Responding to accusations that MSNBC gives more airtime to Israel than to Hamas out of a pro-Israel bias, host Chris Hayes offered a slightly different explanation for the airtime disparity — when it comes to lining up interviews for your talk show, terrorists are not the easiest guests to book.
On Monday, Palestinian journalist Rula Jebreal railed against MSNBC for its “disgustingly biased,” pro-Israel coverage of the Israel-Gaza crisis. Proof of this bias, Jebreal said, is that so much more airtime is given to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and “his folks” than to Palestinians.
“I never see one Palestinian being interviewed on this issue,” she said. “…maybe for 30 seconds. And then you have 25 minutes for BB Netanyahu.”
But MSNBC host Chris Hayes thinks that another factor may be contributing to the disparity, one which has nothing to do with a pro-Israel bias.
“It turns out it’s extremely hard to get a Hamas official on your show,” Hayes said on Tuesday, alluding to a failed attempt to arrange an interview with a Hamas representative.
After Jebreal continues to decry the purported media bias, Hayes wistfully exclaims, “If I could get a Hamas representative to come on this show for 60 minutes!”
Considering the difficulty he ascribes to scheduling interviews with Hamas, it comes as no surprise that Hayes also says that Arab vs. Israeli airtime is a “bad metric” of media bias.
But there’s another reason that airtime disparity is a bad metric: Israel airtime doesn’t translate into pro-Israel coverage. Sometimes, it actually has the opposite effect.
Case-in-point, a recent interview between Brian Williams and Netanyahu on NBC, MSNBC’s sister channel.
In the segment, Williams throws tough questions at Israel’s prime minister about Gazan civilian casualties. Netanyahu responds by citing Israel’s need to defend itself from incessant Hamas rocket fire and by accusing the terrorist organization of deliberately putting civilians in harm’s way so it can garner international sympathy.
Apparently unable to arrange an interview with a Hamas official who can respond to Netanyahu on-air, Williams is forced to read a written response by Hamas which describes Netanyahu and Israel as an army of war criminals that deliberately targets innocent civilians.
As Williams cannot interrogate the written statement, Hamas’s claim goes uncontested and the segment closes with Hamas getting the final word, though the terrorist group has ostensibly been given little to no airtime.
Jebreal is right. The fact that Hamas officials are not given airtime, like Netanyahu, to be grilled on tough questions— such as the organization’s decision to reject a peace treaty and to divert millions of dollars that could have been used to protect civilians towards the construction of terror tunnels—may result in a media bias. It’s just not the bias that she thinks.
(H/t Newsbusters)
View the Hayes-Jebreal interview here:
View the Williams-Netanyahu interview here:
