Media Settle On 35:1 Ratio For Stories On Palestinians Vs. Israelis As Victims

Some members of the FPA worried that they might not be able to adhere to the 35:1 guideline.

Jerusalem, December 13 – Several weeks of deliberation among bureau chiefs of foreign media organizations have resulted in a joint decision to set the quantity of attention given to attacks on Palestinians at exactly thirty-five times the attention given to attacks on Jews, a representative of the group announced today.

Peter Baker, head of the Foreign Press Association and Reuters Jerusalem Bureau Chief, apprised the association’s members this morning that the team of journalists from seven different Western media outlets had agreed on a uniform editorial policy for reporting violent incidents, to forestall any awkwardness over potential accusations of bias vis-à-vis others’ reportage. The new policy ordains that for every story a media outlet carries about an Arab attack on Jews, it must publish thirty-five such reports about Jews hurting or harming Arabs.

In practice, observed Baker in a phone interview, the numbers will seldom work out precisely, and the policy has built-in flexibility to account for that likelihood. “It doesn’t have to be the number of reports,” he noted. “It’s the amount of attention in which we’re interested here. So, for example, even if there aren’t thirty-five things to report on a given day that make Israel’s treatment of Arabs look bad, the ratio is calculated in number of paragraphs in a written article, number of Palestinian vs. Israeli perspectives quoted, or number of minutes of video or audio reporting.”

To illustrate, Baker pointed to Sunday’s stabbing attack by a Palestinian terrorist at Jerusalem’s Central Bus Station, which left a 24-year-old security guard in critical condition. “It’s a dramatic enough story that we couldn’t just ignore it the way we did the hundreds of rock- and firebomb-throwing attacks on Jews we ignore here every day,” he explained. “So we reported it, but our members now know to ensure that anything which might generate sympathy for Israelis or the Israeli position must be outweighed by a factor of thirty-five by countervailing  pro-Palestinian narrative. We did that by invoking rage over Trump’s Jerusalem announcement, mentioning fatalities from Israeli airstrikes on Gaza without noting the Palestinian rocket fire that provoked it, that sort of thing.”

Some members of the FPA worried that they might not be able to adhere to the 35:1 guideline. “There’s a lot of anti-Israel material I put in all the time,” fretted Diaa Hadid, a New York Times contributor. “There’s no way I can get my ratio as low as thirty-five. On a slow news day I rarely even get as low as sixty-to-one. I hope this is a minimum, not a recommended average.”

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