Weiss on Jews in the print media

While reading comments on a blog, I came across a reference to a post that Phil Weiss made on his blog Mondoweiss (a must read blog) back in 2008 about Jews in the positions of influence in the media. The whole thing is worth reading but here are some excerpts...

I’ve worked in print journalism for more than 30 years...in my experience, Jews have made up the majority of the important positions in the publications I worked for, a majority of the writers I’ve known at these places, and the majority of the owners who have paid me...I think it shows that Jews make up a significant proportion of power positions in media, half, if not more. 

In New York, I have worked for a dozen magazines. Most of my editors have been Jewish. Both my book publishers were Jewish. At one point at one publishing house, the editor, his boss, and her boss were all Jewish, and so was the lawyer vetting the work—I remember her saying she would never travel to Malaysia because of the anti-Semitic Prime minister. Oh--and the assistant editor was half-Jewish.

As former CNN correspondent Linda Scherzer has said, "We, as Jews, must understand that we come with a certain bias ...We believe in the Israeli narrative of history.

The result is that Americans are not getting the full story re Israel/Palestine. Slater says this dramatically in his paper--that the Times has deprived American leadership of reporting on the moral/political crisis that Israel is undergoing, one that Haaretz has covered unstintingly...Ilan Pappe has marveled in his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, that the Nakba is all but unmentioned in the U.S.--while Haaretz has sought at times to document it, for instance a former officer saying in 2004 that if he had not helped to destroy 200 villages in southern Israel in '48, there would be another million Palestinians in Israel. To repeat Scherzer's admission: "We believe in the Israeli narrative of history..." 

As I mention in my video, Twin Tragedies, there are Jews in every aspect of American life because they have been successful and are fully integrated into American society. As Weiss says, Jews have their own prejudices as do all of us, but when those prejudices are in position to block what others see, read and hear it has a highly distorting effect on American opinion.