Ethan Bronner

Saturday's New York Times front page featured former Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner's take on the rockets being fired into Israel from Gaza: "Israel, Battlefield Altered, Takes a Tougher Approach." Bronner, whose coverage as bureau chief was not sympathetic toward Israel's side of the conflict, subtly suggested (via the trick of the phrase "many analysts and diplomats outside Israel") that responsible people say Israel must compromise with Hamas, the terrorist group that controls Gaza. As if that country doesn't have tons of enemies among the intelligentsia.

Where was the criticism of Israel? That was the plaint from Ethan Bronner (pictured) in his Wednesday "News Analysis," "Foreign Policy Debate's Omissions Highlight Skewed Worldview."

Bronner, former Jerusalem bureau chief for the New York Times, wrung his hands over all the issues missed during the third and last presidential debate Monday night, which focused (mostly) on foreign policy. While he didn't suggest criticizing Muslim countries, or critcizing Palestinian terrorism against Israelis, he used the term against Israel, wondering where the "criticism" was of "its settlements or its occupation of the West Bank."

On the eve of the Supreme Court's monumental decision on Obama-care Thursday morning, New York Times reporter Ethan Bronner chided Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia for politicizing the bench in "A Dissent By Scalia Is Criticized As Political." But when liberal Justices get political, they are "'passionate and pointed" and finding their own voice.

Departing New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner filed Thursday's off-lead front-page story from the West Bank town of Ramallah, passing on yet another sympathy note for the Palestinians, whose left-wing cause for statehood and against Israeli "occupation" is no longer being trumpeted as loudly in the wake of the tumult in the region: "Mideast Din Drowns Out Palestinians."

The above-the-fold photo featured two Israeli soldiers firing orange flame at "Palestinian stone throwers" in the West Bank....from a clash last month. A photo of a Palestinian "protester" throwing stones was relegated to the jump page.

Former New York Times reporter Neil Lewis last week defended the paper’s history of Israel coverage in a 6,500-word article posted at The Columbia Journalism Review (with a longer one to follow in a Harvard publication next month): “The Times and the Jews --A vocal segment of American Jewry has long believed that the paper has been unfair to Israel. Here’s why – and why they’re wrong.”

Lewis, a veteran reporter who retired in 2009, is now part of The Constitution Project, which focuses on the alleged ‘erosion of privacy rights and civil liberties in a post-9/11 world” and “indefinite detention without charge of terrorism suspects.” That marks Lewis as a man of the left, as did his reporting for the Times, which included an amazingly slanted May 2008 look at the potential Supreme Court nominees of either Barack Obama or John McCain.

President Obama no longer has an Israel problem, Jerusalem Bureau Chief Ethan Bronner reported on Thursday, bolstering Obama’s pro-Israel credentials by assuring Times readers that the president’s recent speech at the United Nations on Israel was pro-Israel. Bronner also broadcasted pro-Obama results from an online poll conducted by the Jerusalem Post – although online polls are an unreliable format the paper rarely consider newsworthy, in “Israelis Happy at Home But Glum About Peace.”

Moreover, the sense over the past two years that President Obama was growing angry with Israel and steering American policy away from its interests subsided last week. The parts of Mr. Obama’s United Nations speech about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could have been written by any official here. It said nothing about Israeli settlements, the 1967 lines, occupation or Palestinian suffering, focusing instead on Israel’s defense needs.

New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Ethan Bronner took some friendly fire from the paper’s Public Editor Arthur Brisbane in his Sunday column, “Tangled Relationships in Jerusalem.” Brisbane forwarded complaints from a left-wing anti-Israeli blogger about Bronner's business relationship with a conservative Israeli, Charley Levine. But Bronner's history of slanted reporting, especially his hostile coverage of "angry rampag[ing]" Jewish settlers in the West Bank, proves he can hardly be credibly accused of sympathizing with Israeli conservatives.

Conflict of interest, or the appearance of it, is poisonous in journalism. This is particularly so when it relates to reporting on Israel and the Palestinians, a subject that draws a steady stream of skepticism about New York Times coverage from readers and partisans on all sides.

 In Wednesday’s New York Times article, "Where Politics Are Complex, Simple Joys at the Beach: Israelis and Palestinians Dare to Swim Together," reporter Ethan Bronner sympathetically devotes nearly all of the article to a group of left-wing Israeli women - an organization called We Will Not Obey - who illegally smuggle Palestinian women through checkpoints from the West Bank into Israel so they can visit the beach.

The article includes a quote from one member of the group who ridiculously compares herself to a resident of Germany living during the Nazi era, while a second activist invokes legendary civil rights activist Rosa Parks. Bronner is apparently so impressed with the quote about Rosa Parks that he uses larger text to preview the reference for readers near the end of the article.

And, according to the pro-Israel group CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle Eastern Reporting in America), the article relays the inaccurate claim that Israelis, unlike Palestinians, enjoy the privilege of unrestricted travel at all points between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, when in reality Israelis do face restrictions on travel into the West Bank.

New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner inaccurately portrayed on Thursday how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was greeted on his return to Israel after a lively visit to America, which included a tense meeting with President Obama and a triumphant speech to Congress. Examining the trip solely from the angle of Netanyahu's refusal to offer territorty concessions in the name of peace talks, Bronner found failure: "In Israel, Premier’s U.S. Trip Dims Hopes for Advancing Peace Talks." The online headline was worse: "Israelis See Netanyahu Trip as Diplomatic Failure."

Which "Israelis" are the Times talking about? In the headline, substitute "Some liberal Israeli newspaper columnists" for "Israelis," and it would be accurate and also signal the pointlessness of the story. Is it news that some liberal Israelis oppose Netanyahu and his refusal to accept the pre-1967 boundary lines demanded by the United Nations and other anti-Israel entities?

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel returned from Washington on Wednesday to a nearly unanimous assessment among Israelis that despite his forceful defense of Israel’s security interests, hopes were dashed that his visit might advance peace negotiations with the Palestinians.

President Obama’s much-hyped speech Thursday on the Middle East called for a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians and endorsing Israel’s pre-1967 borders as the starting point for the negotiations. The New York Times’s lead story Thursday morning by Helene Cooper and Ethan Bronner, "Focus On Obama As Tensions Soar Across Mideast," set the table by sharpening the focus on Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s "unyielding" recalcitrance as the main "stumbling blocks" to negotiations.

Mr. Obama, who is set to address Americans -- and, more significantly, Muslims around the world -- from the State Department on Thursday morning, may yet have something surprising up his sleeve. One administration official said that there remained debate about whether Mr. Obama would formally endorse Israel’s pre-1967 borders as the starting point for negotiations over a Palestinian state, a move that would send an oratorical signal that the United States expected Israel to make concessions.

Times reporting from Jerusalem is often hostile toward the conservative security-conscious Netanyahu, while whitewashing the terrorist origin of the Palestinian militants of Hamas, and there were traces of that on Thursday’s report from Washington.

New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Ethan Bronner and reporter Jennifer Medina summarized on Wednesday the outcry after the dramatic reversal earlier this month by Judge Richard Goldstone. The judge authored the notorious "Goldstone report" for the United Nations Human Rights Council, blaming the state of Israel, but not the terrorist group Hamas, for making targets of civilians during the three-week Gaza war in 2008.

In an April 3 op-ed for the Washington Post (one rejected by the New York Times), Goldstone admitted that the data vindicated Israel’s concerns about his report: “If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.”

Since then, as CAMERA reports, the Times has described the resulting political machinations in a way to make Israel look cynical rather than truth-seeking, while softening the blow to Goldstone’s credibility, by refusing to give up on Goldstone’s initial accusations that Israel deliberately targeted Palestinian civilians: “Investigator On Gaza Was Guided By His Past – Goldstone Once Led South Africa Inquiry.”

Like the headline, the report itself assumed Goldstone was acting in good faith all along:

On April 2nd, The New York Times published a piece by Ethan Bronner titled, "In Israel, Time for Peace Offer May Run Out." In the piece, Bronner discussed various aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including statehood, violence, peace talks, religion, the West Bank, Gaza, and the Muslim Brotherhood.

But while Bronner spent many paragraphs detailing the difficulties in establishing peace between Israel and Palestine, it wasn't until the 2nd page that he Donner admitted a "central obstacle to the establishment of a State of Palestine" is the political and physical divide between the Palestinian Authority-controlled West Bank and the Hamas-controlled Gaza. The more moderate PA has suggested elections for a unified government in both territories.

The subject of the Gaza-bound "Freedom Flotilla" organized by pro-Palestinian activists that attacked Israel Defense Forces as they boarded a cargo boat, was the subject of Charlie Rose's talk show Tuesday night.

Rose's roundtable included Ethan Bronner, Jerusalem bureau chief of the Times, who accused Israel of acting with "disproportionate force" and for causing "increasing disillusionment in the world." As if using superior force is somehow unfair to those who are attacking you.

Here's Bronner, 17 minutes into the show:

I think what's been very interesting over the last sort of six or eight years is that Israel has taken the view that military activity works and diplomacy has not actually worked all that well. And in the short term, you could argue that it has. It has stopped terrorism from the West Bank, it has stopped rockets from Gaza, stopped rockets from Hezbollah in Lebanon and so on. But the problem is, that every time it acts with this disproportionate force in order to carry out a military and security goal, what it gets is increasing disillusionment in the world. And the question is, where does the advantage of one stop and the disadvantage of the other grow so that it overwhelms it. And I think that what may be happening is that we are at that tipping point, even from an Israeli perspective.

Our national media are treating the passing of Sen. Edward Kennedy as an historic event, more historic even than the deaths of presidents like Gerald Ford. Is this level of attention warranted?

We can all grant that Ted Kennedy was a major legislator with his hands in a lot of historic government action. He was at times a very eloquent speaker and was always a passionate fighter. To his side of the aisle, he was their inspirational leader.

Now add the personal story: Two of his brothers were mercilessly assassinated. He was the final Kennedy from that generation. Clearly, when the media spent countless hours mourning the death of John F. Kennedy Jr., a man who never had a political career, the death of an actual Senator of 46 years should be a greater event.

It is not the amount of coverage that bothers, it is the quality of reporting. "[The Kennedys] are the closest thing we have in this country to royalty, the clan's iconic images engraved on our national consciousness." That's how ABC's Claire Shipman put it on the August 26 Good Morning America, echoing what others have been saying across the dial. CBS anchor Harry Smith began this way: "He bore the unspeakable grief and overwhelming hopes of a nation."

Pope Benedict XVI may be touring Israel, but the New York Times is barely paying attention to anything he’s saying in favor of sounding doom-filled notes about the fate of Christianity in its own birthplace.

On Wednesday’s front page, Ethan Bronner reported a story headlined "Mideast’s Christians Losing Numbers and Sway." Bronner says the number of Christians is rapidly falling due to "political violence," among other reasons. A word he doesn’t use: "persecution." The idea that Muslims are intolerant and unwilling to embrace any notion of religious liberty is present, but more accepted than scorned. Bronner quoted the pontiff only to underscore the doom:

The pope, in a Mass on Tuesday at the foot of the Mount of Olives, addressed "the tragic reality" of the "departure of so many members of the Christian community in recent years."

He said: "While understandable reasons lead many, especially the young, to emigrate, this decision brings in its wake a great cultural and spiritual impoverishment to the city. Today I wish to repeat what I have said on other occasions: in the Holy Land there is room for everyone!"

As Israel "assaulted" Hamas positions in Gaza with a ground offensive following an aerial bombardment, the New York Times's dispatches over the weekend began to slant toward pro-Palestinian sympathy, reminiscent of its biased coverage of Israel's attack on the terrorist group Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Ray Rivera attended a Times Square anti-Israel demonstration on Saturday that was filled with left-wing protestors. Yet no trace of that ideology made it into his Sunday story, "Rally Protests Fighting in Gaza -- Pro-Palestinian Crowd Marches to Israel Consulate." The text box claimed: "Across Seventh Avenue, others vent their anger at Hamas." As if the anti-Israeli protestors weren't showing anger toward the entire nation of Israel.

Anger over the Israeli assault on Gaza spilled into Times Square on Saturday, as hundreds of protesters condemned the attacks in a demonstration that stretched four blocks and clogged much of the city's central tourist district for several hours.

The protest came as Israeli troops began a ground incursion into the Hamas-controlled territory in what officials described as an effort to end Hamas rocket attacks on southern Israel. The land campaign followed eight days of Israeli airstrikes that have killed more than 430 Palestinians, many of them civilians.