Blackmailing The Press

ONE YEAR AGO last may five American correspondents in Lebanon were abducted by a Marxist faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and held for 24 hours. According several accounts, the newsmen were stripped and lined up against a wall as if to be executed. Them they were released on the condition their employers not reveal the episode. Only an accusatory finger pointed by the Israeli Press Office eight months later forced the American media to disclose the affair.

The attempt by the press to cover up the intimidation of several influential reporters is more shocking than the intimidation itself. Lebanon, after all, has not exactly been hospitable to journalists; in the past decade alone, more than a dozen newsmen have been assassinated there while doing their jobs. In the face of incessant threats, some members of the media in the Middle East have chosen to flee. Others carried on, reporting to the world the dangers they were facing. But in the case of the five American correspondents, it was business as usual. The story was almost never told.

The affair began to unravel in February when New York Times writer David Shipler mentioned the kidnapping in a piece printed in the Paris-based International Herald Tribune. When the Times ran Shipler's story a few days later, it deleted mention of the incident. But ze'ev Chafets, director of Israel's Government Press Office, began to make noise. He accused the media of partiality in its coverage of the Middle East and singled out the abduction of the reporters as proof the media could not be unbiased. And Chafets revealed that the correspondents involved worked for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek and the Associated Press

The Times was on the spot. Late in February, an article by foreign editor Craig R. Whitney appeared on page 36, admitting the incident. Whitney attempted to explain in a roundabout way why his paper had not reported the story from the start "It is the policy of the Times to report difficulties by its correspondents in the pursuit of stories when the difficulties become news." Apparently then, editors of the Times did not see the kidnapping as news fit to print. Yet previously, two long articles relating problems Times correspondents had encountered while reporting in Israel were published--one on May 29, 1979, the other on February 3, 1980 Last year, the Times also ran an article on the front page describing the plight of a correspondent held for a day by authorities in the Soviet Union.

Finally, Jonathan Kifner of the Times and Julian Nundy of Newsweek admitted they were among the five detained reporters--nearly nine months after the fact Kifner claimed the entire thing had been an "embarrassing" mistake that all parties involved regretted. He added that none of the correspondents had been in danger. Yet several major publications--including Time the French newspaper Le Figaro and the German magazine Stern--reported the threats to the journalists. And other correspondents in Lebanon who knew of the affair confirmed that the Americans had their lives threatened

Only Time magazine and The New Republic have detailed the affair without prompting by the Israelis, In an article last march, New Republic editor Martin Peretz said that in addition to Kifner and Nundy, the correspondence involved were Jonathan Randal of the Washington Post, William Farrell of the Times and William Foey of the Associated Press. But neither the Post nor the Associated Press have made mention of the abduction.

Relating the kidnapping story and its subsequent cover-up in no way constitutes an attempt to tarnish the reporting done by the journalist involved after their nightmare. Nowhere does proof exist showing that Kifner, Randal, Farrell and the others were biased in their coverage of the Middle East. But Americans has the right know about the incidental the abducted journalist reported from Lebanon at one time or another this summer during the Israelli Invasion. No one can say whether their news stories--consciously orsub-consciously--reflected the danger they knew they were in.

IT IS ONE THING for correspondents in West Beirut to have felt some sympathy for the Palestinians. That was to be expected because when bombs dropped, they were just as lethal to journalists as they were to their intended targets. But the possibility that members of the press could have been intimidated to write stories favorable to the PLO is another matter altogether. Such knowledge is essential to a reader--sitting safely at home--in his or her evaluation of what should ideally be an objective news story.

Newspaper accounts of the war in Lebanon this summer were filled with distortions. From the start, the press published casualty figures released by the Lebanese Red Cross--without pointing out that the Red Cross director is PLO chairman Yasser Arafat's brother. In an interview recently granted to the Jerusalem Post, American military observer Col. Trevor N. Dupuy indicates numerous factual errors reported by journalists in Beirut. He notes, for example, a New York Times story on the August 12 attack on West Beirut quoting PLO communiqués saying that Israeli planes dropped 44,000 bombs. The article did not comment on the statistic or offer a differing view. Yet Dupuy and other military experts say the Israeli airforce, at maximum capacity, could only have dropped one-tenth the number of bombs claimed by the Times. Dupuy details other inaccuracies and states: "I am disgusted by the many false and irresponsible media reports by those who have a moral responsibility to present facts truthfully and objectively."

Were any of these "false and irresponsible reports" the result of intimidation? That question will never be answered. Nor is it possible to tell a threatened journalist what course of action to take Fleeing means giving in to terrorism. Staying means living in constant fear. Yet the press does have the responsibility to report the conditions under which journalists work. Armed with all the facts, a reader may approach a story with a healthy dose of skepticism. But that is better than the outright disbelief that more incidents like the kidnapping cover up would no doubt engender.