David M. Litman is the U.S. Media Research Manager at the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), where he covers anti-Israel bias in the media. Previously, David worked at an independent watchdog organization focused on anti-Israel bias, international law, and human rights issues in the United Nations and international courts. David graduated magna cum laude from Case Western Reserve School of Law and holds a BA in International Studies.
Contrary to CNN's depiction, it wasn’t that this was a “he said she said” issue, and the network just failed by not waiting for the “she said.” The issue was that they took Hamas’s claims at face value, and then they gave the terrorist organization’s claims equal weight to that of Israel’s, notwithstanding the IDF’s claims were backed up by audio and visual evidence.
When a Human Rights Watch activist was given two chances on MSNBC to talk about the situation in Israel, she used the word “terrorism” only once. No, not in reference to the mass murder, rape, mutilation, torture, and burning alive of 1,400 Israeli men, women, and children at the hands of Palestinian terrorists. Rather, she used it to describe the Israeli Defense Force’s urging of Gazans to evacuate northern Gaza where the IDF intends to strike hard against those Palestinian terrorists.
The number of erroneous and seriously misleading claims contained in just this article raises serious concerns about USA Today’s commitment to accuracy. That the errors all seem to downplay Palestinian terrorism or distort the Israeli and Jewish history similarly raises concern about USA Todays’ commitment to fairness in reporting.
If Harper’s cannot get these basic, well-known facts about the Gaza Strip right, how can readers trust anything else the magazine says about the conflict?
In the span of two sentences, CNBC grossly misrepresented Hamas’s goals and, in what reads as an attempted justification for Hamas, got both the law and the facts wrong.
At MSNBC, even when Jews are being cruelly slaughtered by the hundreds, they cannot be centered as the victims; after all, they probably had it coming.
The European Journal of International Law proclaims a “commitment to publishing…a diverse range of contributors.” Will it allow a handful of loud, partisan activists to intimidate it into compromising on its own ideals?
Without being privy to CNN’s internal decision-making, one can only guess what factors drive its coverage of the region, and why the one Jewish state is placed under the microscope in a way that no other state is. But it seems fair to say that the content and makeup of its Middle East page isn’t being driven by genuine journalistic motivations.
CNN’s obsessive and slanted reporting continues to leave its audience without important information necessary to understand events. Notably, the omissions all work to downplay and omit the terrorism and violence being waged against Israel, instead highlighting only the decontextualized responses of the Israeli Defense Forces.
Ali Velshi spent much of his Sunday morning weaving a narrative of an evil Jewish state, threading together outright lies with material omissions to tell his false tale of a brutal, undemocratic apartheid state.
