Jewish Council loses case over letters to editor

A three-part complaint by the Auckland Jewish Council against the New Zealand Herald has not been upheld by the New Zealand Press Council.

The Jewish Council complained to the Herald about three matters: the publication of letters the council considered offensive, the editing of a published letter written by the council chairwoman Wendy Ross, and the headlines used over a series of letters.

The first letter from Lloyd Gretton, published on October 27 under the headline "Middle East crisis: Zionists must go," stated "Zionism is a global racist and violent cult" and alluded to "an evil enemy" and "mass murder" in its references to the turmoil in Israel.

The response from Mrs Ross, published under the headline "Judaism and Zionism," called Lloyd Gretton's letter "a hate-filled diatribe not worthy of a reasoned factual response" and said that "Zionism is inextricably woven into Judaism."

She quoted a letter written by Abba Eban [a former Israeli Foreign Minister] in which he referred to the discriminatory principle of anti-Semitism being transferred from the realm of individual rights to the domain of collective identity as anti-Zionism.

Subsequent letters from Bob Downer and W. Fraser, headed "Zionism and racism" (misleadingly titled "Zionist and racism" in the first case) referred to "Mrs Ross' diatribe," Zionist mythmakers and intransigence, and stated "one holocaust has not taught how to prevent another. This is the difference between Judaism and Zionism."

On behalf of the Auckland Jewish Council, Mrs Ross complained to the editor about Lloyd Gretton's letter as being "offensive in both its gross errors and bigotry."

Equally, she criticised Bob Downer's letter as containing "the most extraordinary distortions and lies." One strong section of the complaint was the removal of the word "therefore" from the statement "I am a Jew and therefore a Zionist" in Mrs Ross' published letter.

The subeditor deputed to handle the readers' letters responded directly by e-mail that the "therefore" was removed because he "could not be sure that all Jews are Zionists."

Mrs Ross extrapolated from this that letters chosen for publication were only those the subeditor believes to be true. The unguarded response by the subeditor to the complaint about the omission of "therefore" could not itself be raised to the level of an independent ground for complaint.

The Press Council viewed the short sentence as one packed with meaning, in which the word "therefore" played the central role for the conveyance of the writer's personal message on the true relationship of Judaism and Zionism.

Having said that, the council did not regard the editing by omission as other than unwise and for the ordinary reader unlikely to materially attenuate Mrs Ross' views in the context of the whole letter.

The Jewish Council originally acknowledged the difficulties the paper must have in dealing with "such a fraught subject," while the editor's reply said the correspondence had eventually been closed because it had begun to degenerate into an unpleasant religious free-for-all. It was in this highly charged atmosphere that the proponents' views were expressed.

The essence of the Jewish Council's complaint was the Herald's publication of "profoundly offensive and demonstrably untrue letters, offensively headlined ... "

In response to the Press Council, editor Stephen Davis defended the letters' selection, headlines in general (while admitting an error in the "Zionist and racism" headline) and said the subeditor clearly did not intend to indicate the Herald published only letters it knew to be factual.

The Press Council said the complaint that the content of the letters was offensive was to the point. The council's principle 12 on letter selection was relevant. But there was no sanction in the principle - requiring fairness, balance and public interest to be applied to letters - that prevented offensive statements or opinions from being published, usually with contrary views also given space.

Often offensive matter depended on taste, community attitudes or the person offended, and the principles do not refer to matters of taste.

Even if a correspondent to the newspaper stated baldly, in the face of historical evidence, that the Holocaust did not take place in the Second World War, the letter might not necessarily be barred from publication but would find definite challenges to its assertions in the letters to the editor columns. That was part of a free press.

It was also part of the free and unfettered exchange of opinion in an open society that offensive expression would find a place, even where distortions or extreme views are integral to such expressions.

In the well-known Skokie case in the US, concerning the application by neo-Nazis to march through a Jewish area, it was affirmed that "however pernicious an opinion may seem, we depend on its correction not on the conscience of judges and juries but on the competition of other ideas."

The counter to extreme distortions is the publication of statements that point to the true and reasonable picture. Newspapers would inevitably reflect all these sections of society.

This part of the complaint was not upheld.

On the complaint over the headlines used, the newspaper seemed casual at best in introducing the word "racism" into the debate, but not sufficiently neglectful to warrant upholding the complaint. Headlines over letters to the editor had more latitude than those over news reports and articles.