On December 4, we exposed how the New York Times had failed to disclose the links between the author of a major feature article on the Palestinian refugee camp of Shuafat and the radical Breaking the Silence organization.
We sent a complaint to the New York Times’s public editor Liz Spayd and asked our readers to add their voices. The public editor has responded:
The public editor’s column also recently addressed how much an Op-Ed story should disclose about its author. A piece in Sunday’s Times Magazine on a Palestinian refugee camp in East Jerusalem similarly raised readers’ eyebrows regarding a piece of information it did not include: the name of the organization partly financing the project.
Why was it not disclosed in the recent article by Rachel Kushner about the Shuafat refugee camp that her experience at the camp was organized and coordinated by Breaking the Silence, a political NGO largely funded by Europe whose stated goal is to “end the occupation”? You are promoting a political agenda by neglecting to expose the bias underlying her observations.
Howard Brown, North Kingstown, R.I.
In the piece, Kushner notes, “I was invited on an extensive tour of the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and was asked to choose a subject to write about, for a book to be published next year.” We asked the magazine’s editor, Jake Silverstein, to talk about the story’s provenance:
The writers who are contributing pieces for the book are not being paid for their work. Their travel expenses are being covered through the advance that HarperCollins paid for the book. The editors of the book, the authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, have worked with a number of individuals and organizations within Israel on this project. Among them is Breaking the Silence, which helped to administer some of those travel costs in the region, and which also made additional general contributions toward travel costs for Chabon and Waldman’s project. Breaking the Silence had no direct involvement with Kushner’s reporting or writing from Shuafat.
The public editor’s take: I found Kushner’s magazine story to be an exceptional piece of reporting and writing, one that didn’t seem to be carrying anyone’s political agenda. That said, the wiser choice would have been to make clear the role of Breaking the Silence in the project. Disclosure ahead of time is better than questions afterward. [Emphasis added]
Thank you to all of you who emailed the New York Times and to Howard Brown, a subscriber to HonestReporting who is our Watchdog of the Week for getting his comments into the public editor’s column.
While the public editor’s comments are welcome, we would still question why a disclosure has not been added to the original article. While the public editor’s statement links to the article, the article itself does not include the addition of a link to the public editor’s column.
Nevertheless, the New York Times has been forced to acknowledge our complaint, which is a significant achievement.
