Media-Monitoring Groups

“We will go to war after we have built an army, equipped it, trained.”

That was written in 2008, in a private email, by a participant in an organized effort to take control of how Wikipedia covers the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The group had been convened by a senior research analyst at CAMERA, the oldest and largest of the pro-Israel media-monitoring organizations, and its members had been asked not to forward the correspondence to journalists.

The correspondence reached journalists anyway, which is the only reason any of this is known.

Most of what these organizations do is legal and open

That needs saying before anything else, because the distinction is the whole point of this article.

CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, was founded in 1982. It is not a fringe operation: it reports more than 65,000 members and tens of thousands of active letter writers, keeps offices in Boston and Jerusalem, and took in more than $4 million in grants between 2017 and 2019 by one compilation of its filings. The Forward once named its longtime executive director, Andrea Levin, among the most influential Jewish citizens in America, writing that “media-monitoring was the great proxy war of the last year, and its general is Andrea Levin.” It is one organization among several in the field.

It is also candid about what it does, which makes documenting its methods easy, because it documents them itself. Its mission statement describes CAMERA as “the leading organization exposing and countering anti-Israel narratives in the media, online, and in schools,” working “to expose bias and promote truth, in turn strengthening support for Israel worldwide,” operating “at the forefront of the information battlefield.” It says it “systematically monitors, documents, reviews and archives Middle East coverage” and that its staff “directly contact reporters, editors, producers and publishers concerning distorted or inaccurate coverage.”

Its own account of its Reuters campaign shows the model at work. CAMERA reviewed more than a thousand Reuters stories, took its objections directly to executives, sent alerts urging its letter writers to complain publicly, and published op-eds attacking the coverage. By its account the year-long campaign changed how Reuters described Hamas and Islamic Jihad in 2004. Its British affiliate similarly reports winning corrections from the Guardian by arguing that articles breached the accuracy clause of the Editors’ Code of Practice.

None of that is hidden and none of it is improper. Organizing citizens to complain about coverage they believe is unfair, and pressing editors for corrections, is ordinary democratic speech. Effective advocacy on behalf of a foreign country’s image is still advocacy.

Critics locate the line differently. Mark Jurkowitz, then at the Boston Globe, described CAMERA as an advocacy group trying to impose its views on mainstream journalism rather than a neutral watchdog. The Forward has described the cumulative effect of such campaigns as intimidating scholars and students who disagree. Those are characterizations of an effect, offered here as characterizations, and this archive does not pretend to settle where vigorous media criticism ends and suppression begins.

There is one episode where the record settles it.

What the emails showed

In April 2008 the site Electronic Intifada published four weeks of leaked internal emails from a group organized by Gilead Ini, a senior research analyst at CAMERA.

Ini had circulated a call for volunteers “to help us keep Israel-related entries on Wikipedia from becoming tainted by anti-Israel editors,” moved them onto a private Google Group, and asked them not to forward his emails to the news media.

The plan described in the correspondence went well past editing articles. It was to get participants elected as Wikipedia administrators, positions that carry authority over other editors, and to use that authority to shape coverage while avoiding the platform’s own controls. One experienced editor laid out the route: aspirants should “stay away from any Israel related articles” for months, build goodwill with other editors, get voted in, and only then use the powers that came with the role.

The concealment was not incidental to the plan. It was the plan. An administrator whose alignment is known can be challenged. The entire value of the approach depended on the coordination not being visible.

What Wikipedia did

Wikipedia’s response was immediate and formal. Administrators sanctioned five editors involved in the campaign, and the reasoning went straight at the concealment: the encyclopedia’s open model, they wrote, “is fundamentally incompatible with the creation of a private group to surreptitiously coordinate editing by ideologically like-minded individuals.”

The editor who had advised on grooming candidates for administrator status was barred from editing Israel-Palestine articles. Others were sanctioned as well. The episode fed into the Arbitration Committee’s decision that year to impose stricter rules on the entire subject area, requiring an established track record before editing in it and limiting reverts, restrictions later reaffirmed and expanded.

What CAMERA said

Ini moved to shut the Google Group after the leak, telling members he was doing so “in hopes that members’ personal contact information will not be made public.”

He did not apologize for the campaign. He argued it had never been a deception, saying “we would be idiots if we thought we intended to hide our intentions,” and accused Wikipedia administrators of “capriciously banning” accounts on speculation. CAMERA’s position was not that the effort had gone too far. It was that recruiting and coordinating editors did not violate Wikipedia’s rules, which it described as vague and unevenly enforced.

Why it matters

A well-funded organization pressuring editors on behalf of a foreign government’s image is a fair thing to document and an ordinary thing to do. Plenty of causes and countries do it. On its own it proves only that the advocacy works.

The 2008 campaign is different in kind, and it is different because of the concealment. An analyst at a major media-monitoring organization organized a private group whose purpose was to install ideologically aligned people inside the governance of the world’s most-used reference work, in order to shape what it says about Israel without that shaping being visible.

None of that rests on a critic’s interpretation. It rests on the participants’ own words and on the formal findings of the platform they targeted.

The part worth sitting with is the last one. The effort was not stopped by Wikipedia’s defenses, which it was specifically designed to evade. It was stopped because somebody leaked the emails.

Sources

• CAMERA, mission statement and published descriptions of its methods
• Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, “CAMERA: Fighting Distorted Media Coverage of Israel and the Middle East” — CAMERA’s own account of the Reuters campaign and its membership figures
• CAMERA UK, “Celebrating 10 Years of Promoting Accurate Coverage of Israel,” August 2019
• Electronic Intifada, “A Pro-Israel Group’s Plan to Rewrite History on Wikipedia,” April 2008 — the leaked emails
• The Register, April 29, 2008 — independent reporting on the leaked emails, the private Google Group, and the administrator-grooming thread
• Wikipedia Arbitration Committee records and administrator rulings documenting the five sanctions, the quoted rationale, and the 2008 conflict-area editing restrictions
• Mark Jurkowitz, Boston Globe, on CAMERA as an advocacy organization
• The Forward, on the effect of media-monitoring campaigns