A Shtetl Too Far

The NBA Western Conference Finals is a gem, a matchup between the defending champ and the sport’s best team the past two seasons versus a young, promising group surrounding a singular talent. The Oklahoma City Thunder are a deep and versatile and tenacious bunch led by two-time MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and positioned for several years of excellence thanks to canny player acquisition and a well-run organization. The San Antonio Spurs leaped into the league’s upper tier this season behind the continued rise of Victor Wembenyama, an alien placed here to demonstrate human limitations (personally, I’m willing to give our new galactic overlords a chance at Earth stewardship, though I understand anyone’s desire to ride out the string under the current species – devil you know versus devil you don’t, and all that). 

Wembenyama’s length and athletic gifts make him appear elastic at times. He’s capable of turning a basketball court into a kind of funhouse mirror, the way he distorts and occupies space and forces opponents to adjust like no one else. That he is far from a finished product and still developing is either thrilling or terrifying, depending on your vantage. 

Speaking of distortion, in the runup to this matchup, the Oklahoma City newspaper, the Oklahoman, ran a column the day the series opened that rests somewhere between provocative and WTF?!? The headline provides a fitting, if jarring, launch: “Like Thunder, Israel is an underdog that has become hated.” The premise is that success can breed outsized contempt by opponents and critics, particularly when the successful entity – be it an athletic team or a country – is outside the mainstream or a glamour setting. “As both a fiercely proud Oklahoman and a Jew, the parallels between the Thunder and the nation of Israel are difficult to ignore. Neither was supposed to become what it is,” the author wrote. “Oklahoma City remains one of the NBA’s smallest markets. We lack the glamour of Los Angeles, the nightlife and beaches of Miami, Florida, or the finance and media power of New York City. Yet we built something remarkable anyway. Rather than buying relevance, we created it. Rather than following others, we reimagined our own path to success by relying on the resources and skills we had with discipline and our own brand of resilience. Israel’s story shares many of those attributes — a young, microscopic nation limited in natural resources, surrounded by hostility, perpetually under scrutiny, and constantly forced to justify its actions and existence. Israel nonetheless transformed itself into a global powerhouse of innovation, technology, defense, medicine and agriculture. Like the Thunder and even Oklahoma City, it has risen out of the ashes of a traumatic past despite all odds.” 

People love underdog stories, said the writer, but when underdogs consistently triumph that appreciation "mutates into skepticism and distrust. ... The Thunder are not hated because they somehow gamed the system. They are hated because they mastered it. Israel is not obsessively scrutinized because it failed, but due to its success despite deeply-rooted envy and darker historical motives." Hoo buddy, much to unpack. 

Nowhere in the column does the writer mention that the Thunder’s “traumatic past” included OKC businessman Clay Bennett shortly after purchasing the franchise moving it from Seattle to Oklahoma City after failing to extort $500 million from the state of Washington for a new arena complex. Nor does he mention that just a decade ago the Thunder had a nucleus of Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and 6-11 Serge Ibaka and was oh-so-close to a title. Nor does he mention that plucky underdog Israel and its admittedly kick-ass military have been bankrolled and backstopped by the U.S., or that systematically squeezing the Palestinian people and targeting opponents across borders might prompt some justified scrutiny and criticism. 

To be fair, the Oklahoman piece wasn’t by a staff writer, but a guest column by an Oklahoma native businessman who transplanted to Chicago. You might think that a piece submitted by an outside source would come under greater examination than from a staff writer. One frequent casualty of the corporate strip-mining of newspapers, however, is editorial oversight. Fewer people to raise red flags or put the brakes on flawed writing. The Oklahoman did pull the piece later that day amid questions and backlash. Still, never should have run in the first place. Equating a basketball franchise's place in the sporting zeitgeist to a nation whose history and actions significantly impact the geopolitical sphere is a reach that even Wembenyama can’t match.

All The News That Fits ...

Manufacturers routinely subject their products to stress tests, a wise and necessary practice that allows for improvement and reduces the chance of human suffering and litigation. Other outfits have stress tests thrust upon them while in motion. Their ability to cope and adjust on the fly determine their value. News organizations belong to the latter group. 

Each day brings new challenges, and it’s up to the group to figure out the best way to gather and distribute information within the landscape. Sometimes results are deft and seamless, other times leaks and cracks and breakdowns are apparent. Or, as the philosopher Sam Elliott said in “The Big Lebowski,” “Sometimes you eat the b’ar, sometimes the b’ar eats you.” 

As an old newspaper guy and the site’s media grump, I’m often as curious about *how* stuff is covered as *what’s* covered. Which brings us to a couple of areas that caught my attention. One is the war in Gaza, or more specifically, coverage of the war in Gaza by several major news outlets. The other is who gathers and presents the news, and the filters through which they sift coverage, in this case at National Public Radio. 

First, you can go to a hundred places for news about Israel and Gaza and its effects on Israelis and Palestinians. I have no additional sources or insight. But I was struck by a couple of pieces illustrating that large, smart, capable news organizations are twisting themselves into crullers simply attempting to tell people what the hell is going on. The news site The Intercept was given an internal memo from New York Times editors instructing reporters about what language and terms they should and should not use in describing the conflict. Avoid terms such as “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing,” as well as “slaughter” and “massacre.” Don’t refer to areas of displaced Palestinians as “refugee camps” or Gaza as “occupied territory.” The words “terrorist” and “terrorism” are acceptable when referring to the original Hamas attack on Oct. 7, but not when Israeli soldiers or citizens target or kill Palestinian civilians. 

NYT editors say the aim is to avoid loaded words and terms that convey more emotion than fact, and to simply use precise descriptions. However, a NYT newsroom source told The Intercept: “I think it’s the kind of thing that looks professional and logical if you have no knowledge of the historical context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But if you do know, it will be clear how apologetic it is to Israel.” 

A handful of NYT newsroom sources claim that the paper is being deferential to Israel and Israeli military sources for details of actions and civilian deaths. Meanwhile, NPR’s public editor wrote a recent piece saying that the most frequent criticism received is that its coverage highlights the suffering of Palestinians and downplays the pain and grief experienced by Israelis. That NPR doesn’t emphasize enough that Hamas sparked the present conflict with its initial attack or camouflage itself by blending in with the general population. Nor does it provide Israeli voices and context within stories about what are described as Palestinian civilian deaths and casualties, raids on hospitals and communities, etc. 

The public editor’s response was, essentially: We’re doing the best we can; not enough hours in a day or time in our broadcasts to mention everything. Unspoken was: And no matter how much we do, some of you *still* will bitch because we aren’t tailoring coverage or using language *you* want. 

NPR’s supposed Palestinian bias was also cited by a former editor. Uri Berliner was a senior business editor who recently resigned after 25 years, saying that he “cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR” he outlined in a recent online essay. Berliner wrote at length for a piece on the site Free Press that NPR’s news side has morphed from an obligation to straightforward journalism, albeit with a liberal slant, to full-on, left-leaning advocacy that attempts to tell listeners what to think. 

Despite a commitment to a more diverse newsroom, he wrote that the “most damaging development” was an absence of viewpoint diversity: no conservative voices, no one to challenge when more rigorous standards of reporting or journalism are ignored. He pointed out that several years ago, NPR’s Washington D.C., office where he worked had 87 registered Democrats and zero Republicans, a ratio that was met with staggering indifference when he brought it up to superiors. Listenership is down, he wrote, and the audience has narrowed. 

In 2011, twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle-of-the-road, 37 percent as liberal. In 2023, eleven percent said they were conservative, 21 percent middle-of-the-road, 67 percent liberal. On the journalism end, Berliner wrote that the office went all-in on Trump-Russia collusion in the 2016 presidential campaign before anything was proven, barely bothered to investigate the possibility of a Chinese lab leak as the origin of the COVID-19 virus despite credible questions that persist to this day, and dismissed the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 out-of-hand before any real reporting as a potential distraction for the task of ousting Trump. After George Floyd was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis, rather than explore the impacts of racism through reporting, he wrote that management accepted systemic racism in the nation as a given and charged staff with acknowledging and helping to dismantle white privilege. [Note from the tiny dictator: For what it's worth, the WaPo's Erik Hemple dug into Berliner's claims and found many of them wanting for evidence, which doesn't besmirch the media grump's broader point.]

These are tough times for the news business. As news sources dwindle in an increasingly polarized society, there’s no guarantee that if NPR reported straight down the middle and had more conservative voices that it would attract listeners and have a better balanced audience, that if New York Times reporters didn’t have to check every other sentence through a wartime sensitivity glossary that it would present a fair accounting in a combat zone. But dear lord, people, don’t overthink it. Report and write and speak and present the way you were taught. Follow common sense and your gut. Don’t erect more obstacles than are already in place. The b’ar needs no help.