The Review - Richard Carleton, 60 Minutes and the Middle East

Chutzpah is an apt term in reference to 60 Minutes reporter Richard Carleton. In the absence of a precise translation of that venerable Yiddish word, a cross between "nerve" and "gall" will have to suffice.

That this applies to Mr Carleton will not be news to anyone who follows his reports. His trademark – a braggart, confrontational style of reportage and interviewing – has variously angered and perturbed others. For instance, following a much-criticised trip to East Timor in 1999, both Foreign Affairs Minister, Alexander Downer, and his opposite number, Laurie Brereton, criticised Mr Carleton for stirring up tensions that they said could lead to attacks against Australians.

More recently Mr Carleton has been on the ground in the Middle East, producing a series of reports that have drawn numerous complaints from the Australian Jewish community. It all started in reports aired on 60 Minutes on 15 and 22 October last year, just weeks into the eruption of Palestinian-Israeli violence. The first dealt mostly with the death of Mohammed al-Durra, a 12-year-old Palestinian boy killed at the Netzarim Junction in the Gaza Strip on 30 September during a firefight between Israeli and Palestinian armed units, and other aspects surrounding the outbreak of Israeli-Palestinian violence; the second with the vexed issue of Jerusalem.

In neither of these reports was there a single mainstream Israeli view represented. The only Israeli given airtime in the first report was Eve Harrow, a resident of Efrat representing the Israeli settler movement, decidedly right of centre on the Israeli political spectrum. In the second segment, again, only right of centre settler representatives were interviewed. (There were a few seconds of news footage of Jerusalem mayor Ehud Olmert.) Conversely, in both stories, mainstream or moderate Palestinian spokesmen were given airtime: in the first, lawyer and activist Jonathan Kuttab (about whom Mr Carleton makes such a fuss in the letter below, but we return to that later); in the second Ziad Abu Ziad, an official of the Palestinian Authority.

It bears noting that this was not 60 Minutes first problem of this nature. In 1988, it was criticised for the make-up of a public debate on the Middle East it broadcast, which Mr Carleton chaired. The participants were: Jonathan Kuttab; a Palestinian school teacher who claimed Israeli soldiers had beaten him; a recently discharged Israeli soldier who Mr Carleton said, "shot and killed a 25-year old Palestinian woman"; and Yisrael Medad, representative of the now-defunct far right-wing Tehiya party.

In the 15 October report, Mr Carleton’s investigation of the al-Durra death quickly convicted Israel of both the deed and deliberate malice in its execution. The "overwhelming evidence," averred Mr Carleton, "is that boy was targeted, murdered, by Israeli soldiers."

Mr Carleton’s verdict was made possible by a number of acts and omissions in his report that collectively amount to a violation of standards of both justice and journalism. First, the most minimal right of reply was not conferred on any Israeli official. Second, Mr Carleton formed the judgement solely on the basis of the testimony of the boy’s father and the Palestinian cameraman who filmed the incident. Third, the Israeli account of the events, including aerial photographs bearing out the Israeli claim that the boy’s death, if caused at all by an Israeli bullet, arose out of the cross-fire then in progress, was simply ignored. This evidence was publicly available before Mr Carleton’s report was aired. Moreover, Mr Carleton misrepresented the Israeli account of the boy’s death, alleging that Israel claimed he was shot because he was throwing rocks. Fourth, the nature of Israeli-Palestinian clashes, including those that occurred at Netzarim Junction the day Mohammed al-Durra died, were misrepresented as a case of Israeli guns versus Palestinian stones. Nowhere in the report was there the slightest suggestion that any Palestinian involved in that clash, or indeed any other, had used a gun.

That Palestinian armed groups, including police and other security services, are intimately involved in violence on a daily basis is scarcely debatable, including especially the clash at Netzarim Junction on 30 September. This fact is acknowledged by the Palestinian leadership; for example, in the BBC documentary, ‘When the Peace Died’, (broadcast on SBS TV’s Cutting Edge, 16/1).

Other matters raised in relation to Mr Carleton’s 15 October report included the all-too-common, but unsustainable, judgement that Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount sparked the current violence since it was "a brazenly provocative act".

The Temple Mount, of course, is holy to both Judaism and Islam, and the visit of an Israeli to the site is inherently no more provocative than any other of the thousands of visits that people of all faiths and none undertake every year to the same site. After all, Sharon and other Israeli political leaders have visited the Temple Mount many times before without incident. Moreover, according to official testimony before Parliament by Israel’s then Internal Security Minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami, Palestinian security services were consulted prior to the visit and assured their Israeli counterparts at the time that order would be maintained provided Sharon did not enter the Mosques, which he did not. All this, too, was in the public domain before Mr Carleton’s report was aired.

Additionally, in reporting the Israeli rocket attacks on Palestinian Authority buildings in response to the lynching of the two Israeli reservists in Ramallah while in the custody of Palestinian police, Mr Carleton omitted to mention that Israeli forces purposely and specifically warned of the attacks so the buildings could be evacuated. Mr Carleton’s omission, left viewers with the impression that these controlled Israeli responses were designed to kill Palestinians indiscriminately.

Richard Carleton's letter

In your edition of February you carry a report attacking a perceived editorial bias in the Middle East reporting of CNN. Amongst other examples you cite a CNN report of a "rocket attack on the West Bank town of Ramallah". You go on to report "Well, the ‘rocket attack’ simply did not happen and CNN simply withdrew the story from their website, without apology." Assuming your reporting here is accurate, it is quite intolerable for CNN not to apologise for such a serious error.

Similarly, I suggest, it is intolerable for your own Editorial Chairman, Dr Colin Rubenstein, to adopt those same CNN standards.

In October last year Dr Rubenstein made a grossly defamatory attack on my Middle East reporting. He asserted, inter alia, I had unfairly "set-up" a right wing Israeli settler to debate on 60 Minutes a "well known" (Dr Rubenstein’s words) moderate Palestinian journalist, Doud [sic] Kuttab. In doing so I had left my audience with the intended impression that Palestinians were reasonable and Israelis were unreasonable. This amounts to a charge that I engineered an intentionally distorted picture of a highly charged political issue. In fact, the "well known" Palestinian interviewed on my program whose very presence was the cause of this part of Dr Rubenstein’s complaint was not Doud [sic] Kuttab at all but another "well known" individual altogether. The "well known" Palestinian who did appear (Doud [sic] Kuttab’s brother, Jonathon [sic], a lawyer) was clearly identified and introduced. I can only conclude that Dr Rubenstein either did not see the program about which he complained or, at a minimum, did not listen.

After the exchange of a number of e-mails Dr Rubenstein was able to bring himself and his organisation to "correct our records" - I suggest the equivalent of CNN editing its website.

Like CNN, Dr Rubenstein was unable to bring himself to do the right thing and apologise.

No doubt Dr Rubenstein will now claim that this was but a small error on his part buried in a substantial complaint. I have told Dr Rubenstein I am not prepared to debate his opinions on other substantive matters until such times as he brings himself to apologise for his errors of fact.

Richard Carleton
60 Minutes
22 February 2001

All these matters were raised by AIJAC in a letter to 60 Minutes. In its response, 60 Minutes made almost no effort to address these points and contented itself with a bland assurance that "the program harbours no preconceived bias or opinion on the Middle East crisis." (In their letters segment, the program did very briefly air an Israeli aerial photograph of the incident as part of a letter of complaint by the Israeli Ambassador to Australia.) Following this pro-forma response, AIJAC received a series of private fax and e-mail communications from Richard Carleton, culminating in the letter to the editor opposite, which makes public our private correspondence.

Throughout, Richard Carleton has refused to discuss any of these substantive issues, much less issue a retraction or apology. Instead, he has seized upon a single, substantively unimportant mistake that appeared in AIJAC’s letter and insisted on an apology from us before he would even consent to address the serious issues AIJAC had raised.

The mistake in question was AIJAC’s mis-identification of Jonathan Kuttab, with his brother, Daoud, also a well-known Palestinian media figure. Both are regarded as exponents of moderate Palestinian opinion. No other aspect of AIJAC’s detailed complaint was called into question, but the complaint continues to be ignored by Mr Carleton in toto on the ground that AIJAC itself was in error on this point.

Mr Carleton never explicated clearly what AIJAC’s mistake had been in his intitial contacts with us. AIJAC had no difficulty immediately admitting its mistake in writing to Mr Carleton, and by extension to 60 Minutes, the only recipients of our complaint, once we had actually worked out, in the absence of any straightforward indication from Mr Carleton, what it had been. This proved insufficient for Mr Carleton, however.

In his swaggering letter opposite, dated 22 February, Mr Carleton is pleased to compare AIJAC’s admission of error to the case of CNN having earlier this year reported on an imaginary Israeli rocket attack on Ramallah. CNN never admitted its error; it merely withdrew the story from its web-site without comment or apology for having misled its global audience. This comparison by Mr Carleton is certainly a worthy instalment in the annals of chutzpah. When AIJAC commits a minor error in correspondence (not in its publication) which it then acknowledges to the relevant party, Mr Carleton seeks a public apology before he will even deign to address substantive errors, omissions and biases in his own publicly televised reports. A more cavalier disregard for his own responsibilities to his profession and audience, on a more cynical pretext, would be difficult to imagine.

It remains undeniable that our confusion of the two Kuttabs is totally immaterial to the substance of our complaint. No damage has accrued to Mr Carleton or anyone else as a result of that error, and our original complaint of an imbalance tending to favour one party, the Palestinians, by selecting a hawkish Israeli to offset a dovish Palestinian, as well as on other points, stands.

In the end, the biases and failings of Mr Carleton’s past reportage, though warranting explanation and apology, are less important than improving the objectivity and professionalism of future reports. Accordingly, when Mr Carleton recently requested AIJAC provide him with some contacts within Israel for a new report on the Arab-Israel conflict, we obliged with a variety of political figures, academic experts and leading journalists who might provide balance to Palestinian sources.

It appears not to have helped at all. Mr Carleton’s latest report, "Friday’s War", which screened on 4 March, dealt largely with regular Israel-Palestinian clashes on the outskirts of Ramallah. It failed to include an interview with any of the Israeli figures we provided and showed no sign of having benefited from contact with any of them either.

Mr Carleton commenced with the following masterpiece of pro-Palestinian propaganda:

Scarcely a sentence in this loaded formulation accorded with the facts. Moral equivalence of Israeli reactive measures to violence with premeditated acts of Palestinian terrorism was conveniently slipped in; the origins of the violence – a deliberate post-Camp David Palestinian decision independent of Sharon’s Temple Mount tour – misrepresented and distorted, the blame placed squarely on Israel which, only months previously had gone to unprecedented lengths, in an effort that was not reciprocated, to resolve the conflict.

Proceeding to focus on the Israeli soldiers on the outskirts of Ramallah and a constant theme that Israeli soldiers are deliberately shooting stone-throwing children, Mr Carleton said, "It’s hard to know if the battalion commander, Colonel Wimmer, has his heart in his job. Who would, when the job includes shooting children?" He asked Wimmer, ‘We’re going down to this junction. There’s going to be a riot there, and your soldiers are going to shoot against those children." That Palestinian groups regularly organise riots deliberately using children who should be in school or doing their homework, Mr Carleton was happy to ignore.

It is difficult to believe that in any comparable situation, a reporter would cover a riot in detail without inquiring into how children came to be present in its midst.

The inversion of cause and effect was continuous. Mr Carleton retailed Palestinian assertions that Israeli measures restricting their freedom of movement and ordinary travel were the source of Palestinian anger and violence. Why such Israeli restrictions were not in place until widespread gun battles, bombings and rioting commenced last September was never explained. Instead, Israel was simply and, wilfully it would seem, imprisoning the Palestinian population. "The entrances and exits of virtually all Palestinian towns are controlled by Israeli troops. Sometimes as a security measure, sometimes to punish the Palestinians, the Israelis choose to lock off the entrances and create what amount to jails for all Palestinians." And again, "Locking down Palestinian villages serves to inflame the Palestinian passions and it’s that very policy that is part of the cause of events like today’s." To Colonel Wimmer, "You’ve got them locked down like animals in a cage in there."

These instances were compounded with serious historical errors that could only be the product of ignorance or distortion. Mr Carleton stated, "Israel captured this territory in 1967, and in outright defiance of the United Nations has occupied it ever since. Over the last 30 years, they’ve built over 100 settlements here, that are considered both illegal and provocative."

Qualified international lawyers could have put Mr Carleton right here. Israel was a lawful occupier of the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 war, having taken these territories in a war of self-defence after Egypt had imposed a blockade on her shipping and concentrated armed forces in Sinai. These territories were additionally taken from illegal occupiers, neither Egypt nor Jordan having lawful title to Gaza and the West Bank respectively.

These facts, like so much else that has been remarked upon, are easily accessible to those who care to know. There is no "outright defiance" of the UN, international law or indeed, of anything other than the biases of Mr Carleton. UNSC Resolution 242, the relevant document, calls for Israeli withdrawal to secure and recognised borders by negotiation, which had in fact been occurring for seven years until Yasser Arafat sank the Camp David Summit and reverted to violence.

On settlements, Mr Carleton barely canvassed the issue beyond asserting their alleged illegality. There is no doubting that Israeli settlement in the territories is controversial. There are those who assert it is illegal, although, like Mr Carleton, they rarely bother to indicate how this might be the case. In any event, most settlements would have disappeared under Israel’s Camp David peace offer. But as that peace offer never existed in the Orwellian world of Mr Carleton’s report, he contented himself with a mathematical formulation: "4% of Israelis live in these settlements and they are 90% of the problem." To different settlers he said, "But this is not even part of Israel" and "Look this is not your land, it’s not even your country." Jewish attachment to the land was dismissed with sarcasm. "For settlers like school teacher Boaz Columbus, the Bible teaches he had an ancestor here more than 2000 years ago, hence he’s entitled to settle here today."

Mr Carleton’s coda was an ignorant and egotistical tour de force, the whole world being called in to endorse his own untreated views. "Bullets should beat stones any day, but Israel is losing this war because it is losing the respect of the rest of the world. A way out is to give the Palestinians a homeland, a homeland being what the Jews themselves were denied for centuries." Pity he never once mentioned that Israel had offered Arafat just that the previous July: a state and the vast majority of the territories, with a capital in Jerusalem.

In response to these detailed objections to Mr Carleton’s reportage, 60 Minutes now insists that we cannot know any of this for certain. Suddenly the detailed record of recent political events cannot be analysed, says 60 Minutes executive producer, John Westacott, in a letter of 22 March. "I know acres of newsprint have been expended airing the interpretations of what was offered and what was rejected, but this is simply interpretation. In political debates of this kind it suits both sides to paint the other as rejecting reasonable offers which in fact may or may not have been offered or may have been offered conditionally." Westacott invokes a standard journalistic deflection in defence of professional sloppiness and selectivity that seeks to expel the relevant omissions to the realm of metaphysical speculation.

If only Mr Carleton could recall Camp David from the memory hole, viewers might have been able to form their own judgement on the merits of Israel’s offer. In his universe (and apparently that of 60 Minutes), such an option is clearly unnecessary. It is enough for the fearless reporter to tell them what he thinks they need to know and treat as irrelevant anything that contradicts his own view.

But journalists, particularly those keen to call others to account, need in turn to display accountability. It is woefully inadequate of Mr Westacott to airily dismiss detailed complaints going to errors of fact and bias in presentation with a catch-all assertion that there are "many interpretations of possible cause and effect". Of course there are, but that does not give journalists licence to assert their own preferred interpretation as unequivocally true and present only those facts which accord with it. Moreover, errors of fact have little to do with the range of possible opinions about them. Either Israel offered the Palestinians a state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, coupled with an international settlement of the Palestinian refugee problem, or it did not. That it did so is incontestable and candid Palestinian spokespersons will admit as much. No one can insist that their own views must prevail, but everyone has the right to insist that the known, ascertainable facts are accorded the courtesy of record in a program purporting to examine in detail what is happening and how it came to pass.

It remains for Mr Carleton and 60 Minutes to answer our criticism rather than treating their viewers with contempt. Perhaps Mr Carleton can deal satisfactorily with each and every objection we lodged. But until he makes a serious attempt, we are unlikely to know.