Israeli reply

Press, 20 July 1979, Page 12

Israeli reply

The difference between eve n-handedness and objectivity seemed to have been overlooked by the writer of a letter to “The Press,” according to the Israeli Ambassador to New Zealand (Mr Yaakov Morris). Mr Morris was referring to a letter from W. Margaret Dennis taking issue with him over an address he gave to the United Natjons Association in Christchurch, in which he was critical ■- of evenhandedness in the New Zealand media and called on the Western press to take sides. Even-handedness onesidedly biased the choice of information — giving a tilt by headline, inflection and emphasis — and by the quantity of representation of one side it masqueraded as objectivity, Mr Morris said. Objectivity, which should distinguish a free, enlightened and democratic press from its totalitarian opposite, presented a fair, proportionate and knowledgeable balance of all sides, he said. “Obviously, I fully share W. Margaret Dennis’s abhorrence of ‘blind, unquestioning loyalty,’ the hallmark of the totalitarian society,” said Mr Morris. “However, counterfeit objectivity, because of its subtlety, is not less dan-

gerous because the intelligent reader — even without sufficient knowledge — instinctively rejects extreme bias, while he is less armed — because of dependence on specialised knowledge — against the counterfeit,” he said. Mr Morris said the bias he considered desirable was that of the democrat who insisted on real objectivity and rejected or held suspect hand-outs from totalitarian sources and sympathetic treatment of such hand-outs. Middle East affairs centred on the involvement of a democratic state, Israel, with a series of dictatorships around it, military, one-party, and theocratic. “Sympathetic treatment is given by Western media to the latter, by treating the fabricated and uncheckable news and other items they produce as if they are on an equally objective plane as those from the checkable and entirely open society of Israel. “This ‘even-handedness’ is conditioned by such vested interests as oil and Arab markets and not by the equal rectitude of both sides,” said Mr Morris. “To distinguish between real and counterfeit objectivity is to realise how ‘admirable’ or otherwise are the standards of your press,” he said.