Diaa Hadid, a correspondent for the New York Times, began her article on Palestinians being evicted from Jerusalem’s Old City with a moving account:
Nazira Maswadi’s new landlord is trying to kick her out based on a claim that her estranged husband, Tawfiq, the original lessee, is dead. “He’s not dead,” she insisted. “He has 10 children with me. If he died, they would have to bury him.”
However disturbing, the facts do not back up the claim. Prompted by an investigation by the organization CAMERA, a January 26 Times Editor’s Note explains that court documents in the case indicate she was being evicted over a failure to pay rent. Not quite so compelling or bound to attract sympathy.
Acknowledging the real reason for the eviction proceedings would undermine Hadid’s opinion, which has no business in a news story. This is clear when she writes:
The Palestinian families and their supporters claim the evictions, often based on seemingly arcane violations of their rental agreements, are part of a broader agenda to create Jewish enclaves inside the historic Muslim Quarter.
Would she have readers believe that a failure to pay rent is an “arcane violation” of a rental agreement?
In fact, that was only one of three problems with the article that the editor had to correct. All based on the same basic journalistic failure.
As the Times editor writes:
The descriptions were based on the tenants’ accounts; the article should have included additional information from court documents or from the landlords.
In other words, Hadid sat down with the people being evicted and wrote up their stories without making the effort to check them against other evidence.
This is not the first time that Hadid has written an article for the Times in which she left out important material that did not fit her agenda. As we pointed out, four of the people she used as primary sources for her article on the Arab social scene in Haifa complained that they had been taken out of context.
After being publicly corrected by her editors twice, we can only wonder if Hadid’s oversights are a result of sloppy journalism or something more deliberate. Certainly, her past with the notoriously anti-Israel site Electronic Intifada (“New York Times Employs Veteran of Anti-Semitic Website“) is deeply concerning.
We were encouraged when Margaret Sullivan, the Times Public Editor responded to criticism of the paper’s Israel coverage by saying that they needed to do more to document the lives of Palestinians and what they think, rather than simply portraying them as victims. Yet Hadid is making the Times’ coverage worse, not better.
Write to Margaret Sullivan at [email protected] and, considering the number of times Hadid has been caught leaving vital context out of her articles, ask that the Times does better to address the problem Sullivan highlighted.
