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Keeping It Fair And Balanced At The Los Angeles Times

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  • Keeping It Fair And Balanced At The Los Angeles Times

    KEEPING IT FAIR AND BALANCED AT THE LOS ANGELES TIMES
    Amy Klein, [email protected]

    The Jewish Journal of greater L.A
    Feb 1 2008
    CA

    As the Los Angeles Times' editor of the Op-Ed page and Sunday Opinion
    section, Nicholas Goldberg oversees publication of about four opinion
    pieces per day and eight to twelve on Sundays. The most volatile
    topic on those pages by far -- even more than the war in Iraq, the
    election campaigns or immigration -- is the Middle East and Israel.

    Goldberg, 49, a secular Jew raised in New York who worked as a
    reporter for 15 years, including four based in Jerusalem covering the
    Middle East for Newsday, talked with The Journal about the L.A.

    Times' Israel coverage, whether he would publish a piece written by
    Adolf Hitler or Osama bin Laden, and why in this polarized time
    people need to keep an open mind.

    Jewish Journal: What is your mission?

    Nicholas Goldberg: I think the mission of the Op-Ed page is to run
    the broadest possible range of opinion on a wide variety of subjects.

    A lot of people think that we run articles that we agree with, or
    that somehow the pieces that appear on the opinion pages reflect the
    view of the paper, the editorial board, the publisher or even the
    owner of the paper -- but that's not the case. We want pieces that
    come from all different sides of issues. We also try to run pieces
    that are nuanced, that are politically indeterminate and harder to
    categorize.

    JJ: You worked for Newsday for 10 years. What has your experience as
    a journalist taught you and how is different from working on the
    opinion pages?

    NG: My experience as a daily reporter has been extremely helpful to
    me because I can really work with people on all sides. I work day in
    and day out with people I disagree with and I help make their pieces
    stronger, and I help them make their arguments more logical, and I
    hope I help them make their pieces better. My experience as reporter
    gave me a lot of background in many of the subjects that we write
    about on the page.

    JJ: From 1995-1998 you covered the Middle East, living in Jerusalem.

    Did you go in with a certain opinion?

    NG: I went it with the open mind of a reporter who doesn't know much
    about the subject. For four years I was engrossed in nothing but the
    subject. I did a lot of traveling -- I was in Iraq and Iran and Saudi
    Arabia and Sudan and Egypt -- but I spent more time in Israel and
    Gaza and the West Bank than I did anywhere else.

    When you live in Israel, particularly when you're a journalist you
    spend all day and night working on stories, you sort of live and
    breathe the conflict. The 1990s were the height of the peace process.

    I arrived just months before Rabin was killed and I was there for
    Peres and Netanyahu and Barak. The fates of the peace process went up
    and went down, there were a lot of bombings in Jerusalem when I was
    there, cities war given back to the Palestinians in the West Bank and
    retaken by the Israelis. There was all kind of change and ferment as
    there is now.

    JJ: Living in Jerusalem, did you learn new things about the region?

    NG: I emerged with a more sophisticated and nuanced viewpoint than I
    had when I went in. My job was to cover the place as a reporter: to
    go out and to interview people, to talk to people about what they
    think, and that meant going to Hebron and talking to settlers and
    going to Gaza and talking to the guys from Hamas, and it meant
    interviewing Shimon Peres and Bibi Netanyahu. Of course my view of
    the place changed, but I tried to keep as open minded as I could, and
    to report stories as fairly as I could.

    I do feel that the way the region is covered, and especially the way
    the conflict is covered in the opinion pages in America, has
    generally been very narrow compared to what you read in Israel. If
    you read Ha'aretz, if you see the Arab newspapers -- if you see Al
    Ahram in Cairo -- you will be exposed to points of view that you
    don't hear in the United States. One of the things I decided when I
    became Op-Ed editor is that I would like to bring a broader range of
    viewpoints on the Middle East to the page. I've tried to do that.

    JJ: Are you Jewish? How does that affect your job, or your stance on
    Israel?

    NG: I am Jewish. When I went to Israel as a correspondent, that was
    immediately an issue, people said, "Oh you're going to go to Israel
    and you're going to feel like you've come home, and you're going to
    be a Jew in Israel and that's going to be a moving and a powerful
    experience, and you're going to learn so much about being Jewish."

    I come from a secular New York Upper-West Side Jewish background. Of
    course it affected me, of course I was interested in it -- I had
    relatives there, relatives of friends -but I tried to put that aside
    as a journalist and cover the story as honestly and objectively as I
    could. I tried not to say that I come from this team or this side,
    that these are my people. I tried to go out as reporter and talk to
    everyone about what was happening and to report as honestly I could.

    As an op-ed editor I do the same thing.

    JJ: How would you categorize your personal viewpoints on the Middle
    East?

    NG: My personal feelings about this situation are immaterial.

    Regardless of what I think, I certainly believe that that the opinion
    pages of the L.A. Times are a place where people can argue all sorts
    of things that can totally disagree with my feelings. And we publish
    writers from Alan Dershowitz and Natan Sharansky on one side, and
    Edward Said and Khaled Mashal from Hamas on the other. These are
    important issues, complicated issues, life-and-death issues.

    JJ: Are there any positions or people that you would not publish on
    the opinion page?

    NG: A lot of people ask me (particularly Jews who get angry about
    some of the things we've published on the page), "How can you run
    this stuff? Aren't there some things that don't deserve to be
    published? If Adolf Hitler came to you and wanted to publish
    something on your opinion pages, would you publish him?"

    That's a hard question. Some things are so offensive, so wrongheaded,
    so racist, that we wouldn't publish them. We do have certain
    standards. But at the same time, we try to err on the side of
    publishing rather than not publishing. If I got a piece in tomorrow
    from Osama bin Laden, chances are I'd publish it. If I had received a
    piece from Saddam Hussein in the run-up to the Iraq War, I'd have
    published that. I think it's important for readers to hear all
    different sides.

    JJ: Some pro-Israel media watchdog groups say that by publishing
    articles by members of Hamas you are fomenting propaganda against
    Israel or disseminating disinformation.

    NG: If a guy from Hamas writes a piece, he's probably trying to
    propagandize. Much of what is submitted to the Op-Ed page is
    propaganda. Still, I think that publishing these points of view can
    sometimes be extremely important.

    It's important for people in the United States to know what Hamas
    thinks, or to know what Hamas says; when Hamas won an election in
    Gaza we took that seriously, and we wanted to know what the new prime
    minister had to say about it. And we published a piece he wrote about
    what could be expected in the months and years ahead. Will it all
    come to pass? Was he trying to put one over on us? Can he be trusted?

    Well that's for you, the reader, to determine.

    JJ: CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in
    America, published advertisements alleging that you put out 50
    percent more pro-Arab Op-Eds than pro-Israel Op-Eds in a 19-month
    period and that your pages are biased.

    NG: I think their numbers are misleading. They took a bizarre time
    period of 19 months for some reason ending last July, and they left
    off a number of pieces that we've run on the Op-Ed page that didn't
    seem to help their cause.

    I went back and I looked at the pieces that we've run in the last
    year and a half, and what I found was that about 30 pieces we ran
    were highly supportive of Israel, from people on the right or people
    who were defenders of the Israeli government like Alan Dershowitz,
    Michael Oren, Max Boot, Natan Sharanksy, Moshe Ya'alon, Yossi Klein
    Halevi and Zev Chefets. I also found a handful of pieces that were
    pretty centrist, for example, by American diplomats writing about the
    future of the peace process.

    Then I found about 30 pieces that were critical of Israel. But these
    30 pieces weren't "pro-Arab," as CAMERA would want you to think: 17
    of those came from Jews or Israelis who are Zionists, who are
    pro-Israel, but who are in some way critical of Israel. Of the
    remaining writers, there's a small number that a group like CAMERA
    would say are terribly offensive. For instance, we've published Jimmy
    Carter; John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, who wrote "The Israel
    Lobby"; UCLA professor Saree Makdisi; and on two occasions we
    published representatives of Hamas.

    That's my count, and it's quite different from theirs. My count shows
    a balance.

    JJ: Is balance something that you're interested in?

    NG: Balance is important to us. Not just on this issue, but on all
    issues. We do not do a scientific count saying, "If we ran a piece on
    this side, then we must run a piece on that side tomorrow." We want
    to get the best possible pieces, so we don't keep a day-to-day count
    of what we have to run next. But yes, over time, we certainly are
    extremely interested in not tilting too far to one side or the other;
    we definitely keep an eye on it.

    JJ: CAMERA also alleged that the illustration accompanying the
    Walt-Mearsheimer piece on Jan. 8, which showed a Jewish Star
    shackling Uncle Sam, was anti-Semitic and echoed a Der Stermer Nazi
    cartoon from 1938.

    NG: They said it echoes Nazi imagery. I would say that's an
    unfortunate coincidence -- but that's all it is. We're not Nazis here
    at the Los Angeles Times; we're not anti-Semites. The fact is that
    before the State of Israel was created, the use of the Star of David
    in an illustration like that was meant to represent "the Jews." Today
    the Jewish star, which sits on the Israeli flag, is used by
    illustrators not just as a religious symbol, but as a national
    symbol. That's what it was meant to represent in this case. The
    illustration was about American politicians feeling pressure to
    support Israeli policies, which was what the piece was about.

    I don't think the illustration was anti-Semitic or Nazi-like.

    JJ: Are there criteria for illustrations and cartoons, in terms of
    whether this will offend people?

    NG: Sure. We get cartoons on a not-infrequent basis that we look at
    and say there's something that's offensive about this, that we think
    people are going to react badly. Sometimes we're willing to run them
    anyway because we want to be provocative. We don't want to offend
    people needlessly or gratuitously.

    JJ: What do you think about these media watchdog groups who count
    editorials and send in corrections all the time?

    NG: I've heard from CAMERA often since I've been here. In many ways,
    they're performing a useful and valuable service: They're holding our
    feet to the fire, to make sure that we get our facts right and that
    we correct our mistakes. They force us before we publish to think
    hard about the fact that there are a lot of people watching and that
    we'd better get it right. That part of their mission is valuable.

    But sometimes they assault us with so many complaints -- some of them
    small and some of them large, some of them meaningful, some of them
    silly, some of them simply meant to irritate. I sometimes think that
    they're trying to cause us so much work and hassle in an effort to
    dissuade us from publishing the kinds of pieces they disagree with. I
    certainly don't intend to be scared out of running a piece by a
    Palestinian author that's critical of Israel just because I'm worried
    that CAMERA may not like it.

    JJ: Is this the hottest issue of all your many different issues?

    NG: I think at most big papers in the country, the issue of Israel is
    the most controversial subject there is. In Los Angeles, the issue of
    the Armenian Genocide is very controversial. The war in Iraq is
    controversial. But there's no question -- when we run pieces on
    Israel and Palestine we'll get a huge reaction. Every article that
    makes someone happy will make someone unhappy.

    JJ: Does that make you feel like you are doing your job, because
    there are people who are happy and unhappy?

    NG: If we publish a strong opinion on one side of any issue we'll
    always make other people unhappy. That's part of the job. I'd never
    expected that everyone would be happy with what we ran. But I guess
    it's disappointing to me the degree to which people don't want to
    read opinions that are at odds with what they believe.

    I have always been interested in hearing what people I disagree with
    have to say; I want to hear their arguments. I want to be able to
    unravel their arguments, I want to be able to contradict their
    arguments or maybe be persuaded by their arguments. It's not
    interesting to me to pick up the Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page and
    read only opinions on one side of the ideological spectrum.

    But many readers apparently only want to see things on the Op-Ed page
    that validate what they already believe. I'm not just talking about
    the Middle East, but other subjects as well. That's apparently the
    way some people are. But it's too bad. People gain a lot by reading
    arguments that they don't think they agree with.

    JJ: Are there other Arab or media groups doing the same thing?

    NG:For years and years there were not. There are several groups of
    people who now solicit op-ed pieces from important or thoughtful or
    smart Palestinians to make sure their works are translated well into
    English and to make sure they get to the right people at newspapers.

    I get a lot of those. That was an attempt on the Palestinian side to
    match what's going on on the Israeli side. But there's no Arab or
    Palestinian media advocacy group that comes and reads pieces very
    closely and tells us, "You made a mistake here, you made a mistake
    there."

    JJ: You're not responsible for the letters page, but would you say
    the response in letters is equal on both sides of the issue?

    NG:We get far more letters from people supportive of Israel writing
    in, either to agree with something we wrote or to attack something we
    wrote. There are no question that letters come much more heavily from
    Jews that from Arabs, from pro-Israel people than anti-Israel people.

    JJ: Do you think there is an objective truth when it comes to the
    Middle East or it's just a difference of opinion?

    NG: There is certainly truth when it comes to the facts, and there is
    truth when it comes to the history, and it's very, very difficult
    sometimes to find out what that truth is. It's the job of reporters
    and historians to try to dig as deeply as they can to try to get to
    that truth. But the Middle East is so emotional that the subject is
    so emotional and there's so much bitterness and so much history and
    so much anger that it's hard to cut through to the facts and you have
    to look at it through this prism of opinion.

    In this issue more than others there's a really valuable role for
    opinion pieces to play. And you can really learn a lot from opinions.

    It's very unusual for Jews and Israelis to think about what's gone on
    that part of the world from a Palestinian point of view. I think it's
    hard for the Palestinians to understand what they look at as "The
    Nakba," and to see the Jewish experience. To that end, essays and
    commentary and the kinds of pieces we run in the Sunday op-ed section
    can really be important if people will read them.

    What I found is that many people are much too closed-minded to read
    pieces by others who they don't agree with. But we keep publishing
    them.

    Reading pieces you that you disagree with is terribly important, in
    my opinion. If you really want to understand an issue, you really
    want to hone your own arguments to be sure that your own
    preconceptions are correct. We should all always be re-evaluating
    what we think, and re-arguing our arguments and taking on our
    opponents, it's the only way to work through it.

    JJ: But what if your opinion won't change because it's based on
    emotions?

    NG: Everyone's opinion is based on emotion, but you have to empower
    your opinion with facts and new information and some kind of empathy
    for other people's emotions. It's hard to do. Really this is not just
    about Israel and Palestine, this is about many, many of the issues we
    write about on these pages.

    ------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------
    The Correction Process

    Media watchdog groups sometimes claim that Los Angeles Times' Op-Eds
    contain factual errors, and they ask how the editing process works,
    as well as corrections for articles.

    Times' Opinion Editor Nicholas Goldberg said many of the Op-Ed pieces
    -- especially sensitive ones -- go through a fact-checking process,
    and the newspaper has a "strong policy" to correct errors that occur.

    What merits a correction?

    "Sometimes even that's a judgment call," Goldberg said. The decision
    is usually made collectively by the readers' representative, the
    Op-Ed section editors and the editors who worked on the piece.

    "A correction is for a factual error. If we say something is the case
    that is not the case indisputably, then that merits a correction,"
    Goldberg said.
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