NPR pays an independent journalist, John Felton, to evaluate its Israeli-Palestinian coverage quarterly. We are debuting the reports on the Ombudsman site. --ACS

NPR's Mideast Coverage
Assessments of NPR's Israeli-Palestinian Coverage

In order to ensure that the public can thoroughly review NPR's coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, NPR has made several long-term commitments, including these:

-- Every three months, NPR's coverage is thoroughly analyzed and that analysis is posted on NPR's public website. NPR has been doing this consistently for the last seven years; reports for the past two years are available at the bottom of this page.

-- The criteria for inclusion in these reviews are that the piece be principally about or related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the parties to that conflict. The exceptions would be a discussion, like Weekend Edition Saturday's 'Week in Review,' where the conflict may have been a smaller section of the whole, but still was substantive (i.e., more than a passing reference) or stories like anti-Semitism in Europe, since the Israeli-European tensions are a legitimate part of the story.

-- These reports differ from the Ombudsman's work because they are done by John Felton, whose evaluations of NPR's coverage are independent of NPR. His reports are submitted to the Ombudsman only for proofreading before posting. Felton's bio is below.

-- NPR's Ombudsman, who serves as an independent advocate for listeners, also reviews Mideast coverage questions and concerns. The quarterly evaluations on this page do not preclude her own investigations of NPR's Middle East coverage. The Ombudsman section of our website explains how to forward issues and topics to her attention.

-- NPR posts on its website every story related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict aired on NPR news programs or posted on NPR's web site. The archive does not include brief items which air on our newscasts (none of which are transcribed, for cost reasons). This page also includes blogs and news items by NPR staffers and reports from NPR's web partners (such as Foreign Policy magazine); however it does not include Associated Press stories that run on NPR.org. To review all stories related to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, click here.

For the overall Middle East page, click here.

-- NPR is committed to accurate, fair, and balanced coverage of the Middle East. In particular, NPR believes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a subject of global importance and an issue that requires in-depth, ongoing coverage by NPR.

John Felton prepares the quarterly evaluations. He has covered international affairs and U.S. foreign policy for more than 30 years. His most recent book, The Contemporary Middle East: A Documentary History, was published by CQ Press in 2007.

A former foreign affairs reporter for Congressional Quarterly and foreign editor at NPR, he has been a freelance writer and editor since 1995. NPR pays him to conduct quarterly reviews of NPR's coverage of the Middle East. He submits his reports to the NPR Ombudsman.

Whenever there is a major disaster involving death and destruction, the question of how to handle pictures of dead bodies arises at news organizations.

"All forms of publications struggle with the dead body question," said Terry Eiler, a veteran photojournalist who is director of Ohio University's school of visual communication. "Can I run this dead body in my publication without offending, harming, hurting or disturbing the audience? When you are looking at the scale of destruction in Haiti you can't tell that story without showing dead bodies."

NPR is no different, although its editors differed on whether to prominently display a jarring photo of a man stepping over or on dead bodies on its website home page less than two days after the Jan. 12 earthquake devastated Haiti.

Instantly some staffers demanded that the Jan. 14 image be taken down.

The NPR homepage as it appeared for about an hour on January 14, 2010. (Screenshot)

Nicole Werbeck, a home page editor who spotted the photo by Juan Barreto of Agence France Press, thought differently.

"It really stopped me," she said. "I feel like I've seen quite a bit. So when one photo really grabs my attention I go through a mental checklist asking if the photo adds value to the story. Is it informational? What about the graphic nature?"

She believed the photo was worth running because many news organizations were reporting at the time that people were leaving bodies on the streets and in front of the morgue because there was nowhere to put them.

"Bodies were everywhere," she said. "This was the first concrete proof of these reports that I had seen. On the home page I thought it would be more effective. The anonymous nature of the photo such as no faces being shown, but still having such a huge impact on me, really drew me in."

In her 17 years as an editor, she has run only 3 photos of a dead body.

By now, with the 24-hour news cycle, NPR's web audience may be accustomed to seeing images of dead bodies. But this photo ran when not a lot was known about the precise circumstances that it depicted.

So at the decision-making point, there were three questions to ask: Should NPR use it at all? If so, how? And, was it appropriate for the home page?

Continue reading "Gruesome Haiti Photo: A Need for Context" >

NPR's Ombudsman office keeps a finger on the blog pulse, and occasionally finds items criticizing NPR that are spot on, but others that aren't correct.

That's why a recent post on NewsBusters.org, a conservative media watchdog site, raised a few eyebrows.

"It is a strange paradigm among much of the mainstream media that plummeting poll numbers are of far greater import for Republicans than they are for Democrats," wrote Lachlan Markay, the post's author. "That, at least, is the logical conclusion of the relative silence of major media outlets on the steep decline in President Obama's poll numbers compared with the decline in President Bush's."

Could it be true, as Markay stated, that NPR has neglected to report President Obama's decline in the polls?

We did some research.

It turns out that Markay's post was partially accurate. NPR did not report on the specific Allstate/National Journal poll on Jan. 15. But Markay's general sentiment -- that NPR doesn't report negative polls on President Obama -- was not accurate.

On Jan. 14, NPR's Liz Halloran reported a Pew Research Center for People & the Press survey, noting that the president's job approval ratings were at 49 percent. And that his approval rating on health care had dropped from 51 percent to 38 percent.

Days later Weekend Edition Sunday reported on a drop in the president's poll numbers:

"Ken Rudin: And now it seems like, if you look at the polling numbers - and I can give some polling numbers - The Washington Post has President Obama with a 53 percent approval, CBS 46 percent approval. These are not good numbers, certainly not as good as they were when he was riding so high back in the last spring."

And Weekend All Things Considered also commented on the shift:

"Guy Raz: [...] Originally, he was at around 70 percent approval, now down to 50 percent, just under that.

Mara Liasson: Yes. Obviously, he started at an unnaturally high level.

Guy Raz: Mm-hmm.

Mara Liasson: But being under 50 is the danger zone for presidents as they enter the midterm elections. The presidential approval rating and the unemployment rate are probably the two most significant indicators of how a majority party will fare in the midterms."

On Monday, NPR's Scott Horsley, who covers the president, reported on his sagging poll numbers.

NPR's Mara Liasson reported Wednesday on Morning Edition that President Obama, with a 50 percent approval rating, has the second-lowest national approval rating of any modern president at this point in his presidency. [President Reagan was only slightly lower at 49 percent.] In the same show, NPR's Don Gonyea noted that a new Indiana poll gave the president a 44 percent approval rating with 53 percent disapproving.

And Horsley, also did a newscast spot that day saying:

"Some of the same voter frustration and desire for change that helped propel Mr.Obama into the White House last year has now turned against the President. His approval rating has fallen from almost 70 percent at the time of his inauguration to around 50-percent. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs says with double-digit unemployment, it's little wonder the public is frustrated. Gibbs says the President is frustrated too."

Polls are valuable to journalists and the public because they capture a numeric concept of public opinion. But there are so many polls conducted that not all of them will make it into the news cycle -- and the quality and credibility of polls range from excellent to poor.

Although Markay raised a provocative observation, a quick search of NPR's coverage reveals that a particular poll might not be cited, but listeners are learning about the dramatic slip in approval for the president.

-- Lori Grisham
Assistant to the Ombudsman

Not long after NPR's first stories about the Haiti earthquake started appearing, listeners complained about hearing the word "looting."

"The use of the term 'looting' for people desperate to survive is, frankly, insulting," wrote RJ Bourn of New York City. "It implies widespread opportunism for the sake of gain rather than horrifying hunger, thirst and medical need."

Another wrote: "The action of securing essential survival food and water during the life and death chaos of a natural disaster is not 'looting', it is human need," said Barbara Goldfeder of Nahcotta, WA.

This is a tough one. What the listeners say makes sense, but it is also true that looting has taken place in Haiti.

"There is nothing pejorative about the word 'loot,' " said Didi Schanche, the foreign editor handling Haiti coverage. "There are indeed people who are taking food and water as and where they can find it as a matter of survival, and we've mentioned them. But there is nothing eleemosynary about guys taking off with three televisions strapped onto the back of a motorcycle. We use 'loot' as it's defined."

[Cambridge Online Dictionary definition of looting.]

In every large-scale disaster, no matter where it is, the social codes that allow us to live peacefully often break down when people are tired, hungry, hurt and frustrated. Haiti is no different.

Looting is taking place and NPR should report it, but the issue is one of proportion -- how much looting is taking place, how often, where? Why is it being done? What is being taken? And is that the only story that NPR is telling?

In an online commentary on npr.org, Anita L. Allen of the University of Pennsylvania Law School wrote: "Taking diapers, infant formula, food and flashlight batteries is a kind of self-help humanitarian relief morality surely allows. Who could let their child or grandmother go hungry in a catastrophic emergency not of one's own making simply to preserve the ethical rule against stealing?"

So as a moral, if not a legal, issue, it depends on what is being taken and for what reason. In Haiti, based on NPR's reporting, many people are taking what's not theirs for humanitarian reasons but some are also taking advantage of the instability. Both reasons need to be reported carefully, sensitively and in context. Here's NPR's Haiti coverage.

Wednesday night, All Things Considered led with a piece by Jason Beaubien on how panic and looting, a week after the quake, are escalating. But of the five Haiti stories tentatively slated for news shows on Thursday, not one has to do with looting.


Richter Scale:
Another listener, Mark Powell, insists that in reporting on any earthquake, the phrase "Richter Scale" is no longer operable. It has been replaced by the "Moment Magnitude Scale," he said.

"The listener is correct," said Christopher Joyce, a correspondent on the Science Desk. "We use 'magnitude.' Richter is obsolete."

Overall, NPR policy is to avoid using the term Richter Scale, but it has slipped in. On Wednesday, substitute host Rebecca Roberts on Talk of the Nation used the words "Richter Scale," but then her guest pointed out that the term is outdated.

ROBERTS: Which also gets to the question of - the Richter Scale is not a steady incremental scale, it's an exponential scale? Can you...

HARRIS: That's true. Yeah.

ROBERTS: ...just explain that a little bit?

HARRIS: Yeah. They - basically, each point on the magnitude scale, they don't say Richter anymore. That's sort of a little outmoded but...

ROBERTS: Oh, I'm sorry. I'm passe. SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER

Earthquake magnitudes are measures of earthquake size calculated from ground motion recorded on seismographs. The Richter scale, named for Dr. Charles F. Richter, is no longer widely used.

Magnitudes are usually reported simply as magnitude 6.7, for example, without specifying the scale being used. The various scales differ only slightly from one another.

In the first hours after a quake, earthquake size should be reported as a preliminary magnitude of 6.7, for example. Early estimates are often revised, and it can be several days before seismologists calculate a final figure.

Magnitudes are measured on several different scales. The most commonly used measure is the moment magnitude, related to the area of the fault on which an earthquake occurs, and the amount the ground slips

From time to time, I will try to pull back the curtain and let you know how NPR covers events. Here's a behind-the-scenes look at Haiti coverage. ACS

The magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit Haiti, near its densely populated capital, at 4:53 p.m. eastern time on Tuesday.

That's 53 minutes into the first hour of NPR's All Things Considered. No time to plan; just scramble to get news on air of the biggest quake recorded in Haiti in two centuries.

At 7:50 p.m., ATC ran an interview with host Robert Siegel and Haiti's ambassador to the U.S., Robert Joseph. At 8:10 p.m., Siegel did a 10-minute interview with Rachel Wolff from World Vision, a international relief group based in the U.S. with 400 employees in Haiti. It aired at 8:45 p.m.

NPR's news blog, The Two-Way, posted a piece by 5:26 p.m. with a map and continued to follow the story providing numerous links to other coverage on the Internet. Newscasters filled in every 30 minutes with the latest reports.

That worked for the moment, but the bigger challenge for NPR lay ahead: Getting reporters on the ground in Haiti. Stu Seidel, deputy managing editor, handled the logistics and foreign desk editor Didi Schanche was put in charge of coordinating coverage. Phone lines were down in Haiti. Satellite phone connections were sporadic, and the Internet wasn't working. The airport was closed.

"Reports on damage and casualties are scarce, but reports are grim," wrote Seidel in an all-staff email at 10:08 p.m.

In Miami, Maeve McGoran, a senior editor, got on the phone trying to find charter flights to Haiti. Back at NPR, producer Gisele Grayson also worked the phones searching for flights.

Correspondent Greg Allen headed to the Miami airport to interview people on a plane arriving from Port-au-Prince. It had taken off shortly after the quake turned the capital into a rubble pile with thousands presumed dead. Allen did news spots and filed a piece for Morning Edition. About 75 percent of passengers didn't get on the plane because they were scared to fly, a man told Allen.

Meanwhile in Mexico City, correspondent Jason Beaubien booked a flight for 6:35 a.m. Wednesday to Miami and then on to Port-au-Prince. In Washington, photographer David Gilkey also found a flight to join him.

In Los Angeles, correspondent Carrie Kahn and producer Amy Walters got on a "red eye" to Miami that arrived early Wednesday morning. McGoran had found a plane to Haiti chartered by a university for doctors and booked two seats.

Before Kahn and Walters headed to Haiti, Seidel sent an email advising them to "take sleeping bags, first aid kits, packaged food and whatever else you might be able to take to a place where support services will be dreadful."

While Seidel was playing traffic cop Tuesday night, NPR's social media maven, Andy Carvin, began culling Twitter to find tweets from people in Haiti. He created a special Twitter list that allowed readers to follow what was happening second by second. Read more about how he verified that they were actually in Haiti. He also reached out through NPR's Facebook page to find sources that would later appear on the air. Here's one story that came from Facebook. And another from Twitter.

The Morning Edition staff scrambled to get nine stories on their show Wednesday, which goes live at 5 a.m. It included tape from two people who live in Haiti and could provide first-hand experience. One was gotten through Twitter.

On another floor, the small but ambitious staff of Tell Me More, which goes live at 9 a.m., tore apart its planned show. Producer Monika Evstatieva went to the Haitian Embassy in Washington, DC at 7:30 a.m. to try for another interview with the ambassador.

Tell Me More host Michel Martin started boning up on Haiti facts to prepare. "And we kept putting alternate stories in place as a backup just in case," she said. They did get the interview and another with a Catholic Relief Services spokesman who had workers missing in Haiti.

Meanwhile, the drive was on to get journalists into Haiti -- along with every other major news organization. Flights were booked, canceled and rebooked. Cars rented that wouldn't be picked up.

"Everything is tentative," said Seidel.

Kahn and Walters arrived in Miami and drove to Ft. Lauderdale to fly in with a medical relief charter. But once they got there, only one seat was available. Kahn went ahead with a satellite phone. Walters would follow lugging a sleeping bag, clothing and a much bulkier satellite phone that, all boxed up, weighs 40 pounds and costs $12,000.

Kahn arrived in time to do a "two-way" interview for ATC Wednesday night but had nowhere to stay.

Since the Haiti airport was shut down, Beaubien (carrying 6-pound satellite phone) and Gilkey (with NPR's latest satellite phone, weighing just 2.2 pounds) flew to Santa Domingo in the neighboring Dominican Republic and drove overland to Port-au-Prince.

Wednesday morning, NPR felt like a campaign operation with assignments handed out like marching orders: stories on military efforts, an anatomy of an earthquake, the U.S. Haitian community, Haiti's health needs, State Department efforts, European reactions, social media and President Obama, among others. More story assignments than could ever be done.

All day Wednesday, emails were flying with contact information for doctors, professors, Haitians and other Haiti experts. A producer suggested an interview with a photojournalist in Haiti who was willing to talk. An intern pursued it using Skype but upon reaching her was told the photojournalist was "too traumatized to do any interviews."

By Wednesday night, Kahn was the only NPR journalist in Haiti. She slept in a sleeping bag on the lawn of the La Ville Creole hotel, outside the capital, which had no available rooms that night.

On Thursday, Greg Allen, Amy Walters and correspondent Jackie Northam found seats on separate charter flights into Haiti. And Beaubien and Gilkey arrived by car from the Dominican Republic.

In Atlanta, health correspondent Joanne Silberner and photographer John Poole found seats on a government plane with medical disaster and mortuary teams. As they were about to land in Port-au-Prince, there was a near-miss with another plane, the emergency masks came down, and the plane was diverted to Turks and Caicos. [By Friday night, they still hadn't made it to Haiti.]

By Thursday evening, the La Ville Creole hotel had become NPR's temporary headquarters for the half-dozen staffers who had managed to get to Haiti.

McGoran delievered food and water to producer Tom Bullock in Ft. Lauderdale to take to Haiti. "Dried fruit, beef jerky, canned tuna, things that will keep," said McGoran. "I was going to bring him a portable generator to bring down but we all decided food was more important. So we will send the generator down with the next person going in."

Bullock flew in Friday on a plane that Ted Turner's United Nations Foundation was using to bring doctors to Haiti.

"This is a terrible, terrible story," said Seidel. "Even though all of us have a lot of experience, we are still making this up as we go along. What's in my head right now is who will be in the next group that I send in this weekend. This story is going to take a toll on the people we send there if we have them reporting constantly in a relentless way."

For the staff of NPR, there may be inconveniences, not to mention the expense, in the rush to get the story for millions of listeners and readers. But all that is trivial compared to what the people of Haiti have experienced in this latest of many natural disasters -- their worst of modern times.

For nearly two months, the animated political cartoon sat on npr.org virtually unnoticed. And then someone discovered it, was disgusted and launched it into the blogosphere -- making it a raucous rallying point for conservatives.

The conservative tom-tom was extremely impressive.

When the "Learn to Speak Tea Bag" cartoon making fun of "Tea Party" activists was published on Nov.12, there were 5 comments. By 6 p.m. this past Monday, there were 258. By Wednesday night, over 1,100 people had commented and it was still the most-recommended link on NPR's web site. On Monday and Tuesday, calls came in every 10 minutes. Over 300 wrote to me -- most of them angry.

The 90-second animation, which creator Mark Fiore calls satire, rather summarily dismisses participants in the Tea Party movement as inarticulate, paranoid bumblers. The video "teaches" the viewer to speak conversational "tea bag."

Moderator: Finally, learning a new language doesn't have to be hard. You can be fluent in conversational tea bag in just a few short minutes. Lesson one: Don't get distracted by the confusing words of other languages.

Character: I think the public option and the competition it would foster would really -- socialist, socialist.

Moderator: Good, very good. Lesson two: If you're having trouble understanding the words of others or being understood yourself, use teabag's stronger, more descriptive words.

Character: "Nazi, Nazi, Nazi."

It's actually not that funny -- especially to those on the right, including members of the Tea Party movement, which is populated by passionate Americans who don't like the direction President Obama is taking the country.

"The cartoon is a perfect caricature of what NPR looks like to conservatives: liberals snidely imagining conservatives to be monosyllabic clods who can't make an argument beyond name-calling," said Tim Graham, director of media analysis for the conservative Media Research Center. "Conservatism is 'satirized' into a form of political retardation."

Continue reading "Loud Protests on NPR's 'Tea Party' Cartoon " >