Covering the recent controversy over building and demolition orders in the Silwan neighborhood of Jerusalem, New York Times reporter Christine Hauser credulously repeated false allegations from the extremist anti-Israel group which calls itself the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions.
Carolynne Wheeler, a freelancer for the Globe and Mail, writes as if she were on the scene of the Sharon-Abbas meeting, stating "Palestinian leaders left the meeting in Mr. Sharon's flag-draped residence in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City grim-faced." Only, she couldn't have been there, because the summit actually took place in the western part of the city, not the Old City. Other journalists have been fired pretending to attend events.
USA Today presents a misleading, one-sided picture of home
demolitions in Israel's capital in “Jerusalem's future banging on
residents' doors; Several dozen Palestinian homes slated for demolition,”
June 21.
In a June 7 Los Angeles Times article dealing, to a large extent, with competing Arab and Jewish claims to Jerusalem, Los Angeles Times bureau chief Laura King repeatedly adopts tendentious language which wrongly minimizes Jewish ties to the city.
In response to CAMERA's concerns about an Associated Press article on the wire today covering Temple Mount disturbances, the Jerusalem bureau has responded that it stands by its coverage. Noteworthy, though, is the fact that the service's report today is contradicted by another AP story from 2001.
BBC airs a weekly programme, "From Our Own Correspondent," presenting the personal perspectives of the network's news reporters on the stories they cover. What the BBC does not acknowledge is that the programme is frequently used as a platform for propaganda – a means for partisan BBC correspondents who cover world conflicts to champion the position of the side they favor.
After Israel approved building a new neighborhood in Ma'aleh Adumim, a few miles east of Jerusalem, many news reports wrongly indicated that such building would prevent Palestinians from controlling "contiguous territory" in the West Bank.
The Temple Mount is the site of the first and second Jewish Temples, destroyed in 586 BCE and 70 CE, respectively–a historic fact accepted even by Muslim authorities. Nevertheless, that fact has not stopped some journalists from reporting on the Temple Mount's significance in Jewish history cautiously, as if its status is a matter of Jewish faith, or "belief," and not archeologic evidence.
Washington Post correspondent John Ward Anderson has
teamed up with Israel’s critics in a Post "investigation"
indicting the Israeli government and Jewish groups for "consolidating
their grip on strategic locations." The result is a highly distorted account of
construction in Jerusalem with the broad implication that Jews
have no right to move into or build in predominantly Arab neighborhoods regardless of
historical and legal claims to property.
