RUTHFULLY YOURS

Imagine a major story in one of America’s top newspapers on an island in San Francisco Bay named Alcatraz.

Now imagine that this story omits mentioning a prison.

What could conceivably account for such an “oversight?” Might the writer have an agenda? Might a “full-disclosure” of the writers’ background and family connections reveal such an agenda?

For tens of thousands of Americans an equivalent story was published in the Washington Post last week by its chief Latin American reporter Nick Miroff. The “in-depth” article featured an islet of the southwestern coast of Cuba called the Isle of Pines, which hosted the biggest prison/torture and forced-labor complex for political prisoners in the history of the Western Hemisphere.

Tens of thousands of American citizens of Cuban heritage had family members tortured there by Castro’s Stalinist regime. Some had their family members murdered there. Dozens of the surviving torture victims are U.S. citizens and live in the U.S. today. These heroes qualify as the longest-suffering political prisoners in modern history, having suffered prison camps, forced labor and torture chambers for a period three times as long in Castro’s Gulag as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin’s (8 years). Several of these prisoners are black Cubans who suffered longer in Castro’s prisons than Nelson Mandela spent in South Africa’s (27 years).

“If There is a Third Intifada, We Want to Be the Ones Who Started It”

—New York Times Magazine Cover Story (Illustrated), March 17, 2013

“The most ghastly incident was at Hebron. There was a Jewish population there of over 700 people, an ancient community centred on a Talmudical college. Armed bands intent on slaughter reached Hebron on the 24th [August 1929]. The police were Arab and they stood passively by while their fellow Moslems moved into the town and to deeds which would have been revolting among animals. There was an inn…where some Jews had fled for safety. The Arabs killed and dismembered 23 of them with daggers and axes in an upper room, so that, according to a witness, blood ran down the stairs and soaked through the ceiling… This was not half of the crime…” (Christopher Sykes, Cross Roads to Israel: Palestine from Balfour to Bevin [Collins, 1965], pp. 118-19.)

Combine every speech about the nobility of the journalistic endeavor in every film glorifying reporters intrepidly searching out truth, and you still won’t come close to grasping the level of treacle—there are other words—bubbling up out of “Truth.” Compared with which, “All the President’s Men” (1976)—about the triumphant adventures of Woodward and Bernstein, with Robert Redford portraying Bob Woodward—was a veritable model of shrinking modesty.

Mr. Redford has come a long way since to his latest, namely the role of CBS’s Dan Rather, former network star and anchor of “60 Minutes II,” and the story of how Mr. Rather was ultimately forced out of the company thanks to the scandal in September 2004 after the airing of a segment called “For the Record.”

The creative minds behind “Truth”—based on a book by the CBS report’s producer, Mary Mapes—have wrapped Mr. Rather and Ms. Mapes in a glow of heroic martyrdom so impenetrable there’s hardly a line not put to its service. When, toward the end, all involved in the report face firing, the film’s fatherly Dan Rather asks a young producer what made him want to go into journalism.

Former CBS Evening News Anchor Dan Rather said 60 Minutes “got to the truth” in 2004 but paid a “painful price” for the story on former President George W. Bush’s National Guard service that aired before the 2004 presidential election.

Aside from the authenticity of the memos, Rather said the “basic story” remains true today.

“One, did former President Bush when in his troubled youth, did he use his father’s influence to get into the Air National Guard as a way of avoiding Vietnam? That’s a fact. Fact two: Once he got in the Air National Guard after performing well, in some ways, very well, disappeared for a year, nobody disappeared for a year, now those are facts,” Rather said at the Washington premiere of Truth, a film based on a book written about the controversial 60 Minutes segment that aired in 2004.

“Everybody is entitled to their opinion but they aren’t entitled to their own facts. The reason this film is called Truth is we got to the truth but we paid a painful price for it,” he added.

The broadcast included documents that were not authenticated by forensic experts, which ultimately led to the dismissal of the staff that worked on the story as well as the firing of producer Mary Mapes. The fallout is referred to as the “Killian documents controversy” – after Lieutenant Colonel Killian, Bush’s superior in the National Guard, whose name appears on the documents.

On Sunday, October 11, the Los Angeles Times ran the headline “6 Palestinian Teens Die Amid Mideast Unrest.” It was, technically, true. But it left out a few key details.

Try the opening sentence, instead: “Two Palestinian teenagers were shot to death Saturday in Jerusalem, officials said, after they carried out separate stabbing attacks on an ultra-Orthodox Jew and two Israeli police officers.” Among Palestinians, stabbing Israelis is in vogue at present — as are shooting them, ramming them with vehicles, and bludgeoning them with meat cleavers, all of which have also taken place in the “unrest” of the past few weeks. Seven Israelis have been killed and dozens wounded in attacks since Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year celebration, ended on September 15. The purported reason for the renewed violence is the rumor, despite Benjamin Netanyahu’s assurances to the contrary, that the Israeli government plans to reopen the Temple Mount to Jews. But the rash of violence is better explained by a century-long virus of hatred.

Western media outlets, as this latest flare-up reminds us, suffer their own mild case of this virus, manifested in their headlines. NBC News recently published a story entitled, “Dispute Over Viral Video of Shot Ahmed Manasrah Sums Up Israel-Palestinian Conflict.” What it summarizes is nothing; what it omits — that the wounded 13-year-old Palestinian and his 15-year-old cousin were shot after stabbing and seriously wounding two Israelis — is quite a bit. At the New York Times, there was, “Israeli Police Officers Kill Two Palestinian Men.” (Guess why). On its website, CNN blared, “Palestinian Youth: ‘Now We’ll Fight,’” with the subtitle, “Israeli-Palestinian Tensions Escalate with Four Violent Attacks.” Yahoo News got in on the action with, “Israeli Police Shoot Dead Palestinian at Entrance to Jerusalem’s Walled Old City,” which is both biased and grammatically ambiguous. And while no one expects Al Jazeera to be fair and balanced on this subject, its Twitter tease for a (less egregious) article on a stabbing that killed two Israelis in early October was nothing short of extraordinary: “Palestinian Shot Dead after Fatal Stabbing in Jerusalem; 2 Israeli Victims Also Killed.”