Media watchdog hires D.C. director

WASHINGTON, Sept. 17 — Eric Rozenman wrote his first letter to the editor criticizing coverage of the Middle East back in 1978. Then a young reporter at the Columbus Citizen-Journal in Ohio, he had recently returned from his first visit to Israel and was faulting his own paper’s reporting on that perpetual hot spot. He also sent a critical letter to the paper’s rival, the Columbus Dispatch. These days, the former Washington Jewish Week managing editor is still critiquing media coverage of Israel. But now he’s doing it full time. Rozenman, 55, last week began working as the Washington director of CAMERA-the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America. The job is a new one for both the Fairfax resident and the organization, which monitors media coverage of Israel, seeking to expose what it sees as bias or distortions against Israel. “No one’s ever done this before since CAMERA’s been based in Boston,” said Rozenman, who two weeks ago left his position as B’nai B’rith International’s communications director. CAMERA had been founded in the D.C. area, then moved to Boston about a dozen years ago. Speaking on the second day of his new job and quipping that he still had to figure out the phones and fax, he described his new post as fourfold, but evolving. He’ll be writing and editing for CAMERA publications, doing public speaking, monitoring Mideast coverage in The Washington Post, Washington Times, Baltimore Sun and the Richmond Times Dispatch and handling governmental affairs. Rozenman’s new position comes as many Jews across the country have been complaining that media coverage too often puts Israel in a bad light. Locally, much of those complaints have been directed to The Washington Post, the object of a boycott in June. National Public Radio also has been harshly criticized in the Jewish community, and is a focus of CAMERA’s attention. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds public radio stations, is supposed to only distribute tax dollars for programming that is objective and balanced, according to Andrea Levin, CAMERA’s executive director. Basically, she said, CPB “is subsidizing what we consider biased reporting.” Rozenman, she said, will be key in meeting with members of Congress and their staffers, bringing to their attention CAMERA’s concerns on the public funding. “It’s better to have someone on the ground there, who’s in the community and can be close to the players,” she said. She noted the organization has gained nearly 10,000 new members in the past two years, bringing membership to 40,000-45,000. Levin is delighted to have Rozenman in the new position. “We have been interested in Eric for many years and have enormous respect for his ability and experience,” she said, adding the D.C. office might one day expand. Rozenman said Levin had first approached him about a position in Boston two years ago. In his B’nai B’rith post for only two years at the time, he wasn’t ready to leave that job, nor did he want to leave the area. This summer, he was ready to take on a new challenge. His job at CAMERA, said Rozenman, just extends what he’s been doing since those 1978 letters to the Columbus Citizen-Journal and Columbus Dispatch. “It’s what I’ve been doing with one hand all these years,” he said. It’s time to do it with two hands, he added. Those early letters led to his involvement with the Columbus Jewish Community Relations Committee’s Israel task force and another trip to the Jewish state. He’s visited the country 13 times since. By 1980, Rozenman had come to D.C. to work as press secretary to U.S. Rep. Bob Shamansky, whom he had known in Ohio. He then went to work for the Near East Report, 1984-88, and spent 2 1/2 years working on publications at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), before a year as managing editor at the Miami Jewish Tribune. He returned to D.C. in 1992 to become Washington Jewish Week’s managing editor. He joined B’nai B’rith in 1997. “In all of those jobs, some of the time I was critiquing media coverage of Israel, either for myself, for my job or for my boss. In a way, I’ve been doing this for 20 years,” he said. He’s also written articles and op-eds on media coverage, as well as other Middle East issues, for such publications as Middle East Quarterly, Middle East Insight, Washington Times, The Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald and Philadelphia Inquirer. When he talks about media coverage of the Middle East, in particular The Washington Post, he points to what he terms “major errors of presentation.” “There are many stories about the Mideast in general that I have little or no problem with,” Rozenman said. But, he said, “there is a repeated pattern of imbalance of coverage that repeatedly gives the benefit of doubt to one side.” For example, last spring the Post published what he described as “three or four well-displayed, lengthy stories” with color photos that personalized Palestinian families that had suffered losses and “were essentially sympathetic.” It was only after the Passover bombing in Netanya that the Post did a similar story on Israelis, he said, “but it was inside, shorter, had one black and white picture and simply didn’t have the same oomph.”