From an early age I had a thing about newspapers. I began reading the New York Times every morning before I was ten, and the New York Post was obligatory after-school reading. I always started with the sports section and then moved on to other parts of the paper.

I marveled at how newspapers could be put together overnight. I was fascinated by the window on the world provided by newspapers. I even enjoyed leafing through the Russian and Yiddish newspapers delivered daily to my grandparents in the apartment next door, though I could make little sense of the unfamiliar scripts.

Living in Munich during the seventh grade, I discovered the International Herald Tribune. It had two big advantages over its New York Times co-owner (with the Washington Post)-cartoons and Art Buchwald's column.

By high school I added to my reading list Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, and the New Republic, plus, as a debater, I needed to consult a wide range of newspapers and magazines to research the annual topics of the National Forensic League and to prepare for Model UNs and Student Congresses.

To this day, I continue to have a fascination with newspapers-the real thing, not the Web site version. In fact, one of the great joys of my sabbatical year in Geneva (2000-01) was the morning ritual of going to our neighborhood kiosk and buying La Tribune de Genève, the local paper, Le Figaro, the right-of-center French daily, and La Repubblica, the left-of-center Italian daily. Taking these along with the International Herald Tribune, which was delivered to my home each morning, I would park myself on our balcony, weather permitting, and explore the world.

While always a newspaper and, more broadly, a news junkie, one thing changed for me over the years: Whereas I believed every word of what I read as a child, I gradually came to understand, long before the shenanigans of Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, and Jack Kelley, that newspapers, even in democratic societies, need to be read with a degree of critical sense rather than the naive leap of faith I had once made.

For quite some time, influenced no doubt by the fact that my mother and her family had fled the USSR, I had simplistically assumed that because newspapers in communist countries, as instruments of the state, made an art form out of distortion and deceit-there's no pravda ("truth") in Izvestiya ("news"), and no izvestiya in Pravda, the old Soviet joke went-the polar opposite was surely the case where freedom of the press reigned.

Moreover, it wasn't until I had developed personal knowledge about an issue or familiarity with a particular story that I could begin to separate fact from fiction and notice errors of omission or commission.

But I also discovered that it could be quite difficult to address these issues with the journalists concerned or their editors, and therefore battles had to be chosen very carefully. While some journalists were open, others were remarkably thin-skinned. I remember a syndicated column by Jack Anderson in the early 1980s that dealt with the plight of Jews in the USSR. Those of us in the Soviet Jewry movement always welcomed attention to the issue, but I found myself totally misquoted. I picked up the phone and called Anderson's assistant, complimenting the overall column and then pointing out what I thought might simply have been a transcription error. To make a long story short, I was told more than once that my call was presumptuous and that I wouldn't be interviewed for other stories because I was a "troublemaker." In fact, I was never again called.

In words attributed to Mark Twain, one should "never pick a fight with a person who buys ink by the barrel."

During the Palestinian intifada that began in 1987, I was struck by what seemed, in too many outlets, the simplistic urge to juxtapose a heavy-handed Israeli military battling freedom-seeking Palestinian youngsters. An example: An experienced Washington Post journalist called and said she had been asked by her editors to do a story on the local Jewish reaction to the uprising. I invited her to join me for an American Jewish Committee meeting in suburban Washington that was to focus on that very issue.

In my opening remarks, I said that Israel needed to defend itself against the violence that had broken out, which was no easy thing since Palestinian children were being deliberately placed in the front lines. At the same time, I added, I was pained by reports of possible Israeli military excesses and loss of innocent life. The next day, the paper carried on its front page a story that led with only the second half of what I said, completely ignoring the balanced context, and thereby suggesting that I had been unabashedly critical of Israel. I was astonished by the misrepresentation, particularly in such a respected paper.

Shortly afterwards, I had the eye-opening experience of reading Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust 1933-1945 by Deborah Lipstadt, an assistant professor of Jewish history at UCLA at the time. It's a book well worth reading. Let me quote a brief excerpt:

Many years ago Alexis de Tocqueville praised the press in large and populous nations such as America for its ability to unite people who share certain beliefs about an issue but, because they feel "insignificant and lost amid the crowd," cannot act alone. According to Tocqueville the press fulfills its highest purpose when it serves as a "beacon" to bring together people who otherwise might ineffectively seek each other "in darkness."... There is no way of knowing whether the American people would have ever been aroused enough to demand action to rescue Jews. But we can categorically state that most of the press refused to light its "beacon," making it virtually certain that there would be no public outcry and no "common activity" to try to succor this suffering people.

A subsequent book, Why Didn't the Press Shout? American and International Journalism During the Holocaust, edited by Robert Moses Shapiro, sheds additional light on the role of the media.

Max Frankel, the former managing editor of the New York Times, writing of the paper's coverage of the Shoah, said in his contribution to the volume: "No single explanation seems to suffice for what was surely the century's bitterest journalistic failure." He adds: "Only six times in nearly six years did the Times's front page mention Jews as Hitler's unique target for total annihilation. Only once was their fate the subject of a lead editorial. Only twice did their rescue inspire passionate cries in the Sunday magazine."

Among the reasons he cites for this state of affairs: "[P]apers owned by Jewish families, like the Times, were plainly afraid to have a society that was still widely anti-Semitic misread their passionate opposition to Hitler as a merely parochial cause." Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the paper's publisher, "went to great lengths to avoid having the Times branded a 'Jewish newspaper.' He resented other publications for emphasizing the Jewishness of people in the news."

Laurel Leff, an assistant professor in the School of Journalism at Northeastern University, went into further detail in her powerful essay, "The Holocaust in the New York Times," in the same book:

A newspaper can clearly demonstrate the significance it attaches to a news story. It can make the event the lead, day after day, and key several inside stories off it; it can run editorials and magazine pieces that reveal and reinforce the paper's judgment about its importance; it can highlight the story in weekly and yearly summaries of top news events. The Times never did this with the extermination of the Jews....

You could have read the front page of the New York Times in 1939 and 1940 without knowing that millions of Jews were being sent to Poland, imprisoned in ghettos, and dying of disease and starvation by the tens of thousands. You could have read the front page in 1941 without knowing that the Nazis were machine-gunning hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Soviet Union. You could have read the front page in 1942 and not have known, until the last month, that the Germans were carrying out a plan to annihilate European Jewry. In 1943, you would have been told once that Jews from France, Belgium, and the Netherlands were being sent to slaughterhouses in Poland and that more than half of the Jews of Europe were dead, but only in the context of a single story on a rally by Jewish groups that devoted more space to who had spoken than to who had died. In 1944, you would have learned from the front page of the existence of horrible places such as Maidanek and Auschwitz, but only inside the paper could you find that the victims were Jews. In 1945, Dachau and Buchenwald were on the front page, but the Jews were buried inside.

These studies provide a useful backdrop not only for understanding historical events, but also for grasping the media's unrivaled power to affect public opinion and, ultimately perhaps, the direction of policy formulation.

This brings us to the last three-and-a-half years of press coverage of events in the Middle East. During this period I've kept a file of some of the troubling reporting that has caught my eye. It's by no means systematic or comprehensive, nor is it meant-not at all-to suggest that all reporting by the outlets mentioned is somehow flawed or biased. I'm not a professional media basher. Covering the complex Middle East isn't an easy assignment, even for the most experienced journalists, and those of us caught up in the events may not always be the most dispassionate readers. Still, I've read enough problematic reporting in some papers, not to mention what we might see on television or hear on the radio, to prompt this letter.

Sometimes it's what's missing.

While the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is almost microscopically covered and, as an open society, Israel is inundated with more foreign correspondents per square foot than any other nation on earth, some stories taking place elsewhere are almost totally-and inexplicably-missing from the press.

Take Sudan. This past Saturday, the New York Times (NYT) carried an Associated Press (AP) brief on p. A5 quoting a senior UN official: "In my view, this is the world's greatest humanitarian crisis and possibly the world's greatest humanitarian catastrophe. There has been systematic burning of villages [by Arab militia] and displacement of the population." In fact, over the past decade, an estimated two million Sudanese have been killed in a war that casts Arab and Muslim forces against African Christians and Animists. Why has this story been largely missing from our newspapers, and when it appears, merits only a paragraph at the bottom of page five? Will a future Deborah Lipstadt one day write a book examining the media's relative silence in the face of such an immense tragedy?

Sometimes it's the use of words.

Reuters announced shortly after 9/11 that it would not use the word "terrorist." Stephen Jukes, global head of news, explained: "We all know that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.... To be frank, it adds little to call the attack on the World Trade Center a terrorist attack." And if not a terrorist attack, i.e., the deliberate and, in this case, massive targeting of innocent men, women, and children, what exactly was it?

Most often, we are faced with such sanitized or ambiguous words as "activist" to describe those bent on doing harm-"'No comfort and no relief until revenge is taken,' one [Palestinian] activist cried through a loudspeaker. 'The Jerusalem Brigades are coming, all ready to blow themselves up and avenge the blood of martyrs'" (NYT, September 21, 2001). But "activists" can just as easily refer to those Democrats and Republicans trying to get their candidate elected and who would be revolted by any association with suicide bombings or vengeance.

Or "militant." On November 6, 2003, the Times referred to "militants representing a wide range of causes" gathering in London to protest President George W. Bush's visit. But three days earlier, the same paper announced that "Saudi Arabia has started a crackdown on militants loyal to Osama bin Laden." Has the word "militant" become a one-size-fits-all term to be used for anyone from a peaceful demonstrator to a supporter of the mastermind of 9/11?

Sometimes it's the unspoken.

Remember the lynching of the two Israeli soldiers in Ramallah in 2000? Those camera crews that tried to tape the scene were either stopped or their tapes were confiscated by Palestinians. An Italian private television station was able to smuggle out its tape, which was later broadcast worldwide. Fearing that RAI, the Italian public station, would be blamed, Riccardo Cristiano, the local correspondent, sent a letter to the Palestinian Authority, later printed in a Gaza newspaper: "We respect the work arrangements between journalists and the Palestinian Authority.... Rest assured that this [broadcast of the lynching] is not our way, and we would never do such a thing."

Nearly a year later, the AP wire service protested to the Palestinian Authority about threats against a freelance cameraman who filmed Palestinians celebrating, pace Reuters, terrorist attacks in the U.S. "The videographer, on assignment for AP Television News, was summoned to a Palestinian Authority security office," AP reported, "and told that the material must not be aired. Calls in the name of the Tanzim militia, an armed group associated with Yasser Arafat's Fatah group, warned him he would be held responsible and made what he interpreted as threats on his life" (September 12, 2001). To date, AP has still not released the tape.

And ten days later, Stephen Jukes of Reuters noted: "We don't want to jeopardize the safety of our staff. Our people are on the front lines, in Gaza, the West Bank and Afghanistan. The minute we seem to be siding with one side or another, they're in danger."

How much attention has the media paid to a self-examination of the issues raised by these three revealing episodes? Are audiences being told that some stories in the Palestinian territories may not be pursued because of "work arrangements," or that threats to journalists may lead to suppression of stories or self-censorship? The answers, I believe, are quite obvious.

Sometimes it's the mainstreaming of fringe individuals.

On February 23, 2004, the day the International Court of Justice (ICJ) was to open its hearing in The Hague on Israel's security barrier, the Times gave its lead space on the prestigious op-ed page to none other than Noam Chomsky. It would be as if Charlton Heston were the only person asked to comment on gun control legislation. Chomsky is a fierce critic of Israel, so much so that he has called for a binational state in its stead. His paper trail on Israel is a long one and very much out in the open. Why would the nation's most highly regarded paper give Chomsky, of all people, the opportunity to offer his views on the hearing?

Two days later, the same page offered two op-eds with contrasting-and responsible-views on President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's future in Haiti. Why didn't the paper follow the same format and invite two differing viewpoints from "mainstream" sources to debate the issues before the ICJ?

To make matters still worse, on the same day the International Herald Tribune (IHT), now wholly owned by the Times, gave its lead op-ed space to Palestinian spokesman Saeb Erekat to discuss the ICJ case, without providing for an opposing Israeli position. And the next day, adding oil to the fire, the IHT reprinted Chomsky's piece.

By the way, some leading European newspapers make a regular habit of featuring fringe individuals from Israel and the U.S., like Uri Avneri or Norman Birnbaum, who can always be counted on to voice shrill criticism of Israel on any given issue. Readers, of course, have no way of knowing that these individuals are either barely known or represent only a small minority back home.

There's also been the mainstreaming of fringe organizations.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is a good case in point. There is a good deal of material in the hands of law enforcement as well as in the public domain to suggest that this group may be closely tied to the radical Islamic network, despite insistent denials to the contrary. Not only have the major papers failed to investigate the claims against this group, but they also quote it regularly. CAIR thus becomes simply "an advocacy group based in Washington" (NYT, June 16, 2003) or "a nonprofit civil rights group in Washington" (NYT, March 28, 2003), as if it were nothing other than the Muslim version of the NAACP.

And these groups have also been fiddling with Muslim population numbers in the United States for transparent political motives. Two scholarly studies conducted at the University of Chicago and the City University of New York Graduate Center estimated the Muslim population at roughly two million. A third academic study, "Religious Congregations and Membership: 2000," had a slightly lower figure-1.5 million Muslims. All three studies were reported on in the New York Times. That hasn't stopped Muslim spokesmen from insisting on higher numbers, which are often reported uncritically in the media. For example, on December 28, 2002, the Times cited CAIR's estimate of "seven million Muslims in the United States" without comment, while another article (June 16, 2003) reported that various groups put the number "between four million and eight million," ignoring the findings of the three scientific studies which the paper had previously reported.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post (February 26, 2004) was declaring that "Muslims number 6 million to 7 million, or about 2.4 percent of the population," without even mentioning a source. And columnist Philip Bowring, writing in the International Herald Tribune (September 25, 2001), spoke of a "7 million strong [Muslim] minority in America's midst."

Groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which are on the U.S. government's terrorist list, are often described as "militant" organizations who oppose Israeli "occupation," implying that the issue is the West Bank and Gaza, when, in point of fact, they openly assert that all of Israel, pre- and post-1967 is "occupied" land and call for Israel's total destruction. Seldom is their ultimate goal described in press accounts. In fact, in the New York Times front-page story (March 22, 2004) reporting on the Israeli assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, it is not until the fourteenth paragraph, on p. A15, that Hamas is identified as "officially committed to Israel's destruction," which, needless to say, was key to Israel's decision.

My "favorite" in this category was an interview with a Hamas leader in a top Italian daily, La Repubblica (May 19, 2001). Up front, he declares that Israel has no right whatsoever to exist. In response, the interviewer asks him for his views on the Mitchell Plan and other aspects of the peace process!

Sometimes it's double standards.

Take the issue of foreign troops in Lebanon. Here's how the New York Times (January 21, 2004) described the Israeli presence: "After Israeli troops withdrew from southern Lebanon nearly four years ago, ending two decades of occupation, the border was marked by the United Nations." The key word here is "occupation."

Compare that with an article in the same paper the previous day: "It also increased friction between Israel and Syria, which maintains a large military presence in Lebanon and supports Hezbollah." Notice the absence of any reference to Syrian "occupation" of Lebanon, though that is exactly what it is and precisely what the U.S. Congress called it when it passed the Syria Accountability Act late last year.

Sometimes it's the headlines.

In Le Temps, a leading French-language Swiss daily (April 18, 2001), the front-page headline read: "Israel reoccupies part of the Gaza Strip." It is not until page four, line 23, that readers discover the Israeli action was in direct response to a Palestinian attack.

In La Repubblica on the front page (May 8, 2001), the headline read: "Newborn killed in Palestine. The pain of the Pope." It is not until page three that readers learn that the Israeli military action referred to was in response to Palestinian mortar attacks on Jewish targets and that the Israeli military apologized for the accidental killing of the child. Incidentally, on page 23 of the same issue, a small story mentions that up to one hundred children were killed by guerrillas in Angola and another sixty were kidnapped. There was no reported reaction from the Vatican.

In El Pais, Spain's most prominent daily, the headline after release of the Mitchell Report (May 22, 2001) read: "United States demands of Israel a cease-fire and a halt to new settlements." It omitted entirely the fact that the very first step demanded by the report was a halt to Palestinian violence.

There was a particularly infelicitous headline on the front page of the New York Times (March 6, 2002): "Syria Chief Backs Saudi Peace Plan as Mideast Boils." It seemed to herald a breakthrough in the Syrian position, yet in the third paragraph readers discover that Syria "called for the right of return for Palestinian refugees," which would, of course, totally destroy Israel as a Jewish state and therefore is a negotiating nonstarter.

In the New York Times (March 13, 2002), the headline read: "UN Chief Tells Israel It Must End 'Illegal Occupation.'" It is not until the eighth and penultimate paragraph that we are told that the secretary general also "condemned Palestinian terror attacks on innocent civilians as 'morally repugnant.'"

On April 30, 2002, while the New York Times carried the headline "Palestinian Chief Denounces Terror" and the subhead "Hours Later, Suicide Bomber Kills 2 Near Pub in Tel Aviv," the New York Post, by contrast, went with a far more straightforward headline: "Lethal blast mocks Abu's [referring to PA Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas] no-terror vow."

And in the International Herald Tribune (August 29, 2003), an article appeared about the Israel Vocal Arts Institute's program in Tel Aviv, which prepares people from around the world for careers in opera. The headline read: "An Israeli settlement of opera hopefuls." There was nothing whatsoever about "settlements" in the story, other than the provocative headline. When queried about the choice of words, the paper's managing editor acknowledged that it was a poor choice.

Sometimes it's the hype.

The story of Jenin is perhaps the best example. With Palestinian spokesmen referring to the events there in April 2002 as "Jeningrad" and claiming vast numbers of casualties at the hands of Israeli troops, some Western news outlets swallowed the claims hook, line, and sinker.

On April 14, the London Independent concluded its news story with these words: "Jenin has become a place etched in the consciousness of the Palestinians. What happened there will not go away, however hard Israel tries to keep the refugee camp away from the eyes of the world. This was an atrocity."

Two days later, the same paper carried another report under the headline "Amid the ruins, the grisly evidence of a war crime": "A monstrous war crime that Israel has tried to cover up for a fortnight has finally been exposed.... The sweet and ghastly reek of rotting human bodies is everywhere, evidence that it is a human tomb."

Not to be outdone, the London Evening Standard declared (April 15, 2002): "We are talking here of massacre, and a cover-up, of genocide."

And the Guardian went a step further in its April 17 editorial: "Jenin camp looks like the scene of a crime. Its concrete rubble and tortured metal evokes another horror half a world away in New York, smaller in scale but every bit as repellent in its particulars, no less distressing, and every bit as man-made. Jenin smells like a crime."

The facts about Jenin are now well-known and confirmed by outside groups. Rather than take a lesson from NATO in Serbia and wage war by bombing from the air, and thus risking the loss of innocent life, Israel chose the far more dangerous option of sending its troops into the narrow and booby-trapped streets of Jenin to conduct a house-to-house search for suspected terrorists and their workshops. As a result, twenty-three Israeli soldiers lost their lives in the operation, while fifty-two Palestinians, all but a handful armed gunmen, were killed. A "monstrous war crime?" "Genocide?" 9/11 redux? Hardly.

Sometimes it's the photo.

While I have a large collection, three in particular stand out for me.

The first appeared in the New York Times on September 30, 2000, and has since received considerable attention. Taken by an AP photographer, it shows a uniformed Israeli wielding a club and a young man beneath him with a bloodstreaked face. The caption read: "An Israeli policeman and a Palestinian on the Temple Mount." The only problem is that the "Palestinian" was in fact an American Jew, Tuvia Grossman, who was being protected by the policeman after a Palestinian mob had pulled him and his friends from a taxi and started beating them. The Times first published a correction, then, under pressure, reprinted the photo with the proper caption. And HonestReporting.com noted that in 2002 a French court "condemned the Associated Press for 'misrepresenting [Grossman] as a member of the Palestinian community.'"

The second appeared in the Times on May 6, 2002. Actually, there were three photos in all. They were taken at the annual Salute to Israel Parade in New York. The photo on the front page showed marchers carrying Israeli and American flags in the background and, in the foreground, two pro-Palestinian demonstrators with a Palestinian flag and a sign facing the camera that said: "End Israel's Occupation of Palestine." The caption read: "Hundreds of thousands of people lined Fifth Avenue in Manhattan yesterday for a parade commemorating Israel's 54th anniversary. The boisterous but peaceful event also drew several hundred protesters." There were two additional photos inside the paper, one of a group of pro-Israel supporters, the other of a pro-Palestinian group.

What was wrong? The Times devoted exactly fifty percent of its photos to the pro-Palestinian side despite the fact that, by the paper's own admission, there were as many as 800,000 pro-Israel supporters attending the parade and "several hundred protesters." Why was such disproportionate attention given to the latter?

While the damage couldn't be undone, the outpouring of complaints to the Times led the paper to issue what was in effect an apology to its readers, a relatively rare occurrence and a good object lesson.

And the third photo appeared in the New York Times earlier this year, again on the front page and above the fold. It showed Israel building a segment of the security barrier, part of the wall in this particular case (which constitutes less than five percent of the planned barrier, the rest being a fence), with a heavily armed Israeli soldier on one side and a 91-year-old Palestinian woman and her daughter on the other. The photo's message could not have been clearer. In fact, it was so transparently clear that it prompted some to ask whether the Palestinians had cleverly staged the scene by having the two fragile and bereft women there as the counterpoint to the tough-looking, gun-wielding Israeli soldier.

And sometimes, it's the cartoons.

By definition, political cartoons are meant to have an edge, but there are some that, in my judgment at least, have crossed a line and reveal something far more insidious. While there have been a few such examples in the American press, the worst have appeared in mainstream West European newspapers and magazines, and they touch on incendiary themes-Israelis as the new Nazis, Israelis as Christ-killers, and Israelis as child-killers.

I could keep going. The subject is vast and there are many categories worth exploring in far greater detail. In reality, I've only begun to skim the surface, and there are many areas I haven't even touched on, such as the almost obligatory description of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as "right-wing," "hawkish," "inflexible," or "hard-liner," while largely avoiding any description when mentioning Chairman Arafat other than his formal title. Or the antiseptic way the Six-Day War is usually mentioned, during which Israel "seized" the West Bank and Gaza, implying aggressive intent on Israel's part, but without an accompanying explanation of what led to this war for Israel's survival.

We can fight back when we see what we believe to be unbalanced, misinformed, or erroneous reporting. Commissioning serious studies of the treatment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in specific outlets is one way to document and present the record. Contacting editors and reporters is another, but always bearing in mind that broad-brush accusations are not likely to lead anywhere other than creating an enemy, whereas thoughtful and well-reasoned approaches may stand a chance of success. And alerting sympathetic advertisers to a recurring problem might also be helpful in some cases.

As for me, my lifelong fascination with newspapers continues, but I understand far better today the media's power to identify an issue, frame it, ignore it, or even misrepresent it. After all, it's about human decision-making and all the "baggage" that goes along with it.