Last year, Ramadan anti-Israel incitement and violence — in the guise of a Jihad for Jerusalem — saw many in the mainstream media ignore the historic patterns of provocation by the Palestinian leadership and instead echo their pretexts blaming Israel. Media reporting this year follows the same pattern.
CBS and AFP ring in the New Year with old bad habits: deleting the Palestinian rocket attacks which precipitated today's Israeli strike in the Gaza Strip and omitting that Israel targeted Hamas.
CBS's Elizabeth Palmer flips reality on its head, falsely depicting Hamas' attacks on millions of Israeli civilians as a "counterattack" and "retaliation," ignoring that Hamas began the fighting with rocket attacks on Jerusalem and southern Israel Monday night.
CBS has failed to correct the straightforward factual error in a Nov. 21 article and headline that former spy Jonathan Pollard is free to "return to Israel." He has never before lived in Israel.
CBS's false depiction of Israel's demolition of a handful of illegally tents and pens dangerously built in a long-established military firing zone as the destruction of an entire Palestinian village is one small step away from Congresswoman Ilhan Omar's vitriolic "ethnic cleansing" charge.
There were a few problems in this week’s 60 Minutes segment on the construction of Rawabi, a planned city in the West Bank by Palestinian-American businessman Bashar Masri. But overall, the sneering and aggressive tone the television news magazine historically directed at Israel under the leadership of now-disgraced executive producer Jeff Fager — and correspondent Bob Simon — seems to have greatly diminished.
What were the biggest failures in 2018 media coverage of Israel? In April, The New York Times published what Amb. Dani Dayan called “the correction of the year” after the Gray Lady wrote that Palestinian Authority payments to terrorists and their families are a “far-right conspiracy theory.” A lot happened since April.
CAMERA prompts correction of a CBSN report which falsely stated that Palestinians had fired "hundreds of rockets at Israel's military." CBSN corrects, stating that, in fact, Palestinians fired hundreds of rockets at Israeli cities and civilian targets.
