Has any event ever been the subject of more blatantly biased news coverage than the Israeli elections? Ted Koppel said the Netanyahu win was “a devastating setback.” Stephen Rosenfeld of the Washington Post argued that Israelis who voted for Likud are irrational and psychologically weak. Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times compared Netanyahu to Russian Communist candidate Gennadi Zyuganov because they are both representatives of the past and of fear. The Times’s Joseph Berger was among the many who treated a Likud victory as a return to medieval fundamentalism. Meanwhile, all during the campaign, the Peres camp was rhapsodized as the “peace” party by American journalists and headline writers.
The coverage was no surprise to anybody who has spent time around Western correspondents as they trade anti-Likud gossip in the bar of the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem. But you’d think foreign editors back home would insist on a tinge of balance when they send their reporters off to cover foreign elections. And you would think that columnists like Friedman and Rosenfeld would have a little more discretion than to condescend to a democratic electorate that has just participated in a reasonably civil and high-toned election campaign. Rosenfeld may prefer Labor, but is it really ” irrational” to vote for Likud–a party that has governed Israel for 15 of the last 19 years and under whose aegis, after all, Israel gave the Sinai and its $ 3 billion a year worth of oil back to Egypt in exchange for paper guarantees of peace? And while Friedman may prefer Peres to Netanyahu, it is tasteless in the extreme to compare this American-educated, freely chosen leader of a party committed to democracy to a neo-Stalinist anti-Semite.
