Since Hezbollah first attacked Israeli towns and troops on July 12, hundreds of thousands of Israeli and Lebanese civilians have fled their homes. While the Associated Press reports in story after story about Lebanese displaced, the wire service has had little to say about Israeli displaced.
In a July 19 Los Angeles Times Op-Ed, UCLA English professor Saree Makdisi minimizes Hezbollah's provocation of the crisis with Israel by distorting the chronology of events.
A few days after Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote on July 18 that Israel is a "mistake" because "the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism," the newspaper published CAMERA's response.
On July 22, the Philadelphia Inquirer published an unsigned editorial that, with unabashed moral equivalency, obscures the differences between Israel and its neighbors in terms of hate education, and erases the asymmetry between Israel and Hezbollah.
Henry Siegman has a history of dishonesty when writing about the Arab-Israeli conflict. So it is perhaps no surprise that the Los Angeles Times found it necessary to publish a correction to demonstrably false assertions in Siegman's June 18, 2006 Op-Ed.
As Israel began responding to Hezbollahí¢â‚¬™s cross-border assault, the Associated Press was rewriting the history of conflict between Lebanon and Israelwith a skewed timeline entitled "A look at key events in Lebanon-Israel conflict." Update: A piece dispatched by AP less than a week later does a better job.
Ha;aretz has in the past revealed its complete disregard for journalistic norms by describing its "quasi-policy" of ignoring complaints about factual errors in news stories. And now, once again, a significant factual error has gone uncorrected in the pages of the newspaper.
Even while Hamas officials unequivocally stress the signing of prisoners' document does not mean the group accepts Israel's legitimacy, some news organizations continue to wrongly claim that by signing the document, Hamas leaders "effectively endorse a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict." Other news organizations, however, have significantly improved their reporting on the document.
The San Francisco Chronicle claims to "strive for accuracy" and promises to "quickly correct errors or misleading statements." Yet its opinion pages serve as a haven for patently inaccurate anti-Israel allegations, and no corrections appear to be forthcoming.
Much of the media is misreporting the substance of the referendum proposed by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and the so-called Prisoners' Document presented in the referendum. Reports claiming the document is a "peace plan" or that it accepts a two-state solution recognizing Israel are selling an idea of Hamas moderation that has little, if any, basis. While such overenthusiastic extrapolation might be acceptable in an opinion or analysis piece, news stories should stick to reporting the facts.
