Newspaper columnists have the right to express whatever opinion they want, but they do not have the right to disseminate inaccuracies, distortions or fabrications and present them as facts. Bryan Shuck, a student from the St. Louis Community College (Meramec campus), wrote an inflammatory column riddled with errors, including paraphrases that are the opposite in meaning to the actual quotations.
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.
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?")
The Chicago Tribune and other newspapers conceded a Dick Locher cartoon came close to anti-Semitism.
The New York Times has trouble reporting the facts straight about Middle East documents, repeatedly distorting their terms and shifting responsibility — and fault — to Israel. Recent misinformation about the road map by correspondent Steven Weisman is fuel for critics who see the paper increasingly marshaling its news pages to advance an editorial agenda.
The day after the bloody rush hour bombing of bus #14a in downtown Jerusalem, the White House stated that the obstacle to Middle East peace was the terrorist group Hamas.
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.
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.
In an article May 1 entitled "Syria Still Mourns Land Lost to Israel," Los Angeles Times correspondent Azadeh Moaveni made false assertions about Israeli actions in the Golan Heights town of Kuneitra during the 1970s which are refuted by the paper's own coverage from that time period.
The response of the student newspaper and the administration to provocative, but accurate, pro-Israel ads and to an anti-Semitic letter full of lies, is a lesson in moral confusion.