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").
One month after Christianity Today first received word from CAMERA that an August 4 on-line column by Gary Burge contains multiple factual errors, the editors have made no move to correct the record.
Jonathan Cook, a free-lance writer whose tendentious articles charging Israel with gross wrongdoing frequently appear in Egypt's Al-Ahram, in addition to other publications in the Muslim world, has received a pass from fact-checkers at the International Herald Tribune.
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.
ABC has once again stonewalled, refusing to correct a clear cut factual error from its June 11 "Nightline" report with Jim Wooten about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which lacked any semblance of objectivity and impartiality. The theme of Wooten's one-sided broadcast is that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is solely responsible for the ongoing violence, and that Palestinian President Yasir Arafat is a hapless victim bullied by Palestinian "militants."
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.
In a June 6, 2003 broadcast riddled with factual errors and misrepresentations, PBS’s “NOW with Bill Moyers” spotlighted Israeli settlements, their role in the ongoing conflict, and their possible funding via fungible American taxpayer dollars to Israel.
In his May 26 article entitled, "Maneuvering Over "˜Road Map' for the Mideast," Los Angeles Times columnist Ronald Brownstein erroneously reported:
When New York Times reporter Jayson Blair resigned amid controversy in May 2003, the Gray Lady sought to put its house in order by cutting down on factual errors. Evidently that new focus on accountability and accuracy has yet to rub off on the International Herald Tribune, which is owned by the Times and publishes material by its reporters and columnists.