A Novel Twist on the Campus Israel Issue

[Ralph]

From The New York Times

July 18, 2005
When Writing an Irate Letter to the Editor Is Just Not Enough
By SARA IVRY

Convention dictates that when newspaper readers question the accuracy of an article, they ask for a correction or write a letter to the editor. But when the conservative pollster and political consultant Frank Luntz had a complaint with The Forward, the venerable New York newspaper of Jewish culture, he took a different approach.

Mr. Luntz became angered after reading a June 24 article about his recent report assessing graduate students' attitudes toward Israel. Mr. Luntz dashed off an incensed e-mail message to J. J. Goldberg, the paper's editor. Rather than ask for a retraction or correction, he pledged to disparage The Forward at meetings of Jewish donors where Mr. Luntz regularly speaks. Maybe, he wrote, "an advertising boycott of The Forward might help the publication refocus on accuracy and get it right in the future."

Mr. Luntz's report said that many students at elite universities, some of whom could become policy makers, are anti-Israel. The article in The Forward contrasted that with findings of undergraduate student groups that sympathies toward Israel had grown stronger in the last two years.

"There is a hostility towards Israel on college campuses that is undeniable everywhere except on the pages of The Forward," Mr. Luntz said. The paper's editors, he added, consistently spin articles "with their own political bias: liberal." Five years ago, The Forward ousted Seth Lipsky, its neoconservative editor, who is now president and editor of The New York Sun.

Mr. Luntz has already begun to criticize the paper's coverage of his report, which was commissioned by the Washington-based Israel Project, at gatherings in the Washington area, and said he had found the reaction to be "overwhelmingly positive." He maintained that he was not actually calling for a boycott, but simply presenting his case to donors.

Though Mr. Goldberg said the potential financial blow would be negligible, he acknowledged the darker threat of an image war. Mr. Luntz has "a big reputation," he said. "These institutions tend to trust Republicans - the sense of faith in Bush and the Republicans to defend Israel in the war against Israel is a real sense. So, I feel somewhat vulnerable."

Mr. Goldberg, asserting that he has defied expectations that his tenure would be liberal and offering the paper's support of a separation fence in Jerusalem as evidence, contested charges that the paper was biased. "The reason we raise hackles is because we don't have a slant. We don't say 'Oh my God, the world is burning down and the Jews are about to die.' It's the opposite of a slant and that's what people hate." SARA IVRY

[pizza]

A tempest in a teapot.

[Ralph]

A tempest in a teapot.

*****

As long as it's Earl Grey.