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.
In a familiar syndrome, many otherwise impartial American journalists, newly posted in Israel, slip quickly in their reporting into unmistakably hostile views of the country. Why?
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.
The Associated Press (AP) has adopted the word “militia” to refer to Palestinian terrorist groups such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades. Not only are Hamas and Islamic Jihad on both the U.S. and U.N. list of international terrorist organizations, but all three share a platform of targeting and killing civilians.
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.
Ray Hanania's July 4 column contained several serious errors...The fence being built between Israel and the West Bank to protect Israelis from terrorists has nothing to do with Gaza and nothing to do with the death of Rachel Corrie.
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."
Cartoonist Joe Sacco has made it a professional goal to champion the Palestinian cause, presenting their perspectives on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in easily-accessible, comic strip form to the American public. His longest work to date on this issue is a 9-issue comic book entitled "Palestine," originally published by Fantagraphics in 1993 and republished in book form in 2002 with an introduction by noted Palestinian polemicist Edward Said. Written after a 2-month backpacking stint in the Gaza Strip during the first Intifada, the comic book depicts Israeli interrogators, soldiers, and Jewish settlers brutalizing and harassing innocent Palestinians.
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 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.