"The harm done by Jayson Blair in The New York Times newsroom may, in the end, be offset by a bit of good it does elsewhere. The incident is serving as a wake-up call for journalism, prompting many papers ... to redouble efforts at accuracy and accountability," wrote Christine Chinlund, the Boston Globe ombudsman, in a soul-searching column on media accountability.
"Israel, in short, is an anachronism" charges Tony Judt in the Los Angeles Times and the New York Review of Books in arguing for the elimination of the Jewish state in favor of a binational secular state. He falsely singles out Israel as being the only modern, democratic nation based on "ethno-religious criteria."
Henry Chu's Sept. 27 article about the Temple Mount is yet another example of the Los Angeles Times' sloppy reporting and non-responsiveness to readers' feedback concerning factual errors ("Faith and Rage Intersect at Jerusalem Holy Site").
In his Sept. 11 op-ed, Daniel Benjamin writes: "[T]he last two years have witnessed an unprecedented wave of terrorism outside the United States, including attacks in Bali, Moscow, Mombasa and Riyadh, to name only a few of the most lethal strikes." The country which is the most frequent target of lethal terrorist strikes is conspicuously absent from this list.
It seems that some members of the media are having a tough time differentiating the terms of the American brokered "road map" from Palestinian unilateral demands on Israel. Namely, while Palestinians have conditioned their cease-fire on the release of thousands of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli prisons (among other demands), the "road map" plan, drawn up by the United States, European Union, Russia, and the United Nations, has nothing at all to say about Palestinian prisoners.
Misrepresenting civilian deaths in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, guest columnist Rashid Khalidi erroneously reported June 17 in the Los Angeles Times that "The U.S. media regularly fail to mention that three times as many Palestinians as Israelis–most on both sides civilians–have been killed since September 2000, when the second intifada began" ("Can Hamas Cut a Deal for Peace?")
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.
Newspaper headlines about the Hamas terrorist bombing in Jerusalem — for which the death tally has now reached 17 — and Israel's strike against Hamas in Gaza that killed four members of that organization and five bystanders have very often failed to represent events clearly.
In his May 26 article entitled, "Maneuvering Over "˜Road Map' for the Mideast," Los Angeles Times columnist Ronald Brownstein erroneously reported:
Over the last couple of days, the Los Angeles Times news coverage of Ariel Sharon's views on the U.S.-backed "road map" and his Cabinet's approval of the plan unfairly characterized the prime minister and contained several other examples of bias.