Actually, Bronner has been found on numerous occasions to be producing Israel-centric news. Unfortunately, Hoyt didn't include this information in his column.

Please see my CounterPunch article, "NYT's Israel Editor's Sticky Situation: Ethan Bronner's Conflict With Impartiality" for details on Bronner's highly flawed journalism.
http://counterpunch.org/weir02052010.html

For more information on Israel-Palestine see http://ifamericansknew.org

We need full, accurate, unbiased information on Israel-Palestine. Bronner has not been giving it to us.

I really appreciate your full disclosures here, Bernard. And I think you know how hard most journalists wrestle with questions of truth and then quite rightly go back to those things that they CAN control like being fair, being open and being honest.

Having a son in the Israeli military is a tough one. But, come on. Has an American reporter ever been reassigned for having a spouse, sibling or child in the US armed services? Of course not. Heck, it's unthinkable that a US reporter would ever be actually criticized for being "biased" towards the US military!

If the only bias is hoping that people don't die, then I can live with that from my reporters.

And that's another thing... one might well be biased towards the members of a military in that they want the best for them. But that doesn't mean they are biased towards militarism. We liberals are fond of pointing out that "supporting the troops" always means "opposing frivolous warfare."

If more reporters and citizens truly were biased in favor of their soldiers we would have fewer wars.

mr. bronner recently gave a lecture at vassar. here is the reporting from philip weiss:

"Now that Israeli courts have cleared the titles, some Jewish owners have chosen to sell their houses to settlers. Bronner said the problem is that by granting pre-48 title to Jews, the court opened the door for Palestinians to claim their old houses in West Jerusalem."

talking about himself, mr. bronner says:

"I live in West Jerusalem. My entire neighborhood was Palestinian. … So I think it’s a very worrying decision… and one causing a great deal of anxiety there.."

anxiety for who, mr. bronner?

bronner said "...there was a case you could make that the occupation was not illegal."

biased much?

http://mondoweiss.net/2010/02/rage-at-bronner-and-at-the-times.html

I really agree with Bernie's take here and I find the premise -- that Bonner should be reassigned because his son enlisted in the IDF to be ridiculous bordering on offensive.

Bernard, this is not a very careful reading of the argument in the Hoyt piece.

You write, "In other words--or so we are to surmise--if Bronner's son is in the Israeli Army, most will assume his arguments are biased toward the Israeli Army, and the Times's integrity will suffer."

But your characterization doesn't follow at all from the paragraph you are characterizing. That paragraph only states the Times's very reasonable ethical guideline that acknowledges the possibility of bias when reporters find themselves in circumstances, such as the activities of a family member, that could affect their credibility, and that requires reporters to report these circumstances to their editors, so that the editors can make the call. It says nothing about any assumptions or presumptions one way or another about what the majority of readers will think or ought to think, and apparently leaves the judgment to the editor.

The paragraph you quote doesn't even contain Hoyt's argument. Bronner did report the potential conflict to his editors, so he did the right thing as far as the ethical guidelines are concerned. Hoyt then addresses the question of what should be done, and after going back and forth on the pros and cons of removing Bronner, he at last comes to his conclusion:

But, stepping back, this is what I see: The Times sent a reporter overseas to provide disinterested coverage of one of the world’s most intense and potentially explosive conflicts, and now his son has taken up arms for one side. Even the most sympathetic reader could reasonably wonder how that would affect the father, especially if shooting broke out.

Do you really doubt the assertion made in that last sentence? Don't you agree that such a concern on the part of the reader is at least rational? You say that Hoyt avoids entirely the question of what the reading public should think about Bronner's trustworthiness - and even suggest that this avoidance means he doesn't take his job seriously. But Hoyt doesn't avoid this. Rather he judges that a reader's wondering about the effect of Bronner's son's participation in the IDF is reasonable.

Now obviously, one possibility is that the paper simply make Bronner's close personal relationship to a members of the IDF well-known to its readers, and then leave it to the readers to judge Bronner's credibility for themselves on the basis of his track record of reporting over time. However, a paper like the New York Times, which aspires to be the "paper of record", tends to aim higher with its reports. It doesn't present these reports as just one entry among a large variety of testimonial reports that rational readers are then expected to sift through and weigh in total. Rather, the Times strives to be preeminently authoritative. They want their readers to think that when the Times says, "that's the way it is," well then, that's the way it is.

I would think that strongly pro-Israel readers have even more reason to be concerned about bias than Israel skeptics. What if the Israeli government sends Bronner's son into some engagement in which he is killed? Bronner might then, like any normal human being, be more susceptible to biased criticism and second-guessing of the military judgment than a reporter with less of a personal stake in the outcome of the decision.

Your discussion goes off the rails a bit in your tirade suggesting some weird and unholy latter-day combination of radical subjectivists, behaviorists and postmodernists have driven Hoyt into the denial of the very possibility of truth and objectivity, and have made "nonsense of reason itself", as though these degenerates are responsible for the very notion that one's emotional engagements with and interests in some subject matter can impair one's capacity for objectivity about that subject matter. But it is a commonplace in the canons of evaluation of testimonial evidence that one appropriate consideration in the impeachment of such evidence is evidence of bias on the part of the testifier, in the form of personal interest in the outcome of a case.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of overly-simplified and poorly digested introductory logic class lore about ad hominem argumentation that has left many people, even well-educated ones, with the impression that considerations of a speaker's background, commitments, interests or emotional engagements are uniformly lacking in evidential relevance when it comes to evaluating the speaker's testimony. That is not true; and recognizing it is not true is not some recent perversion wrought by Kuhn, Derrida or other recent thinkers.

Now, in defense of your own position, I think the strongest argument would be that the standard Hoyt appears to be proposing is impossibly high for practical, real-world journalistic enterprises. For illustration, surely there are reporters all over the United States, perhaps even at the Times, who report on defense and national security matters even though they have close family members in the US Armed Forces. If it's OK for these reporters, why isn't it OK for reporters whose children are in a foreign military?

On the other hand, the Times has a particularly heightened interest in being concerned about its journalistic credibility where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is concerned.

Are there no WASPS to serve in this post. Yes, there are plenty of Jews for whom Israel is utterly and completely a foreign country.
And those would be fine too.
But I don't think Jews who are Zionists should serve in this post.
Or anti-Zionists.
Let all the brilliant Jewish kids who do "area studies" go to Latin America, Asia, or whatever.
And let the non-Jews and non-Muslims have this post.
I want my correspondents to be disinterested. I don't think they should be attached to the country in which they serve.
As for Bronner's son choice, it is no problem if he grew up in Israel, fell in love with the place, and decided to join up. But, if his family is devoted to Israel, with his serving a logical extension of his family's devotion to the place, then he should serve and his dad should be covering Paris or Warsaw or Seoul.
I don't know Bronner so I don't know if he is devoted to Israel. If he is, he shouldn't cover it.
I'd apply the same standard to an Arab but that won't ever happen.

There was a time when New York Times readers could assume stories were as close to the truth as fair journalism could get. Nothing's perfect, of course, and the Times' actual performance in the past century has been spotty, at best. (Walter Duranty stooging for the Soviets was one BAD stumble, making the newspaper of record accessory to collectivist genocide on a vast scale.) But any illusion of factual certitude the Times may have cultivated has been lost in the sands of Iraq, searching for Judith Miller's WMD mirage. No wise reader peruses the Times with anything more than skepticism now, especially when the subject of the Mideast pops up. I doubt Bronner's reassignment will change the situation at all; he never should have been in the post to begin with.

I would take serious issue with the idea of Bronner as good journalist who educates the public or some such twaddle. If you read his work, he almost always exclusively quotes from Israeli sources - rarely corroborating with independent human rights groups, or ghast, actual Palestinians - when rendering events. In a recent piece he wantonly disparaged the Goldstone Report's assertion on the destruction of the Al-Bader flour mill by, get this, quoting an IDF spokesman. And you know what, it turns out, he was wrong. In fact, his work includes an incredible amount of IDF schlock. But that aside, the issue of NYT does raise some serious issues about reportage on this topic, which I think MJ touches on.

The New York Time is the most influential newspaper in the country, especially on the I/P conflict. And yet, its two Jerusalem correspondents are Bronner and Isabel Kershner. Bronner is married to an Israeli and his son serves in the IDF. Kershner is an Israeli. So dare I ask: Where are the Palestinian (or Arab) Jerusalem bureau reporters? Are there any Palestinian or Arab NYT journalists with children in Hizbullah or Hamas (and spare me the purity of arms!). Of course not. They would be pilloried. It would never happen.

Why is it that the NYT needs to have a an israeli-centric view of the conflict? Is there anything particularly special about this issue that only warrants presentation by Jews with Israeli lineage, backgrounds and possibly loyalties. Me think not.

I fear you miss the issue: it is not about Bronner per se, but the overarching issue of how the "paper of record" presents and reports on the conflict. Is no one else entitled to speak on this issue? Has the times done a particular stellar job? It think we all know the answer to those questions.

So please stop personalizing this affair as an issue of Bronner's integrity and meet the issue where it begs. Are the standards fair? Why is there a sense of exceptionalism to reporting on the conflict? Where are the Arabs or the view which the wider world shares?

Actually, Hoyt's piece doesn't call for Bronner's reassignment. He quotes Alex Jones to that effect, but he also quotes several others who suggest that the fact that his son is in the Israeli Defense Forces shouldn't be an issue. I am critical of Israel's policies in Lebanon and Gaza, as well as on the settlements, but that would in no way lead me to think Ethan Bronner should be reassigned. It wouldn't have occurred to me to even raise it as an issue. My reading of Hoyt's article is that he is reporting conflicting views, not advocating one or the other.

Avishai sez:

"People who think that my friendship clouds my judgment are the disease who presume themselves the cure."

How amusing.

This manifestation of the disease that doubts Avishai was quite struck by the disclaimer issued by a journalist who supports Bronner remaining at his post:

And just to set the record straight: I'm not a friend of Bronner's, though I do have some friends who know him quite well. I met him a couple of times in New York, and maybe twice in Israel, we once spoke together at an event and shared a cab back to Manhattan.

http://cgis.jpost.com/Blogs/rosner/entry/should_nyt_jerusalem_correspondent_leave

Shmuel Rosner, rightwing Israeli and a professional journalist by trade, carefully details the extent of his casual contacts with Bronner in order to reassure the reader that his opinions are not influenced by a personal friendship with the man.

Is Rosner a bad liberal?

Bronner should continue in his assignment with his byline automatically followed by

Ethan Bronner's son serves in the Israeli Army.

.....as should have been the case already. Hoyt did the Times a service by forcing Keller to face this issue.