The Death of Adele Biton and The New York Times’ Justification of Lopsided Reporting
On Feb. 17, 4-year-old Adele Biton died as a result of complications of pneumonia. Two years earlier she was critically injured in a Palestinian stone-throwing attack and had never fully recovered. But when NYT correspondent Jodi Rudoren wrote a nearly 2000-word front page feature on Palestinian stone-throwers, she found no room to mention the attack that maimed the toddler. In an interview following Adele's death, Rudoren defends her lopsided reporting. 
The bias in New York Times news coverage is a routine occurrence, appearing both in obvious ways, for example, with factual distortions, and in more subtle ways, with reporters coloring news stories with opinion. CAMERA has rewritten some of these passages to present a more objective and factual version. 
Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren does not differentiate between objective reporting and pushing her viewpoint. And her editors do not care. In fact, they seem to prefer advocacy over straightforward journalism. A case in point—a Dec. 9 front page article purporting to report on a debate over Israel's Jewish identity. 
Much of the mainstream media coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is marred by the attempt to fit breaking events into a pre-existing, simplistic narrative whereby Palestinians are not held directly responsible for their actions. This again was the case with the coverage of the brutal massacre in a Jerusalem synagogue. 
The New York Times Sunday Book Review Supplement turned to Time Magazine's Joe Klein to write a review of a book about the Begin-Sadat negotiations. Klein used it as an opportunity to air his own biased views of the former Israeli Prime Minister.