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."
In their evening broadcasts of June 22, ABC and NBC reported as fact that Israel killed three Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, despite the fact that the circumstances surrounding their deaths were disputed.
On April 24, ABC's Peter Jennings incorrectly reported the location of a Palestinian suicide bombing:
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.”
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.
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.