Bronner's son sets off ethical Times bomb
Clark Hoyt's New York Times public editor column on Sunday suggested the paper should take its Middle East correspondent Ethan Bronner off the beat because Bronner's son has enlisted to serve in the Israeli army.
The Times sent a reporter overseas to provide disinterested coverage of one of the world’s most intense and potentially explosive conflicts, and now his son has taken up arms for one side. Even the most sympathetic reader could reasonably wonder how that would affect the father, especially if shooting broke out.
I have enormous respect for Bronner and his work, and he has done nothing wrong. But this is not about punishment; it is simply a difficult reality. I would find a plum assignment for him somewhere else...
Times editor Bill Keller responded directly on Hoyt's blog:
You seem to think that you (and Alex Jones) can tell the difference between reality and appearances, but our readers can’t. I disagree...
You seem to see this as a binary choice: either we ignore the situation, because we trust the reporter, or we remove him from the assignment, because it might cast doubt on the paper’s credibility. But our rules -- and real life -- are more complicated.
Every reporter brings to the story a life -- a history, relationships, ideas, beliefs. And the first essential discipline of journalism is to set those aside, as a judge or a scientist or a teacher is expected to do, and to follow the facts...
If we send a Jewish correspondent to Jerusalem, the zealots on one side will accuse him of being a Zionist and on the other side of being a self-loathing Jew, and then they will parse every word he writes to find the phrase that confirms what they already believe while overlooking all evidence to the contrary. So to prevent any appearance of bias, would you say we should not send Jewish reporters to Israel? If so, what about assigning Jewish reporters to countries hostile to Israel? What about reporters married to Jews? Married to Israelis? Married to Arabs? Married to evangelical Christians? (They also have some strong views on the Holy Land.) What about reporters who have close friends in Israel? Ethical judgments that start from prejudice lead pretty quickly to absurdity, and pandering to zealots means cheating readers who genuinely seek to be informed.
Two of the Atlantic's star bloggers also came to Bronner's defense. Jeffrey Goldberg wrote:
the assumption is that Bronner...will somehow be a proponent of Israel's military now that his son has enlisted. In fact, the opposite could be true: Wouldn't it be in Bronner's best interest to write critically of offensive Israeli military operations, in order to influence events in such a way as to keep his son out of harm's way? Two, and this is a somewhat obvious point except to propagandists, reporters are capable of actually separating out their personal interests from their coverage.
Andrew Sullivan agreed, but took Keller to task for lack of disclosure:
The test of a journalist is his work. I haven't detected a shred of bias in Bronner's pieces from the NYT on Israel and the Middle East, even though his son is now in the IDF. I agree with Goldblog on this for the most part. I do believe, however, that it should have been clearly disclosed without pressure from the outside forcing the NYT into a disclosure that clearly would not have happened without a public editor. Keeping such a potential conflict of interest under wraps - even as questions of war crimes are being debated in a military in which Bronner's son is now fighting - was a clear lapse of ethical judgment on Bill Keller's part, not Bronner's, who rightly informed his editors.
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