ABC

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.

July 11, 2003

“Nightline” Over the Line

ABC has once again stonewalled, refusing to correct a clear cut factual error from its June 11 "Nightline" report with Jim Wooten about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which lacked any semblance of objectivity and impartiality. The theme of Wooten's one-sided broadcast is that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is solely responsible for the ongoing violence, and that Palestinian President Yasir Arafat is a hapless victim bullied by Palestinian "militants."

January 3, 2003

CAMERA Op-Ed: Blaming the Media, With Reason

A respectful dissent, please, from Gary Rosenblatt’s column, “Don’t Just Blame the Media,” (Nov. 8). Rosenblatt asserts that “for the most part, mainstream American coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been fair.”

January 2, 2003

CAMERA Op-Ed: Nightline Sanitizes Roots of Terror

Terrorist savagery against Israeli civilians, often in the form of suicidal, bomb-strapped Palestinians, has yet to elicit from most journalists and major media anything close to honest coverage of the true causes of the onslaught. Instead, vacuous explanations, ones that essentially repeat Arab arguments, prevail.

July 1, 2002

Jennings’ World

The saga of another Jennings error in reporting on Israel, followed by the network's outlandish rationalizations and its eventual, slippery correction, captures exactly the ethos of a media outlet that barely pretends to disguise its advocacy of the Palestinian cause.