Making Excuses for Ramallah

SCOTT SHUGER

A lynching is not one of the more subtle human actions. Yet when two Israeli soldiers were murdered two weeks ago in Ramallah, several of America's major newspapers utterly failed to give a simple account of what had happened. Some of this was no doubt due to political correctness, but something else was also going on. The papers mishandled or ignored facts about the lynching in a rush to get at its "meaning." And that too-quick trip illustrates certain fallacies holding powerful sway in many newsrooms. To wit: * Explaining is explaining away. One of the great advances in contemporary journalism over say, 30 years ago, is the emphasis on providing a story's context. At the best papers, you rarely get too far in without being given a healthy dose of the political, sociological, historical, economic and social forces that drive a story's characters. But with all this context comes a risk: that the principals will be represented as mere vessels floating on the sea of these forces rather than as free, responsible agents. The telltale sign that a news story is making this mistake is the low incidence of names and pronouns and the comparatively high incidence of abstract nouns.

A prime example is the highest explanatory statement in the New York Times' lead story the day after the Ramallah lynching: "What happened today was a collision of what each side sees as the other's core ugliness." Now, answering the question "What happened today?" is the fundamental task of a news story (as opposed to an editorial or a opinion column or feature story or a comic strip), and since after rereading that Times sentence dozens of times, I still don't really know what it means, I know it failed Journalism 101.

The headline the Washington Post put over its lead Ramallah story was similarly misguided: "Grief, Anger Spurred Frenzied Crowd to Kill." With its emphasis on external, even understandable, forces, this is classic responsibility-avoiding language. Note that there are no individuals in either the Times sentence or the Post headline. Even when presented with irrefutable evidence of personal culpability, all too often the papers still try to fuzz it over. Take that unbelievable picture of the guy with the bloody hands. The Los Angeles Times supplied a caption to the photo that managed not to refer to the blood at all. And in fact, neither the Los Angeles Times' nor the New York Times' lead story even mentioned the guy with the bloody hands.

* All violence is created equal. When it comes to covering murder trials, the papers are generally clear on the differences between deaths that result from an accident, from self-defense, from a willful or even hateful but passionate act, and premeditated murder. And of course they recognize the difference between violence that results in death and violence that doesn't. But outside of their trial reporting, too often the papers drop such reasonable distinctions in favor of a moral relativist's whole cloth.

How else to explain the papers' creation of an equation between the lynching of the soldiers and the Israeli helicopter attack that followed in response? Most of the leads put the lynching and the air strike together at the top of their stories, but the L.A. Times article didn't mention until the 22nd paragraph the crucial fact that Israel had given the Palestinian police three hours' notice of the air strike and fired warning shots prior to launching missiles.

The New York Times story said the Israeli warning enabled the Palestinians to clear the target buildings--but said so in the 42nd paragraph. Neither the Washington Post's nor USA Today's lead story, nor The Wall Street Journal's main news story on Ramallah, reported the warnings at all. None of the day's main pieces mentioned that the raids killed no one.

* In big stories, small details should get small play. Too many page-one stories are organized in descending order of grandiosity: You start out with the biggest idea or invoke the largest forces you can and then work your way down. Trouble is, the larger an idea is, the more small facts can overthrow it. Therefore, the more sweep a story has, the more room it ought to make high up for the probative detail.

Consider the idea that the murdered Israeli soldiers were on a spy mission. This is a big idea in the sense that it entails quite a lot about Israeli operations in the region and in the sense that it is widely held among Palestinians, so it certainly should have been played high in the lynching stories. But the same holds for the tiny facts that refute it. Yet the Washington Post waited until the 16th paragraph, and the L.A. Times until the 20th, to mention that witnesses said at least two of the soldiers in the group the mob seized were in uniform. The Washington Post saved for the 14th paragraph the rather dispositive detail that the soldiers' car had an Israeli license plate. The New York Times didn't get around to revealing this until the 26th paragraph.

In the search for the journalistic Yeti leaving all these footprints, that mucky New York Times "explanation" of Ramallah is instructive. "Collision" suggests an accident between objects moving towards each other with equal force. "What each side sees" suggests that in the Middle East, one can never escape ethnic perspective to get at the plain facts. And "core ugliness" suggests that in this region, neither side is blameless.

Now, looking at the whole sad history of the place, all these ideas are probably true. But the problem is that none of them accurately describe "what happened today" at the Ramallah police station: the Israeli soldiers were defenseless when set upon, therefore it was objectively wrong to kill them, and therefore on that particular day in that particular place, unequal blame can be apportioned.

All this points to the trouble newspapers have with two key ideas. First, their dedication to objectivity commits them to fairness, and second, if a newspaper is going to be fair, then every news story in it must be fair. These principles are subtly false. True objectivity entails being fair in the way you conceive stories and execute them. That is, you should ensure that all the players are given a chance to explain themselves, but having done that, if you discover that someone's action can't be explained away, that some violent act in the story really is worse than some other, it's wrong to add or spin material in order to smooth everything out again.

When a story turns out not to have two sides, it's the antithesis of objectivity to supply both. A newspaper achieves fairness by a sustained effort over time at seeking out all sides and aspects of a subject. But on any given day an honest effort at fairness may result in a news story in which one side is right and the other wrong. Thinking a balanced paper is built out of only balanced news stories is like thinking a round house is built out of round bricks.

Mr. Shuger writes the Today's Papers column for Slate.