OK, I haven’t been reading the New York Times every day, but when I have read it during the past week or so, I saw coverage whose main thrust was that Israel was attacking Gaza.

I saw a big, colorful front-page photo of Palestinians running from an Israeli missile clearly visible in the sky. A day or two later, I saw another big front-page photo, this one of a Hamas building reportedly blown to bits by the Israelis. The second photo’s caption referred to the reader to an article, not about Sderot, but about an Israeli crackdown in the West Bank in which 33 Palestinians were seized.

You’d think that the Palestinians were doing very little against the Israelis, whereas the Israelis were running hog-wild.

Although The NY Times does refer to attacks on Israel by Hamas, it does so only in passing, and you never get a sense of the rain of missiles on Sderot and the damage it has caused. You never get the sense that it’s the Israelis responding to Hamas aggression, rather than the other way around.

My impression is that the reporting is mainly done from Gaza, with little or nothing from Sderot. Why not have big photos from both places? I think one problem is that, with no Western reporters daring to go into Gaza these days, the major news organizations rely on local Palestinian reporters. But that shouldn’t stop the Times from also hiring stringers on the Israeli side.

Actually, many Western news organizations rely on Palestinian reporters even in the best of times, a practice I cannot fathom. But now the dependence on Arab reporters in Gaze is probably total.

It’s very strange to first look at videos of the damage in Sderot and then see the New York Times. It’s like looking at two alternative universes.

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Thanks,
David