FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The Israeli-Palestinian war has a profound effect on the children of the region. As NBC‘s Tom Brokaw put it on the April 11 Nightly News, “All of this is making the children of war, on both sides, grow old before their time.” The piece that followed, however, concerned only children on one side. Correspondent Keith […]
As violence continues in Israel and Palestine, so does debate over what exactly happened during Israel’s invasion of the Jenin refugee camp. Israel barred journalists and aid workers alike from the camp during the invasions, but as access restrictions have eased, human rights groups have issued graphic reports detailing evidence of human rights violations by […]
Even before the bloody events of April, more than 300 Israelis and 1,200 Palestinians had been killed since the current Intifada began in September 2000 (Boston Globe, 3/31/02). Thousands more people have been injured. U.S. media coverage of the conflict was intense as Palestinian militants carried out several major suicide bombings and the Israeli Defense Forces […]
On January 10, FAIR put out an Action Alert asking people to write to National Public Radio about an apparent blind spot in its Middle East reporting. NPR had been referring to the situation in Israel and Palestine around the New Year as a time of “relative calm” or “comparative quiet,” explaining at one point […]
ACTION: Please contact the NPR’s ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin to ask for an end to NPR’s double standard in reporting on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and for equal treatment of all victims of violence, regardless of ethnicity or nationality.
There was an 81 percent likelihood that an Israeli death would be reported on NPR, but only a 34 percent likelihood that a Palestinian death would be.
American journalists probably feel more pressure about their coverage of Israel and Palestine than any other subject. That is true even of Extra!; despite having a readership that is overwhelmingly sympathetic to our progressive critique of the media, our Middle East coverage invariably elicits angry letters and complaints, sometimes resulting in canceled subscriptions. According to […]
“Excessive force” should be used against Palestinian civilians, including “interrogation methods that border on psychological and/or physical torture.” These are extreme proposals–but it is their author, Anthony Cordesman, to whom ABC News regularly turns to in wartime to provide military analysis. Cordesman made these recommendations in an October 2000 report released by the Center for […]
“The Palestinians began the latest protests with old-style demonstrations. Then they started shooting at Israeli towns. Now they are attacking settlements. It’s not at all clear what the next step will be, but every step seems to get bloodier.” —”Into the War Zone,” Time (12/4/00) In war—especially the kind of war that has now broken […]
U.S. media have been ignoring or downplaying an important dimension of the ongoing turmoil in the Middle East. On October 7, the United Nations Security Council voted 14 to 0 for a resolution condemning Israel’s “excessive use of force against Palestinians” and deploring the “provocation” of Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon’s September 28 visit to […]
“The forces of terrorism are in a coalition, engaged in an information warfare campaign against Israel, a campaign in which the American news media is serving as the witting or unwitting ally of Arafat.” So House speaker Newt Gingrich (R.-Ga.) told the cheering audience at AIPAC’s (American-Israeli Political Action Committee) national convention (C-SPAN, 4/8/97). Democrats […]
As virtually all media outlets celebrated the “magnificent spectacle of peacemaking” in Washington (Newsweek, 9/27/93), leading media voices were often more jubilant than accurate in their reporting. Even as the Israelis and Palestinians were lauded for “emerging from the clutches of history” (Time, 9/13/93), too many journalists clung to past habits of bias in their […]
