Philadelphia Weekly

Photos by Jessica Griffin

"The Philadelphia Inquirer: all bias all the time
The more you look, the more you find.
It won't call terrorism by its right name,
And for the Israelis, it only finds blame.
They see deliberately blowing up babies and self-defense
But the Inquirer reporters can't tell the difference.
Louis Nizer documented Knight Ridder's Nazi past
But how long did that influence last?"
- a poem by Herb Denenberg

"Palestinian faces only make it above the fold [in the Inquirer] when they are suicide bombers or their name is Abu Nidal."
- Ahmed Bouzid, Palestine Media Watch

"This is a time of high tension and deep frustration in the Middle East over the violence and the failure to make progress towards peace. More than at any time, it is our job to do our best to remain scrupulously balanced and insightful in our coverage of a very complicated story where everyone doesn't always agree on what is the truth. Our reporters and editors are trying as hard as they can on this story, and I respectfully disagree with you that we have failed."
- Inquirer Editor Walker Lundy in an open letter to ex-subscribers that joined the boycott against the paper over perceived anti-Israel bias

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Herb Denenberg is--as he has been for the better part of his 72 years--mad as hell, and he's not going to take it any more. "I don't care if they have the whole lost tribe of Israel working at [the Inquirer's newsroom at] 400 N. Broad St. I don't care if there are choirs of angels on every floor of the newsroom. All I care about is what I read in the paper, and that's what I'm drawing conclusions from," he says, sitting over Chinese food in Bryn Mawr, his sauteed vegetables and shrimp largely untouched.

Denenberg does not talk with his mouth full and he has been talking more or less nonstop for the last hour. Clearly frustrated that, over the course of lunch, PW has yet to see the light and concede that the Philadelphia Inquirer is a bastion of anti-Semitic bias, he turns up the volume and intensity a few notches. His eyes narrow as he moves his face just inches from that of his interviewer. If there were a meter for righteous indignation, the needle would be buried in the red.

"What I see in the Inquirer is anti-Israeli from A to Z, day in and day out! Headline! Body of the story! Pictures! Captions! Editorials! Op-ed! And you can smell the bias and feel the bias! It stinks and it's wrong and I wouldn't get this pissed about it if it wasn't really bad, and this is really bad!"

The restaurant falls silent. Looking around nervously, Naomi Denenberg, Herb's wife of 44 years, gently touches her husband's shoulder, as if to ground him. The effect is instant, and Denenberg pauses and backs away slightly. The look in his eyes is once again friendly and avuncular as he ends his rap on a note of self-deprecating humor. "If nothing else, you know it's bad when I shell out $2,500 for a full-page ad in the Exponent," he says with a chuckle.

That ad ran in the Jewish Exponent--the newspaper of record for the local Jewish community, with a circulation of 65,000--and it urged Inquirer subscribers to boycott the paper. To date, 360 have canceled in protest. The boycott was kicked off with a noisy protest outside the Inquirer's headquarters at 400 N. Broad back in the middle of July, just a few days before PW's lunch with Denenberg.

The full spectrum of Israel's internal debate seems to show up on the Inquirer's front step that day. Roughly 100 protesters from the local chapter of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) wave banners and signs with slogans such as "INKY=P.R. FOR ARAB TERROR" and "AFTER 9/11 PALESTINIANS CHEERED AND ISRAELIS MOURNED."

Adding a touch of the surreal to this bit of political street theater are four teenagers dressed as suicide bombers, each bearing a placard that read, alternately, "FIGHTER," "MILITANT" and "ACTIVIST." The fourth holds a placard that reads, "CAN YOU SPOT THE TERRORISTS? THE INQUIRER CAN'T."

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AT ISSUE IS THE ZOA'S COMPLAINT THAT the Inquirer does not use the word "terrorist" to describe Palestinian perpetrators of violence against Israeli citizens. "Words can kill--Goebbels proved that," says one ZOA protester.

Standing next to the ZOA demonstrators are 35 counter-demonstrators from the local chapter of the Jewish Mobilization for a Just Peace. They hold signs with slogans like "SAY NO TO THE ZEALOTS ORDAINED AGENDA," "PRO PEACE IS NOT ANTI-ISRAEL" and "THOU SHALL NOT BLOCK AMBULANCES." One of the ZOA protesters turns to one of the counter-demonstrators and calls him a Nazi.

Denenberg, who officially joined the ZOA earlier this summer, is on the megaphone, standing next to an orange rubber garbage can emblazoned with the words DENENBERG'S DUMP in magic marker script. He ceremoniously dumps a copy of the Inquirer into the trash can, a gesture reminiscent of his 25 years as a consumer advocate reporter for Channel 10, and launches into a denouncement of the paper's "history of vicious and pernicious anti-Israeli propaganda."

Visible over Denenberg's shoulder and quietly taking it all in is Inquirer Editor and Executive Vice President Walker Lundy, who will later invite representatives of the ZOA into the newsroom to air their grievances. The meeting does not go well--at one point Lundy pointedly tells the members of the ZOA that they will get a fairer hearing if they stop referring to the newsroom staff as anti-Semites--and both sides walk away without any sense of resolution.

"We could not get them to understand that there is no moral equivalence between Israeli citizens targeted by suicide bombers and Palestinian civilians accidentally killed in military operations," Leonard Getz, president of the local chapter of ZOA, told PW after the meeting. "They won't even refer to the suicide bombers as terrorists."