Media Responds to Accusations of Bias in Middle East Coverage

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• JEFFREY BROWN:

  When it comes to coverage of the Middle East, there are two truths that everyone who works in a newsroom, including ours, comes to understand. One is that few, if any, subjects elicit more response. The second is that the reactions to the very same story can be completely opposite.

  One small example from our own e-mail this week, after a story we aired on a group of American Jews returning from Israel. One letter read, "Simply the worst piece I've seen on the NewsHour. Total propaganda. Please stop wasting our time with blatant fundraising attempts for Jewish and Israeli groups."

  Another said, "Finally, someone has a clear conscience that a war has two sides. Don't take sides by just showing those sad faces and anger in Lebanon."

  We look at how readers and viewers see the news and its perceived biases with Timothy McNulty, public editor of the Chicago Tribune. He has previously served as foreign editor and as Middle East correspondent for the paper.

  Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center.

  And Lee Ross, a professor of social psychology at Stanford University and co-founder of the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation.

  Andy, I want to start with you, because you could put some numbers on this for us. You just did a poll in which you asked about bias. Tell us about the general findings.

  ANDREW KOHUT, Pew Center for the People and the Press: Well, the general reactions of the public were positive about the media. By a three-to-one margin, people said the coverage was fair, not unfair. And as you well know, the public is not shy about being critical of the press.

  And this was a story that was very followed by a very large percentage of the public, much larger than the usual foreign story that doesn't have a clear American angle. And there was no pushback on how much coverage there was.

  Most people said this story got the amount of coverage it deserved, even though at one point it took up 70 percent of the news hole of the three commercial networks in the first full week of the war. So it was well-followed, well-regarded, and the public thought it was even-handed.

• JEFFREY BROWN:

  But you did find some significant differences between Democrats and Republicans, partisans?

• ANDREW KOHUT:

  We did. We found that Republicans were a little more critical. Only 59 percent of the Republicans said the coverage was fair; 69 percent of the Democrats said the coverage was fair.

  There are a couple of things going on here. First of all, Republicans are almost always more critical of the press than Democrats. But also, in this case, the people who said that the coverage was unfair tended to think that the coverage was anti-Israel. And by a two-to-one margin, it was seen as anti-Israel, not balanced in that way. And Republicans are more supportive of Israel than are Democrats and independents, and by a substantial margin.