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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.
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.
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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.