To: onthemedia@wnyc.org
Cc: letters@camera.org
I just listened to your July 11 episode.
I listened in HORROR to your interview with Philip Weiss of Mondoweiss.
His comments were a skewed, biased, warped version of reality. That’s not surprising, since Mondoweiss itself presents a skewed, biased, warped version of reality. It is a radically anti-Israel, anti-Zionist pro-Palestinian web site, as should be obvious from two of the four “principal aims” published on its About page:
To foster the movement for greater fairness and justice for Palestinians in American foreign policy.
To offer alternatives to pro-Zionist ideology as a basis for American Jewish identity.
I can’t begin to enumerate all of the ways in which Weiss’s comments distorted reality, so I will mention only the most glaring one, i.e., his implication that the New York Times‘s coverage of recent events differed in any marked way from its coverage of the conflict in the past. The “occupation” narrative has been prevalent in Times coverage for quite some time; it’s nothing new. Which isn’t surprising, considering that the Times coverage of Israel is itself biased, albeit not to nearly as large as extent as Mondoweiss’s.
You failed to give your listeners any context in which to interpret Weiss’s statements. The closest you came was to label Mondoweiss a “progressive” web site in the last sentence of the segment, a direct quote from its About page and hardly an adequate acknowledgment of the fact that the site is universally known to be, and indeed admits to being, anti-Zionist.
You not only gave Weiss the last word, you gave him the only word, failing to include even a single sentence in opposition to his warped point of view.
Shame, shame, shame.
Jonathan Kamens
P.S. Having just finished writing this letter, why am I now not surprised to see that CAMERA has already taken you to task for this segment?
