Early media coverage of Hizbullah's aggression against Israel presented a generally sound picture of cause and effect, of the terrorist group's agenda and of Israel's right to remove the menace to its people. The BBC, however, is a frequent exception.
Mainline Christian churches and their umbrella organizations have routinely characterized the Arab-Israeli conflict as a consequence of Israeli intransigence and have ignored Arab refusal to accept the existence of a Jewish State in the Middle East. This trend persists in the face of recent attacks by Hamas and Hezbollah.
A July 27 article in the New York Times about four UN officers killed in an outpost hit by Israeli fire ("U.N. Says It Protested to Israel for 6 Hours During Attack That Killed 4 Observers in Lebanon" by Warren Hoge), omitted crucial context about Hezbollah firing from or near UN positions.
The Shiite leader of Hezbollah has a vast Iranian budget to pursue his anti-Israel and anti-American agenda. The terrorist leader uses these resources to incite attacks on Jews, Israel, and the U.S.
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.
No doubt the control of information–a critical tool in psychological warfare–is part of any combatant's war arsenal. But when a July 22 ABC "World News Saturday" report on the Israeli bombing of television transmitters accuses Israel of controlling information "to sway public opinion," it is ABC which is controlling – and withholding – information.
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.
On May 8, 2006, MIT Professor Noam Chomsky began an eight-day visit to Lebanon, receiving a hero's wecome. He met with Hezbollah leaders, embraced them and repeated their rhetoric, publicly rejecting their disarming (contrary to UNSC Resolution 1559). Now that the terrorist group has launched a war, he mildly rebukes them as "irresponsible" but continues to wish them well.
An independent panel commissioned by BBC's Board of Governors stated that the BBC does not consistently give a full and fair account of the Israeli-Arab conflict. Nowhere is this more evident than in the network's reporting on the latest crisis in Israel, Lebanon and Gaza.
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.
