TBE doesn’t usually engage in journalism, much less (open source) investigative journalism, but sometimes we decide not to simply pass a story on to someone else, as we usually would.

This tale begins with our catching up on some reading. We were looking at some neglected feeds on our RSS reader and came to Stephen Walt’s FP blog. Innocently scrolling down we came to a post about an Iran conference convened by the Israel Project, a US propaganda outfit that toes the “stopping settlements is “a kind of ethnic cleansing”” line, according to J Street. Not having attended the conference, we don’t know what was said. But if the materials on the group’s website are any indication, it was probably quite similar to a little ditty sung by former presidential candidate John McCain in one of his more unguarded moments. None of this is altogether shocking in a US context.
What did surprise us, however, was a panel, “How to Get Published and Write a Letter to the Editor with journalist and Reuters Editor Alan Elsner.” Why, we wondered, would an editor at Reuters, which, as far as we know, hews to US journalistic standards of objectivity, lead a panel at a conference run by a group that is almost certainly attempting to influence the coverage of the news organization for which he works? A quick google news search indicates that he is an editor at Reuters’ Washington, DC bureau. Past postings, according to his personal website, have included stints as Jerusalem correspondent (1980-85) and chief political correspondent (1994-2000).
With those facts in mind, and lacking any contact information for Mr. Elsner himself, we contacted Reuters’ public relations department. After a little back-and-forth, we received the following email:
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