ITVS pulls web pages on Palestine
The Independent Television Service early this month withdrew part of a website about Arab-Americans after supporters of Israel called the material inaccurate and biased.
Criticism of the site threatened to distract attention from the companion broadcast, "Caught in the Crossfire," ITVS said. PBS and ITVS execs later acknowledged that the site was flawed in ways that couldn't be amended easily before the Sept. 4 debut of the program it was meant to support, an observational documentary about how the lives of three Arab-Americans changed after last September's terrorist attacks.
ITVS was consulting late last week with Middle East experts to determine whether the historical section could be revised and re-launched. PBS also responded to the Anti-Defamation League's complaints about the anti-Israeli bias in the broadcast.
The "Caught in the Crossfire" website, most of which remains on PBS.org, attracted sharp criticism for its summary of Palestinian history. The summary reportedly included an inadequately labeled map of Palestine in 63 B.C., which encompassed the land that is now Israel. To web users who came to the graphic through search engines, the map of Palestine seemed to challenge Israel's right to exist.
A pointed critique of the site in the New York Sun on Sept. 3 quoted Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, describing it as a "serious hatchet job." Comments posted on one pro-Israel weblog pilloried its historical narrative as amateurish, revisionist history by leftists. ITVS and PBS received a chain of e-mail complaints about the site.
In a letter to PBS, Foxman wrote that the site "leaves the reader with the conclusion of Israeli culpability for the conflict, the breakdown of the peace process and the outbreak of Palestinian violence." He asked PBS to address flaws in the site and add links to more diverse online resources.
ITVS, which presented the documentary on PBS and produced the website, posted a retraction notice when it withdrew the entire "Homelands" section the same day the Sun published its article. The section summarized the histories of three Middle Eastern homelands of individuals profiled in the film, including Khader El-Yateem, a Lutheran minister who was born in the West Bank town Beit Jala.
"Our goal was to provide background information that contextualized the cultural histories of the people whose lives are chronicled in the film," ITVS said on the revised "Homelands" page. "In an effort to keep the focus on the current experience of Arab-Americans, we have removed that section of the site."
Pull it or revise it?
The site was "flawed in its totality," Foxman said in an interview. "I think [public TV] realized that when they reviewed it."
"We looked at the site, and felt it wasn't up to our editorial standards," explained Lois Vossen, ITVS communications director. The history of the region is "way too complex" to summarize, and ITVS couldn't revise it in time for the broadcast of "Caught in the Crossfire" on Sept. 4.
ITVS's decision to retract rather than amend the site troubled other web producers in pubcasting. Pulling material was a drastic move in a medium that thrives on instantaneous exchanges and lends itself to revision, they said. "It's a very heavy thing to pull something--the message is very strong" that the content in the site is wrong, said Marrie Campbell, editorial director of Frontline's website.
"It makes you look like you caved," said Richard Dean, webmaster at KQED in San Francisco. "I'd be reluctant to take anything down once it's fact-checked."
Editors at PBS.org conferred with ITVS about how to respond to the complaints, said Cindy Johanson, senior v.p. of Interactive Learning. "There was discussion of amending it, but in this case, it was not an easy fix of just changing some text." Fixing it required reconstruction of the site's architecture. "The decision was made at ITVS not to do that."
Vetting of websites linked with PBS.org begins with the expectation that "producers are delivering a site that has been fully fact-checked and has been developed in a way that is free from outside influence or political pressure," Johanson said. PBS standards for web publishing, which are posted on its website for producers, call for sites to meet the journalistic standards set for public TV programs.
WGBH published a web-practices code this summer that sets rules to protect the noncommercial and editorial integrity of its web content. WGBH shared the manual with PBS and decided to offer it to other pubcasters, said Louis Wiley, executive editor of Frontline, who wrote it to address thorny issues that producers had encountered in web publishing.
"What I wrote and what I believe is that we should have controversies, publish strong material and be provocative whenever the material warrants it," Wiley said. "But we also have an obligation to be accurate and fair. People may have a strong opinion, but that is different from your responsibility as you're reporting."
"Public TV needs to really understand from what happened here as we look to the Web to produce content and deliver information," Johanson said. Site developers must recognize that "the Internet is not about linear storytelling," she said. "People can make deep links into content. They don't start on the home page and travel down the path that producers would want them to."
Search engines drive most traffic to PBS.org, Johanson noted, and they send visitors directly to content, not on a linear path via home pages. She intends to emphasize the importance of nonlinear web design in the PBS.org production manual.
"Parallel realities"
Addressing the site's editorial problems will be difficult. ITVS, which consulted with Lumiere Productions on the design and content, researched and wrote the pages in-house. ITVS has an experienced web production team, but none of those who worked on the site had expertise in the subject of Middle Eastern history, Vossen acknowledged.
"This section of the website was never intended to be a definitive statement by ITVS, PBS or anybody else on the history of the region," said David Van Taylor, who produced the documentary with Brad Lichtenstein. "It was intended as background on where each of the characters in the film came from."
Lumiere asked experts at the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism to review ITVS's draft summary of Palestinian history, and ITVS took their advice in the final version, Van Taylor said. "It was not like they gave it a Good Housekeeping seal of approval. This was more about our having done the right thing" by vetting the historical narrative with a mainstream Jewish organization.
"In retrospect, I don't think this website section was ever biased against Israel," said Van Taylor. "I'm Jewish and I'm a big believer in Israel and its right to exist and be secure. Never in a million years did I intend to be part of putting something on the Web or the air that was going to harm Israel."
The site's content was "reflective of the people in the film," Vossen said, but the contentious nature of the subject warranted a more careful compromise between point-of-view treatment and traditional journalistic standards. "This is one of those issues that deserved more depth and space, and all the angles you can look at it."
Web journalists at Frontline, which has reported extensively on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict this year, have adopted a completely balanced approach to web reporting on this topic, according to Campbell. "You always have to offer both versions because, essentially, they're parallel realities." The web companion to "Shattered Dreams," a Frontline episode on the Middle East peace process that aired in June, displays analyses from both Israeli and Palestinian points of view "no matter what section you're in."
"The show didn't get a large audience, so we didn't get a lot of visits to the site," said Campbell. "But back in June, no one went after us for being unbalanced."
The flap over "Caught in the Crossfire" reversed the traffic pattern between media. Instead of TV steering viewers to the Web, the website controversy drew viewers to the broadcast Sept. 4.
Foxman of the ADL objected to the documentary's profile of Pastor Khader El-Yatteem in a Sept. 4 letter to PBS's John Wilson, co-chief programmer. Foxman described the profile as a "nothing more than a diatribe against Israel" that was irrelevant to its stated objective of examining the impact of Sept. 11. He asked PBS not to broadcast it again.
The producers followed Pastor El-Yatteem as he ministered to his congregation of Arab-American Christians, many of whom lost relatives in the World Trade Center, and counseled his parents, who wanted to return to the West Bank as fighting there escalated. In a written response, producers respectfully disagreed with Foxman, and Wilson backed them in a Sept. 11 letter to the ADL.
". . . 'Caught in the Crossfire' is a sound program, especially as part of our programming that is meant to bring diverse--and sometimes controversial--points of view to broadcast television," Wilson wrote.
Outside
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