Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis

Based on Wikipedia: Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis

The Watchdog That Watches the Watchdogs

In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon. The war was brutal and controversial, generating intense media coverage that many American supporters of Israel found deeply troubling. Out of that crucible emerged an organization with a name that sounds almost bureaucratically neutral: the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, known by its acronym CAMERA.

But there was nothing neutral about its mission.

CAMERA was born specifically to challenge what its founders saw as anti-Israel bias in American journalism, starting with The Washington Post's coverage of that Lebanon invasion. Four decades later, it has grown into one of the most influential—and controversial—media monitoring organizations in the United States, claiming over 65,000 paying members and chapters in major cities from New York to Los Angeles, with an outpost in Israel itself.

What Media Monitoring Actually Means

To understand CAMERA, you first need to understand what media monitoring organizations do. In theory, they serve a democratic function: holding journalists accountable, catching errors, and ensuring the public gets accurate information. Many exist across the political spectrum, scrutinizing coverage of everything from environmental policy to gun rights.

CAMERA's approach follows a specific playbook. When the organization spots what it considers an inaccurate statement about Israel or the Middle East in a news outlet, it gathers evidence, contacts the publication, and requests a correction. On its website, CAMERA lists 46 news organizations it says have issued corrections based on its work. That's the polite version of what they do.

The more aggressive version involves organizing protests, purchasing full-page newspaper advertisements, and—perhaps most controversially—encouraging sponsors and donors to withhold funding from media outlets whose coverage CAMERA deems unfair to Israel.

The Rise of Andrea Levin

Every organization is shaped by its leaders, and CAMERA's trajectory cannot be separated from Andrea Levin. She founded the Boston chapter in 1988 and took over as executive director in 1991, inheriting an organization with roughly 1,000 members.

Under her leadership, membership exploded to 55,000 by 2007. More importantly, she transformed CAMERA from a modest letter-writing operation into a force that major news organizations couldn't ignore—whether they wanted to or not.

In 2002, The Jewish Daily Forward named Levin America's fifth most influential Jewish citizen. The newspaper's reasoning was revealing: "Media-monitoring was the great proxy war of the last year, and its general is Andrea Levin."

That military metaphor—proxy war, general—tells you something about how CAMERA's supporters view the stakes. This isn't about journalism for its own sake. It's about a larger struggle.

The NPR Campaign

Perhaps no episode better illustrates CAMERA's methods than its long-running battle with National Public Radio.

In 2001, CAMERA released a detailed report analyzing two months of NPR's Middle East coverage. The title left little doubt about the conclusion: "A Record of Bias: National Public Radio's Coverage of the Arab-Israeli Conflict." The report accused NPR of a "striking anti-Israel tilt" with "severe bias, error and lack of balance commonplace."

CAMERA didn't stop at publishing its findings. The organization launched a boycott campaign and demanded the firing of NPR's foreign editor, Loren Jenkins. CAMERA accused Jenkins of comparing Israel to Nazi Germany in his writings and letting his personal views contaminate NPR's coverage.

NPR's ombudsman at the time, Jeffrey Dvorkin, pushed back hard. In a 2002 interview, he accused CAMERA of using selective citations and subjective definitions of bias to manufacture its conclusions. Then he reached for a loaded comparison of his own.

"It's a kind of McCarthyism, frankly, that bashes us and causes people to question our commitment to doing this story fairly. And it exacerbates the legitimate anxieties of many in the Jewish community about the survival of Israel."

McCarthyism. It's a word that would come up again and again in discussions of CAMERA.

The Wikipedia Infiltration

If the NPR campaign represented CAMERA's traditional approach—public pressure, organized letter-writing, donor mobilization—then what happened in 2008 revealed something different entirely.

That April, The Electronic Intifada, an online publication covering Palestinian issues, reported on the existence of a Google group set up by CAMERA. The group's stated purpose, according to emails that were later excerpted in Harper's Magazine, was to "help us keep Israel-related entries on Wikipedia from becoming tainted by anti-Israel editors."

What made this remarkable wasn't just the goal—plenty of interest groups try to shape Wikipedia content. It was the strategy.

According to the leaked communications, CAMERA encouraged pro-Israel editors to initially focus on topics unrelated to Israel. The idea was to build up a track record of seemingly neutral contributions, gain the trust of the Wikipedia community, and eventually be elected as administrators—the volunteer editors who have special powers to block other users and protect pages from editing.

Once they achieved administrator status, these editors would be positioned to suppress pro-Palestinian editors while supporting pro-Israel content. It was, in essence, a long-term infiltration campaign.

Wikipedia administrators eventually identified and sanctioned five editors involved in the campaign. Their ruling was pointed: Wikipedia's open nature "is fundamentally incompatible with the creation of a private group to surreptitiously coordinate editing."

CAMERA's Gilead Ini initially wouldn't confirm whether the leaked messages were genuine, but acknowledged there was a CAMERA email campaign. He argued it adhered to Wikipedia's rules—a claim the sanctions rather conclusively refuted.

"Israel's Jewish Defamers"

In October 2007, CAMERA organized a conference with a title that tells you everything about its worldview: "Israel's Jewish Defamers."

The targets weren't Palestinian activists or Arab media outlets. They were Jewish intellectuals and publications that had criticized Israeli policies: Richard Falk of Princeton University, writer Norman Finkelstein, former New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, and Haaretz, one of Israel's oldest and most respected newspapers.

The conference featured notable speakers, including writer Cynthia Ozick and Harvard psychiatrist Kenneth Levin, who compared the Jewish critics to chronically abused children—suggesting their criticisms of Israel stemmed from a kind of psychological damage rather than legitimate disagreement.

The responses from those named were telling.

Anthony Lewis told the New York Sun the conference was "about a nonexistent phenomenon," noting that Jewish criticism of Israeli policies was not the same as defaming Israel. David Landau, then editor-in-chief of Haaretz, refused to comment at all, calling it "a matter of policy and principle" not to respond to CAMERA, which he dismissed as "McCarthyite."

There was that word again.

The McCarthyism Question

When critics repeatedly reach for the same comparison—McCarthyism, the 1950s anti-communist witch hunts led by Senator Joseph McCarthy—it's worth pausing to consider what they mean.

McCarthyism, at its core, involved using accusations of disloyalty to silence dissent, creating an atmosphere where people were afraid to express certain views for fear of professional and personal consequences. McCarthy's targets were often guilty of nothing more than holding unpopular opinions or associating with people who did.

CAMERA's critics argue that the organization operates similarly: that it doesn't merely seek accurate coverage but rather seeks to suppress any coverage unfavorable to Israel, regardless of whether that coverage is true. That it targets journalists and academics not for factual errors but for reaching unwelcome conclusions. That it creates a climate of intimidation.

Journalist Robert I. Friedman, writing in The Nation as early as 1987, put it bluntly: "CAMERA, the A.D.L., AIPAC and the rest of the lobby don't want fairness, but bias in their favor. And they are prepared to use McCarthyite tactics, as well as the power and money of pro-Israel PACs, to get whatever Israel wants."

CAMERA's supporters would reject this characterization entirely. They would say the organization simply holds journalists to basic standards of accuracy, and that the real bias runs in the other direction—against Israel. They would note that CAMERA has documented genuine errors that news organizations subsequently corrected.

The Accuracy Paradox

Here's what makes CAMERA fascinating as a case study in media criticism: the organization's name promises accuracy, but its critics consistently accuse it of caring about something else entirely.

Journalist Gershom Gorenberg, writing in The American Prospect, captured this tension: "Like others engaged in the narrative wars, it does not understand the difference between advocacy and accuracy."

It's a crucial distinction. Accuracy means getting the facts right, period—whether those facts are flattering or unflattering to any particular side. Advocacy means promoting a particular viewpoint, selecting facts that support your position while minimizing those that don't.

When CAMERA caught publications printing a quote falsely attributed to Israeli military leader Moshe Ya'alon—"The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people"—and successfully pushed for corrections from The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and others, that was accuracy work. The quote wasn't real. It shouldn't have been printed.

But when CAMERA organized a conference attacking Jewish intellectuals for criticizing Israeli policies, or orchestrated a covert campaign to control Wikipedia content, or demanded that journalists be fired for their editorial perspectives—was that accuracy or advocacy?

Gorenberg's assessment of the Wikipedia affair was damning: "CAMERA is ready to exempt itself from the demands for accuracy that it aims at the media."

The Support Network

Despite its controversies—or perhaps because of them—CAMERA has attracted notable supporters over the years.

Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, Senator Joe Lieberman, Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, and former Israeli cabinet minister Natan Sharansky have all spoken at CAMERA fundraising events. Congressman Tom Lantos served on the organization's advisory board.

These aren't fringe figures. They represent a significant strand of mainstream American Jewish opinion that sees CAMERA as performing a necessary service—pushing back against media coverage they perceive as fundamentally unfair to Israel.

Former New York Times public editor Daniel Okrent, whose job was essentially to criticize his own newspaper, actually thanked CAMERA in his 2006 book for maintaining "an evenness of tone and an openness of communication no matter how much they disagreed" with his columns. That's a notably different assessment than McCarthyism.

What It All Means

The story of CAMERA illuminates something larger about how information warfare works in the modern era.

Media monitoring organizations exist across the political spectrum, and they serve a genuine function. Journalists do make mistakes. Coverage can be biased, consciously or unconsciously. Corrections matter. Accountability matters.

But the line between monitoring and manipulation is blurry, and it becomes blurrier still when the monitors have a clear stake in the outcome. CAMERA has never pretended to be neutral about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was founded specifically to advance a pro-Israel perspective in American media.

The question is whether an organization with an explicit agenda can also be a reliable arbiter of accuracy. CAMERA's supporters would say yes—that facts are facts regardless of who points them out. CAMERA's critics would say the organization's track record, from the NPR boycott to the Wikipedia infiltration to the "Jewish Defamers" conference, demonstrates that accuracy is subordinate to ideology.

Edward Said, the Palestinian-American intellectual and Columbia professor, offered perhaps the most cutting assessment back in 1988: "Not even the Israeli government has ventured arguments as extreme as CAMERA."

The Broader Landscape

CAMERA doesn't operate in isolation. It's part of a larger ecosystem of pro-Israel advocacy organizations in the United States, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (better known as AIPAC), the Anti-Defamation League, and dozens of others. Political scientist Cheryl Rubenberg, writing in 1986, identified CAMERA as part of "the Israeli lobby"—a term that itself became controversial in later years.

The organization also has an international dimension. CAMERA-UK, formerly known as UK Media Watch and BBC Watch, applies similar scrutiny to British media coverage of Israel.

On college campuses, CAMERA runs student programs, offering "representative positions that include compensation and training in Israel" to students willing to counter what the organization calls misinformation about the Middle East. Critics have characterized these as paid positions to write anti-Palestinian content.

The Permanent Campaign

More than four decades after its founding, CAMERA shows no signs of slowing down. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues, American media continues to cover it, and disagreements about that coverage remain as intense as ever.

Whether CAMERA is a necessary corrective to genuine media bias or an ideological pressure group masquerading as a watchdog depends largely on where you stand on the underlying conflict. What's undeniable is that the organization has shaped the landscape of American journalism about Israel—through the corrections it has won, the journalists it has targeted, and the chilling effect its critics say it has created.

In a media environment increasingly fractured along ideological lines, CAMERA offers a preview of what happens when well-funded, highly organized groups decide that accuracy means getting coverage that supports their side. They can achieve real results. Whether those results serve the public interest is another question entirely.

The watchdog watches the watchdogs. But who watches the watchdog's watchdog?