Updated with additional material.

In my initial responses to the Nouvel Obs petition supporting Enderlin, I noted that in the future, PhD theses on the dysfunctions of the media in the late 20th early 21st century will begin by exploring the identity and journalistic record of those who signed. Ivan Rioufol already identified a number of signers as having behaved like Enderlin, guilty of the same journalistic offenses. And John Rosenthal identified a number of people who had not business signing so partisan a petition. I’d like to begin a series here on some of the signers and I welcome anyone who wants to prepare a dossier.

Jon Randal.

Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, in her devastating discussion of the petition signers, has this to say about Jon Randal of the Washington Post:

There was the noted Paris-based former Washington Post foreign correspondent, 75-year-old Jon Randal, a Middle East expert I’d looked up to for years as a cub reporter, who trenchantly explained that he was seeing in all this a dangerous American trend of “vindictive pressure groups interfering with news organizations,” now unfortunately crossing the Atlantic. (Having lived in Paris for over 40 years, Jon had become alarmingly French.)

“Americans have been under the gun of such people for some time, but France used to be free of this kind of thing. [These groups] are paranoid, they’re persistent, they never give up, they sap the energy of good reporters.

He’s speaking here of the Zionist zealots who have the nerve to criticize the media for their fast and loose accounts. (See below.)

I can’t imagine how much money France 2 has spent defending this case. Charles Enderlin is an excellent journalist! I don’t care if it’s the Virgin Birth affair, I would tend to believe him. Someone like Charles simply doesn’t make a story up.”

This is a common error that Enderlin supporters make, assuming that Enderlin is the object of the legal attack, intended to suck money from France2. In fact, Enderlin attacked, using France2′s deep pockets to harrass individuals who were far more seriously threatened financially. As for the credulity Randal expresses, one could hardly ask for a better articulation of the guild mentality.

But, I tried to interject, the absence of the boy’s “agony” from the tape?-

“Nonsense! Televisions don’t show extreme violence. You know that. Look, I don’t know what side you’re on in this?”

Another key revelation of the guild mentality. Bring up evidence and you reveal “what side you’re on.”

“I’m trying to make sense of it all.”

“I want you to call my friend at NPR, Loren Jenkins; call David Greenway at the Boston Globe; they’ll tell you about pressure groups.”

What he means by pressure groups are the Zionists who critique the gross inaccuracies of a media that seems incapable of getting a story straight. Actually Chafets has some remarks to make about Loren Jenkins, then a correspondent for the WaPo, that show exceptional continuity from 1982 to 2008:

Jenkins… published an article in Rolling Stone that made several comparisons between the Israelis and the Nazis and elegantly argued the Arab version of history — that Zionism is illegitimate because the Jews stole their land. Jenkins was expecially indignant about the Holocaust: “[The Israelis] think they’re owed something because of what happened [in World War II],” he fumed in an interview with the Aspen Times. (p. 306)

In other words, just as expressed by the indignant Nouvel Obs petition, to allow Zionist zealots to challenge their advocacy journalism was an impediment on the “freedom” [read: license] of the press.

I ran into similar sentiments at a conference in Budapest when I presented the al Durah case as a blood libel that had helped drive Global Jihad from the margins to the center of Muslim culture in the 21st century. One of the conference’s organizers responded:

It’s not blood libel; it’s just simple murder of children, which we know for a fact Israelis are doing every day. And although the Jewish lobby has prevented the American press from reporting these things, we can be thankful that the European press, which is more objective, has remained independent.

So the fact that the European press, unpressured by Israeli advocacy groups with scrupulously acquired documentation — CAMERA is nothing if not extremely careful to document everything it claims — can report “freely” on what goes on in the Middle East on a regular basis… and that’s a preferable situation.

But let’s take a look at some of Randal’s earlier experiences and reporting from the Middle East to have a sense of what’s going on behind the curtain. Recently, in preparing my response to “David,” I took another look at Ze’ev Chafets’ Double Vision: How the Press Distorts America’s View of the Middle East, a fundamental text I recommend to everyone. (It is, by the way, in response to the same distorted coverage of the war in Lebanon that Chafets chronicles, that CAMERA was first formed in 1982, just as, in response to the stunningly inaccurate coverage of the second Intifada, Honest Reporting was founded.)

In Chafets I found out that Randal had been detained along with several other journalists in Beirut in the Spring of 1981 (pp. 85-6). They were questioned, imprisoned in tiny cells where they could hear gunshots, possibly of people being executed, questioned, and finally released after about 20 hours. Intimidation? If some Israeli paramilitary group had done this, it would undoubtedly be seen as an attempt to intimidate, to let the journalists know their lives hung by a thread, and that thread was what they had to say in their reporting.. and denounced with all the moral indignation the MSM could muster. But, curiously, upon being released, the five journalists “made an informal agreement that we would not write about the incident. The stories would have just embarrassed everyone involved” (“New Gathering Under the Gun,” Time, March 1, 1982). Notes Chafets, “Especially the PLO” (p. 87).

I would like to make an additional reflection on this point. Unquestionably this would be embarrassing to the PLO, and given their tendency to violence at the slightest “embarrassement” as they perceive it, that’s something to worry about. As Chafets had already documented, at least four murders of reporters by the PLO (pp. 65-76), and much intimidation of the sort Randal and his colleagues had undergone.

And the role of intimidation in the private agreement came out clearly when, eventually, the incident became public. Jim Hoagland of the WaPo, forced at last to discuss the incident, revealed the source of the “leak”: William Farrell. The alarm felt by everyone for the safety of this reporter, including Chafets, who was responsible for publicizing the leak, makes clear the public secret involved in the intimidation of our MSM.

What was he [Hoagland] talking about? I had never mentioned Farrell’s name at all, never mentioned any names, in fact, and certainly hadn’t said what my source for the story was. I couldn’t believe that Hoagland could have made such a sloppy mistake. He had publicly named Bill Farrell, who was still stationed in the Middle East, as a source of information for an Israeli official, a charge that could get the New York Times reporter into serious trouble in the Arab world… Farrell, I subsequently learned, was badly frightened by Hoagland’s article, and I was, as I said, very upset (p. 105).

And Farrell had special cause for concern since he was the last to speak to Sean Toolan before he was brutally murdered in the Spring of 1981 (p. 66).

But I think an equally great embarrassment would come to the people one would not expect to have been part of this game of intimidation and silence, namely our own mainstream media, in this case, the newspapers involved and especially the Washington Post with Randal and Hoagland in the lead. They were the ones most prone to embarrassment because if their public had known what was going on, their reports would have carried far less conviction. I think this particular “informal agreement to not write about the incident” is at least as concerned with the impact of such knowledge on their reading public, as it is on their treatment by the PLO.

Indeed, as Chafets recounts in some detail, there was an unusual amount of silence from the Western press about the pervasive intimidation by various factions in Lebanon. The Western press normally, protests the mistreatment of its journalists with loud indignation. But above all, the PLO received special treatment. Bill Marmon, a reporter for Time magazine had run afoul of the PLO and found himself expelled from Lebanon with a threat of death if he returned — a classic combination of intimidation and access journalism (what good is he as a reporter if he has no access?). But when Marmon got out, he found that Time was not on his side.

When I got to Amman, Jordan, I immediately contacted Dick Duncan, who at the time was the acting head of correspondents. I reported that I had been essentially expelled from Beirut by the PLO and that my life would be in danger if I tried to return. At the time Duncan was noncommittal, but as time went on I realized that New York was upset with me, not with them. There was a sense there that the PLO had to be cultivated, not alienated, and that somehow I was responsible for spoiling relations with them” (p.89).

Which brings us back to Jon Randal and the incident discussed above. Apparently this was not the first time Randal had run afoul of “militant” groups participating in the vicious (using today’s progressive standards, “genocidal”) Lebanese civil war. In 1975 he had been “arrested” and detained not for 20 hours, but for two, by a Lebanese communist outfit. At that time, Randal had no problem telling in painstaking detail what had happened to him, and the Washington Post had no problem publishing those details. Chafets, who points to multiple cases of the MSM reporting on and denouncing the intimidation of journalists all over the world, thinks that the difference is that Randal was a PLO advocate, and didn’t want to embarrass them. That may well be, or it may be that in 1975 the really nasty intimidation — including murder — was just beginning in Lebanon.

But Randal’s silence, and the silence of his newspaper, went to great lengths on this incident. Only when a Knesset debate in Israel on the intimidation of the Western media in Lebanon in February of 1982 forced the MSM to deal with the problem did the incident come to light… but not in the pages of the WaPo. Finally forced by an article in the New Republic by Marty Peretz, Jim Hoagland responded to the problem of the WaPo’s news blackout. In addition to explaining Randal’s silence as a product of his “phlegmatic” nature, Hoagland granted that the Syrians did intimidate, but that the PLO “tacitly provides protection for the American embassy and [has often pulled correspondents out of scrapes as imperiled them.”

The possibility that this protection came with a price apparently didn’t occur to Hoagland, or if it did, he wasn’t about to mention it. Rather he tried to compare the danger from Israeli jets with the danger from kidnapping as equal sources of potential intimidation. And even after Chafets had loudly protested Hoagland’s outing of William Farrell of the NYT, the WaPo dragged its feet for weeks before publishing a correction.

Which brings us back to Randal. What kind of a reporter was he? According to Chafets, he was the unofficial commander of the Commodore Battalion (p. 151) The Commodore Battalion was Arafat’s term for the reporters who hung out at the Commodore Hotel in Beirut (run by Palestinians) and proved to be a most valuable battalion in his military campaign by serving as a smokescreen, shielding him and keeping the West from any awareness of both his exterminationist campaign against Israel and his atrocious behavior in Lebanon (127-54). Chafets quotes Randal in a list of the obviously partisan pronouncements that marked the allegedly “objective” journalists who made up this group-think, pro-PLO and anti-Israel, collective (pp. 305-308) as follows:

…since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Israel has habituated the Arab world… to a rising level of violence in this region. (Washington Post, July 18, 1982)

Now given that since the 1967 war, the region had been hit by a rising level of violence — from Black September 1970 (a month in which Jordanian troops killed over 10,000 Palestinian men, women and children, to the Lebanese Civil War (a seven-year-long war that, by that point had killed about 100,000 Lebanese, many of them civilians), the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88 which would eventually kill over a million people) and, of course, Hama the very year Randal was writing (20,000 killed in two weeks) — all of which had next to nothing to do with Israel, that statement does stand out as a fairly stunning example of what Chafets calls “speaking as a polemicist and not a reporter” (p. 305).

Rather than document his pro-PLO activity (see for example Chafets’ treatment of his behavior, pp. 150-54), I’d like to come full circle and quote what he had to say about the Hama massacre about which the WaPo found it extremely difficult to get morally incensed (as opposed to their furious indignation about Sabra and Shatilla):

What emerged from the Hama rubble, according to local residents, was a respect for the government in large part born of fear but also a feeling of avoiding even greater catastrophe. Some analysts have argued that the destruction of Hama, an anti-government center since the days of the Ottoman Empire, marked the birth of modern Syria and the triumph of centralized power.

We had similar explicit and implicit reactions to Saddam Hussein from the likes of Michael Moore and other “progressives.” This bespeaks the stunning and implicit but pervasive racism of reporters like Randal. They know, instinctively, that Arab political culture oscillates between anarchy and prison, and that prison is the only (known) way to keep “order.” And apparently, that’s okay. To people like Randal and Moore, these folks are apparently like animals when it comes to morality. No one rebukes a cat for killing a mouse. No one expects it to understand the difference between right and wrong.

And it’s precisely that awareness that makes their hostility to Israel so morally corrupt, a combination of moral sadism (comparing the Israelis to Nazis when it’s Arab political culture that most closely resembles and admires them), and political blackmail — identifying any form of Israeli violence in response to the chaotic and genocidal hatreds of the Arab world as the source of the hatreds and therefore illegitimate. In short, they use their moral bully pulpit to beat the Israelis into a position where they cannot defend against an onslaught that has few closer parallels than the Nazi assault.

Which brings us to a final thought on the relationship between advocacy journalism and intimidation of journalists. I don’t think either issue explains most cases, but rather a interesting combination. Most intimidated journalists don’t have the courage to tell their readers/viewers that they’ve been intimidated: otherwise, how could they lay claim to such titles as “the most trusted source in news”? But their cowardice extends beyond that silence. Most people — and here, I think Enderin is a good example — want very much to think well of themselves. So not only can they not admit their cowardice to their readers, they can’t admit it to themselves.

That’s where advocacy comes in. If you’re “helping the little guy” then the compromises you make with the facts, with an honest assessment of what’s going on, with the silences and the loud indignations — all of which favor the people you’re afraid of — then you can think most highly of yourself, curry their favor, and present yourself, in all good conscience, as a crusader for truth and justice.

And of course, if at the same time, you can take some swipes at that irritatingly morally superior Jews, a couple of dollops of moral Schadenfreude, maybe even an occasional sadistic comparison with Nazis or Apartheid racists, then who’s going to complain but a bunch of whiney Jews.

That threesome — intimidation, compensatory advocacy, and moral Schadenfreude against the Jews — is a potent and deadly cocktail that regularly greases the conversation at the Commodore Hotel or the American Colony Hotel, and explains a lot of the bullsh*t at the MSM’s Augean Stables.