As in the case of so much journalism today, the words are high-minded and the self-congratulatory claims of unstinting rigor constant while the actual product is a depressing testament to shoddiness and bias - and New York Times columnist Jonathan Kuttab is no exception.
Usual fare on cable TV's Discovery Channel — documentaries about inventions, nature, and archeology — gave way recently to an unabashedly anti-Israel series entitled "Beirut to Bosnia" and reported by British journalist Robert Fisk.
Boasting a constituency drawn heavily from America's best educated and most politically active, National Public Radio enjoys a unique vantage from which to reach and influence policy-makers.
Over the last decade the Public Broadcasting Service, supported by tax dollars, viewer contributions and, increasingly, by private corporations and foundations, has aired at least fifteen documentaries on the Arab-Israeli conflict, and no more than three of these can reasonably be described as balanced.
Henry Kissinger's observation of Anthony Lewis, "He's always wrong," applies not only to the columnist's colossal misappraisals of the murderous Khmer Rouge and the Ayatollah Khomeini, and to his inane prediction that the Gulf War would become another Vietnam, but, most aptly, to his relentless misrepresentations of truth about Israel and the Middle East
