Journalists often characterize their job as “holding power to account.” The Society of Professional Journalists, for example, professes that journalists have “a special obligation to serve as watchdogs over public affairs and government,” and that they must be “vigilant and courageous about holding those with power accountable.”
One of the media’s clearest examples of failure, in this regard, is its treatment of the United Nations. While the precise extent of its power is subject to much debate, it is undeniable that it has substantial influence. Indeed, at its very core, it is simply a collective body of national governments making decisions that shape the daily lives of their constituents.
Yet were one to read every page of The New York Times—the “paper of record”—one would find little to no scrutiny of the institution.
That’s not to say the United Nations is never mentioned. To the contrary, major media outlets are constantly mentioning it. A LexisNexis search of mentions of the United Nations from Jan. 1 of this year through the morning of Nov. 13 returns 499 New York Times international edition articles, 1,352 CNN International stories, and 3,254 Associated Press reports. By contrast, the European Union returns substantially fewer stories: 381 from New York Times international edition, 624 from CNN International, and 1,509 from the Associated Press.
What is almost entirely absent from these thousands of stories mentioning the United Nations is scrutiny.
It’s not like there is no reason for scrutiny. The world body is, after all, notoriously corrupt. U.N. actors have committed unspeakable crimes and abuses around the world. U.N. bodies devoted, in name, to causes like human rights have been co-opted by the world’s worst human-rights abusers: China, Cuba, Pakistan. Fewer than half of the members of the U.N. Human Rights Council are described as “free” by Freedom House.
The United Nations is regularly cited by journalists in stories about Israel. But there are countless reasons a truth-seeking journalist would exercise caution in doing so.
Take the case of the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on the Palestinians, Francesca Albanese, who admitted that she could not remain impartial on the subject even before being appointed to her position. The United Nations put so little effort into ensuring the position was filled by someone with a sterling reputation to sit in judgment of the Jewish state that it picked someone whose rhetoric mirrors that of neo-Nazis, exemplified by her claim that the United States was “subjugated by the Jewish lobby.”
The closest that the Times has gotten this year to exposing this absurdity was to bury in articles that “Israeli and American Jewish groups denounce her for accusing Israel of committing genocide, an accusation they reject,” or that they “argued she minimized the violence carried out by Palestinian militant groups like Hamas.” A Times subscriber would be blissfully unaware that she has also been criticized for absurdly claiming Europe is selling specially trained rape dogs to Israel or that she was widely condemned for her Holocaust and antisemitism revisionism to depict both as less about Jews and more about Muslims.
Such absurdities strike at the heart of the credibility (or rather, lack thereof) of Albanese and the United Nations, which is exactly why the outlets like the Times should be reporting on them. “The public is entitled to as much detail as possible to judge the reliability and motives of sources,” the SPJ’s Code of Ethics instructs. Perhaps if the media did its job and scrutinized the world body, it wouldn’t feel so emboldened to appoint a deranged antisemite to continue an inquisition against the Jewish state.
The same is true for the U.N.’s Commission of Inquiry against Israel. Outlet after outlet has, without elaborating on, inquiring into or cautioning readers about the source, referred to a “U.N. commission” or “investigations” concluding one alleged Israeli atrocity or another. Consequently, this U.N. body is enabled as it ludicrously accuses Israel of using imaginary weapons to murder children, contradicts itself over basic facts, and—once again—weaves antisemitic conspiracy theories about the “Jewish lobby.”
The conclusions of these U.N. “experts” don’t just get repeated in one-off stories by incurious journalists. Activists and other institutions build on them to recycle their poorly evidenced allegations.
The International Court of Justice, which is currently hearing multiple cases accusing Israel of “genocide,” is notorious for uncritically accepting as fact the reports and conclusions of such U.N. actors. State governments often take the resulting ICJ opinions as persuasive authority for their own domestic legal systems. It’s a direct line from the delusions of a lunatic like Francesca Albanese to legal consequences that mainstream media is leaving unaccountable.
There are a plethora of other controversies and scandals plaguing the United Nations, including other agenda-driven activists borrowing the imprimatur of the international organization to advance personal or political interests. The Islamic Republic of Iran was just elected to “the main U.N. body shaping the world organization’s priorities on women’s rights, human rights, disarmament and counterterrorism,” in the words of UN Watch. The same organization has also exposed numerous instances of U.N. “experts” receiving large sums of cash from malign actors like China.
The dynamic between journalism and the power that is the United Nations is the antithesis of the vigilance and courage journalistic institutions claim to embrace. By amplifying the agency without subjecting it to even minimal scrutiny, journalists have embraced the role of lapdog, not that of a watchdog.
