ABC

December 16, 2004

The ABC’s of One-Sided Journalism

ABC News has once again issued a one-sided report on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, highlighting and sympathetically portraying Palestinian losses due to Israeli military actions, while downplaying the initial Palestinian attacks, and their impact on Israelis, that prompted the Israeli action.
May 21, 2004

WABC-TV Refuses to Correct Jim Dolan’s Factual Errors

Since late April, CAMERA has been working hard behind the scenes to seek redress on factual errors and other distortions by Jim Dolan of New York's WABC, who reported from Israel for several days earlier that month. News Director Ken Plotnik and President and General Manager Dave Davis have stonewalled, refusing to correct several material errors and to respond to the specifics of CAMERA's concerns.
May 5, 2004

‘Nightline’ Stonewalls on Balance Issue

An April 22 "Nightline" segment by Richard Gizbert conforms to a pattern which features interviewees sharing one point of view–opposition to Israel and/or its policies and sympathy to Arab concerns. In the following letter, CAMERA presses "Nightline" to produce the date of just one broadcast within the last year which was tilted towards Israel. Though ABC officials have in the past alleged that the program's record is "even on the whole," the network has yet to respond to CAMERA's simple request.
March 18, 2004

Coverage of Unwitting Palestinian Boy-Bomber

The exploitation of Palestinian children in attacks against Israel is a troubling trend which deserves media coverage. Yet, some news outlets did not even cover the story of 11-year-old Abdullah Quran. Others, most notably the Boston Globe and MSNBC's "The Abrams Report," gave the incident the prominence it deserved.
January 15, 2004

Confusing Murder and Martyrdom at ABC

In an otherwise informative report on ABC World News Tonight (Jan. 14) about Raeem Al-Raiyshi, the female suicide bomber who killed four Israelis after duping guards to let her bypass the metal detectors at a checkpoint, correspondent Hilary Brown referred to Raiyshi's choice of "martydom" over motherhood. "It seems she loved martyrdom more [than her children]," Ms. Brown concluded.

December 26, 2003

Measuring Balance at “Nightline”: Divergent Views Need Not Apply

"Nightline and ABC News devote a significant amount of time to both Israeli and Palestinian issues and we consider our record even on the whole," wrote Kerry Smith Marash, ABC's VP for editorial quality, in her Nov. 13 letter to CAMERA. If the Dec. 2 "Nightline" focusing on "Israeli issues"–the 27 pilots objecting to Israel's targeted killings followed by a piece on the "demographic bomb"–was meant to balance the tendentious Oct. 9 broadcast featuring the suicide bomber as victim and criticizing Israel's security barrier, then it was a dismal failure.

November 14, 2003

Lebanon’s Civil War and Jennings’ Historical Revisionism

In his Oct. 23 report on the twentieth anniversary of the Marine barracks bombing, Peter Jennings provided a highly slanted account of Lebanon's tumultuous civil war years, twice mentioning Israel as a destabilizing factor but not mentioning the Syrian occupation or the Palestinians' role in fomenting violence and chaos.
September 4, 2003

Nightline’s Moral Equivalence

Journalists covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are often accused of drawing a false moral equivalence between Palestinian terrorist attacks and Israeli military anti-terrorist actions – what they frequently refer to as “the cycle of violence” or “tit-for-tat violence.” ABC Nightline’s Ted Koppel tried to deflect such criticism in advance by introducing an August 21, 2003 segment by Mike Lee about Israeli and Palestinian mothers who lost children.