One constant criticism in my inbox is that NPR is unfair to Israel. Listeners and readers often point out that stories about the Middle East don't always include Israel's point of view, even when Israel plays a role.
I often ask these letter writers to join me on a Zoom call so that we can listen to news stories together and they can further explain how they receive NPR's reporting.
I did that recently with a retired schoolteacher who wrote in to point out what she perceived to be missing context. She had listened to two journalists discuss the legendary Lebanese singer Fairuz 50 years after the release of her most famous song. This radio listener believed the story unfairly portrayed Israel.
So I called her. We spent more than an hour on Zoom listening to the 7-minute story by Morning Edition host Leila Fadel. Then I called several academics who have studied the media coverage of the Middle East. Finally, Fadel and I talked about how she decided to do the story and how she made choices about what information to include and not include.
We also spotlight a recent NPR investigation into the impact of President Donald Trump's many pardons on public accountability. — Kelly McBride
What about Hezbollah?
Sue Margolis wrote on April 13: My husband and I used to donate money to NPR but no longer. We stopped several years ago when NPR stories increasingly became more and more unbalanced. We hardly listen to NPR but the station happened to be on when I returned home from school.
The story was Leila Fadel The enduring legacy of Lebanese singer Fairuz’s ‘Bahebak Ya Lebnan.’
On the surface, the story appeared to be a mostly benign profile of a traditional Lebanese singer. Then, the story turned to the various history stages of Lebanon where Leila spoke of her memories as a young girl during difficult times. What was blaringly missing in the story was any mention of Hezbollah and how the Lebanese people struggle as a result of this terrorist organization controlling so much of Lebanon and how weak the Lebanese government is. Instead, Leila emphasized the invasion of Lebanon by Israel and Syria, never mentioning that Israel was protecting its citizens from the terrorist group.
I am a retired schoolteacher and I very much cringed at the lack of balance in this story and how young adults listening would get a totally skewed impression of Israel. It was an incredibly unjust picture of Israel and fraught with poor journalism. How there was no mention of Hezbollah and its continued damage to the Lebanese people and economy is absolutely shocking.
Fadel's story aired on Thursday, April 9. It was long for a weekday story. It featured her conversation with Danny Hajjar, a freelance journalist who covers emerging Arab musicians. Hajjar had recently published an April 1 essay in The Guardian in which he asserts that young Arabs don't listen to Fairuz with the nostalgia of their parents.
Fadel set out to do two things with this conversation. She wanted to introduce American listeners to the most famous musician in the Arab world. And she wanted to explore the bittersweet reality that younger Lebanese people now have a negative reaction to music that at one time was considered the soundtrack of Lebanese life.
The 50th anniversary of the release of one of Fairuz's famous songs, "Bahebak Ya Lebnan" (I Love You Lebanon), offered a timely opportunity.
"I just wanted to do a story about this beautiful and iconic music, what it means to Lebanese people," Fadel told me. "What it meant then and what it means today after so many decades of one problem after another."
I wanted to understand Margolis' strong reaction. During our Zoom meeting, Margolis mentioned her students several times, reiterating that anyone who listened to this story would walk away from it believing that Israel is the cause of so much suffering in Lebanon. As a volunteer GED tutor, she is keenly aware of the disjointed nature of modern news consumption. This might be the only story some people hear about Lebanon, she told me.
"I kind of put myself in the shoes of a younger person hearing these stories and walking away with a really unbalanced impression," she told me. "The younger generation listening to these stories and saying, 'Hey, you know, Israel must be this really big bully of a country. Really powerful, really big.' And they don't realize until they look at a map that Israel is tiny compared to the other countries in the Middle East. They don't realize it's a small country and that they're just trying to protect their citizens."
Israel is mentioned three times in the story. After introducing Fairuz as the voice of Lebanon with three short song clips, Fadel begins her conversation with Hajjar, pointing out that the music journalist wrote his recent essay against the backdrop of Israel's most recent invasion of Lebanon.
Hajjar says that Fairuz is "the only true uniting public figure in Lebanon."
Fadel responds, "But unity has long been elusive for Lebanon. From 1975 to 1990, the country was engulfed in a religious civil war over power as Israel and Syria both invaded and occupied. It was a war I witnessed during my childhood."
As an audio news story, this one is quintessentially NPR. Rich in sound and discovery, it was crafted to lean on the music as a narrative device, hooking listeners by first establishing Fairuz as a phenomenon. Then Fadel and Hajjar, who both have family ties to Lebanon, expose the twist that younger generations find the music triggering because they've never experienced the country represented in the songs.
As a listener, Margolis, who lives in Connecticut and recently visited Tel Aviv, was offended by Fadel's decision to not include more context. As we listened to it together, she had me stop the recording when Fadel mentioned the current Israel invasion of Lebanon, as well as the past occupation. "So why did Israel invade?" Margolis asked. "There should be like a comma and then say 'After its citizens were being struck by rockets all the time from Hezbollah, a terrorist organization located in the south of Lebanon.'"
I disagree. Israel is not singled out in this script as the sole source of Lebanon's suffering. Israel's occupations appear as one of a litany of challenges that Lebanon has faced. Other hardships named in various places throughout the story include Syrian occupation, civil war, government corruption, sectarian strife and revolution. The list is an aside, meant to give the listener an appreciation of the political chaos that made the iconic music relevant.
It is unrealistic to expect that any one audio story about any topic can give a listener enough historical context to guarantee a complete education. This is true of almost every issue. But there is an ample body of research on the subject of Middle East conflict. Studies of news coverage in both the U.S. and in Europe consistently suggest three conditions:
- Consumers are often undereducated and misinformed about the Arab-Israeli conflict.
- Israel's point of view historically receives significantly more representation in Western media broadcast news than Arab points of view.
- In the past decade, consumers have more access to a wider array of opinions and images than they have in the past.
"What academic research has shown over many decades is that Israeli accounts and Israeli perspectives on the conflict tend to predominate," said Mike Berry, a media sociologist from Cardiff University in Wales.
Berry researches what the public understands as a result of the news they consume. He advocates for changes in the news content that can make public comprehension of current events more complete and accurate.
After listening to the story about Fairuz, Berry said the bigger question is whether NPR is embracing its broader responsibility to educate its audience about Israel's relationship with Lebanon.
"I don't think it necessarily needs it" for the story about Fairuz, he said. "But more generally in journalism, I think journalists will shy away from explainers because they know if they talk about some of those issues, then, you know, there's going to be a lot of heat on them. The consequence of not doing that is people are consuming hours and hours and hours of the story and they still have no idea why the two sides are fighting or how it might be resolved, which to me is an enormous failure of journalism."
When Barry analyzes a media organization, he examines more than just a story or even a single broadcast. He looks across the scope of coverage to see if a wide range of opinions and viewpoints are represented.
I take the same approach. I judge NPR by the complete body of its work. And when I judge individual stories, I look for the journalistic purpose and I ask whether that was a worthy pursuit and well executed. This particular story was both worthy and well done.
I and other ombudsmen have consistently analyzed NPR's body of coverage of the Middle East and judged it to be fair. For more than a decade, NPR paid a journalist to independently analyze its Middle East coverage, in response to the volume of complaints. That work ended in 2014.
In the past, I've examined NPR's coverage of the Middle East, including Israel's war on Gaza and the current U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. I've also looked at Israel-focused stories that generated audience complaints. And my analysis refuted the claim that NPR is biased against Israel.
When it comes to covering Lebanon, NPR's recent body of work is expansive. Fadel interviewed an expert on Lebanon's role in the Arab-Israeli conflict. She explained why terrorist groups like both the Palestine Liberation Organization and Hezbollah took root in Lebanon. And just last week, Morning Edition host Michel Martin interviewed a former Department of Homeland Security official whose family home and village in Lebanon were recently destroyed by Israeli forces. And this State of the World podcast quoted United Nations reports of 600+ military attacks by Israel in Lebanon since the ceasefire, and 30 Hezbollah attacks on Israel. NPR's broader coverage of the Middle East is also vast.
But back to our schoolteacher's concern that in this disjointed era of scrolling, someone who only listens to this one story will walk away misinformed. "The media landscape is different these days," Berry told me. "People have a wider range of information sources to draw from."
If the hypothetical young person who knows very little about the Middle East pauses long enough to hear the NPR story about Fairuz, he or she will walk away knowing that, as a country, Lebanon has many problems with many causes, and it also has a vibrant music scene. This young news consumer might just get more curious about the Middle East, after learning that on the other side of the world young people are rejecting the standard songbook of their parents' generation, in favor of musicians who express their anger about the current state of their world.
That would be a good result for a well-told news story. — Kelly McBride
If you want to listen and discuss NPR stories with me, email me at ooffice@npr.org. Be sure to include a link to the stories you want to discuss and why you think they are flawed.
How Trump pardons undermine the fight against public corruption
President Donald Trump has, so far in his second term, pardoned more than a dozen former elected officials and their associates who were convicted on federal corruption charges. NPR published a deep dive for Weekend Edition Saturday exploring how these actions undermine the fight against public corruption. Justice correspondent Ryan Lucas guides listeners through a few of the cases, including that of a former Las Vegas councilwoman who was convicted of pocketing all of the more than $70,000 in donations meant for memorials to honor two Las Vegas police officers killed in the line of duty. Officials said she used it for personal expenses. We hear from a legal expert and the former acting chief of the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section, a specialized unit that was decimated by the Trump administration, and learn about the implications of Trump's pardons. This story is a worthwhile listen, and the kind of explanatory coverage that greatly benefits NPR listeners. — Amaris Castillo
The Office of the Public Editor is a team. Reporters Amaris Castillo and Nicole Slaughter Graham and copy editor Merrill Perlman make this newsletter possible. Illustrations are by Carlos Carmonamedina. We are still reading all of your messages on social media and from our inbox. As always, keep them coming.
Kelly McBride
NPR Public Editor
Chair, Craig Newmark Center for Ethics & Leadership at the Poynter Institute
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