene, before we get into the nuts and bolts of the seven tweets in question, what’s your overall conclusion about Mr. Baker?

I would like to be clear that I am not trying to evaluate Luke Baker’s overall performance as a reporter and bureau chief. I respect Reuters and assume that Mr. Baker is a capable journalist whose reporting is fair and accurate. In this matter, I’ve been asked by your nonpartisan, non-advocacy organization to give my professional opinion about certain tweets he has sent.

With those caveats, I am concerned that Mr. Baker is making a mistake by indulging in commentary. I think his credibility as an impartial reporter is undermined by several of the tweets you brought to my attention. In the last decade, news organizations have issued guidelines on journalists’ use of social media. These guidelines reassert the long-standing, long-accepted rule in journalism that straight-news reporters do not publicly discuss their opinions of events and people they cover — or of controversial issues whether they cover them or not. In its Handbook of Journalism, Reuters says avoiding opinions in the news is a fundamental principle that generates trust in Reuters.

 

2. Are you seeing a lot of this problem with social media in the mainstream journalism business? Is it out of control?

As a retired editor of the 20th century, I never had to deal with tweets, for good or ill. I’m on record in my book as being enthusiastic about the opportunities that the Internet offers to journalism. To address tweets specifically, I recognize that they enable reporters to disseminate breaking news instantly and to promote their stories by providing links.

But Twitter has to be handled carefully. I see problems on two levels: First, the emphasis on speed can mean that reporters feel pressured to skip steps in verification and to tweet news without an editor’s review. Both of these factors exponentially increase the possibility of error. Second, and this is the problem we are dealing with here, Twitter’s opinion culture and its impulsive nature can induce reporters to express opinions that they have no business expressing.

As for other social media, such as Facebook, working journalists have to make sure their posts do not express inappropriate opinions. They may think they can compartmentalize their professional and personal personas, but the public sees them as journalists 24-7.

 

 

3.  Let’s move through the seven tweets in question.   In the first example that Honest Reporting sent to Reuters,  Mr. Baker tweeted in February [see screenshot above]:  “Continuing the idiocy of Israeli security, I was just told to strip for a search leaving Gaza.” (For emphasis, he added the press unit of Israel’s military as a specific recipient of his tweet.) I don’t know what prompted the search, but “continuing the idiocy” strikes us as bias against Israel’s government. Most foreign reporters will tell you that the primary reason they are dispatched to Israel is to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So Israeli security is clearly a major part of their mandate. “Continuing the idiocy” suggests that Israel is doing nothing right when it comes to the nation’s security. What’s your take?

Incidentally, nine days later, Mr. Baker claimed that Hamas detained him — but he didn’t refer to it as “continuing the idiocy of Hamas’ security.” He simply tweeted that he was “Briefly taken in for polite questions.”

In tweeting about the strip search, using the phrase “the idiocy of Israeli security” suggests bias. It is natural that he would be angry about having to undergo a humiliating experience, especially since he is a recognized journalist working for a reputable news service. But he has to keep his cool. The matter should have been addressed by Reuters through appropriate channels.

I don’t see anything wrong with the tweets about his questioning by Hamas’ security, because they were factual. However, as you suggest, a comparison of the difference in tone in the tweets in the two episodes could hand ammunition to someone predisposed to think Mr. Baker is biased against the Israeli government.

 

4.  In June of 2015, Mr. Baker tweeted: “Israel’s foreign ministry produced a bizarre video mocking the foreign press. Here’s the response.” The response he included was a link to a complaint by Israel’s Foreign Press Association, which he chaired at the time.   The 50-second-long video had indeed satirized the coverage by most of the foreign press of the 2014 Israel-Hamas war. I agree with the ministry that many major foreign news outlets deserve to be chastised for their coverage [note our exposé, The Media Intifada; as well as Associated Mess.] However, I’m not troubled — as HonestReporting is — by Mr. Baker’s use of the word “bizarre” here. Frankly, it was a very strange, silly animated video that the ministry has since removed. What do you think?

“Bizarre” could be viewed as biased in this context. Why not show that the video is bizarre rather than tell the audience that it is? I suggest a neutral tweet linking to a detailed analysis of the video.

 

5.  Mr. Baker’s next tweet in question, which he made regarding that same Foreign Ministry video, was: “If Israel’s diplomats want to be taken seriously, they’ll have to do better than mocking the press.” We find this tweet very disturbing because of how broad his attack is.  It suggests to us that Mr. Baker doesn’t take any Israeli diplomats seriously. After all, it could have been just as easy for him to have written: “If some of Israel’s diplomats…..”

Readers of the tweet could easily conclude that Mr. Baker doesn’t take Israeli diplomats seriously. Those readers would likely include diplomats whom he will be dealing with as a reporter.

 

Read the rest of this investigative article at Mideast Dig here and stay tuned for Part 2 coming soon!

 

 

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