Margaret Sullivan, Public Editor for the New York Times, is struggling with a tough ethical dilemma (“Should David Brooks Disclose his Son’s Israeli Military Service.”) She has been asked by some readers whether columnist David Brooks should be fired from the paper for failing to disclose (until recently) that his son is serving in the Israeli Defense Forces. While she disagrees that Brooks’ son’s service should prevent him from writing for the Times, she does agree that he should have disclosed the information, that readers have a “right” to know about it.
In general, she says that columnists should be immune from the kind of disclosures that reporters should have to make. However, because his son is serving in the Israeli military, he really has a greater obligation. She writes:
I don’t think readers usually need to know what the spouses of columnists think or what brothers do for a living, or whether a daughter has joined the U.S. Army. But this situation strikes me as a more extreme case. Mr. Brooks’s son is serving as a member of a foreign military force that has been involved in a serious international conflict – one that the columnist sometimes writes about and which has been very much in the news.
Fair enough. Yet when it came to the Times chief correspondent in Gaza who used a picture of Yasser Arafat as his profile picture on Facebook and referred to Israelis as terrorists, she voiced no such concerns. Even after Richard Behar broke the story in an article in Forbes magazine, the Times never acknowledged the bias of its correspondent. In fact, Fares Akram has continued to work for the Times even after the story was made public.
How can it be that the occupation of the son of a columnist is more significant than the personal admiration of reporter for one of history’s leading terrorists?
When it comes to Brooks’ son, Sullivan writes:
I do think that a one-time acknowledgment of this situation in print (not in an interview with another publication) is completely reasonable. This information is germane; and readers deserve to learn about it in the same place that his columns appear.
Yet when it comes to the adoration of their chief Gaza correspondent for Yasser Arafat, Sullivan apparently does not consider the information “germane” and does not believe that “readers deserve to learn about it.”
[sc:graybox ]Please write to Sullivan at [email protected] and ask why there are double standards at the New York Times between employees with Israeli connections as opposed to those connected to Palestinian terrorists.
In order to make sure she sees your question, please include the following:
Article Headline: Should David Brooks Disclose his Son’s Israeli Military Service
Date Published: October 8, 2014
Web or Print: Web
