On Sunday, NBC’s Meet the Press spent the majority of its program discussing the fallout of the terrorist attack in Paris, France and how the world should respond. While much of the program focused on the challenges associated with identifying and stopping such attacks, NBC News reporter Ayman Mohyeldin chose to partially blame American foreign policy for Islamic extremism. Speaking during a pre-recorded segment from Dearborn, Michigan, Mohyeldin argued that “for some, radicalization and attacks against the U.S. stems from anger at American foreign policies and wars in the Middle East.”
Ayman Mohyeldin
By Mark Finkelstein | October 6, 2014 | 7:48 AM EDT
Remember this the next time you see a report by Ayman Mohyeldin. The man NBC sends to report on doings in Muslim countries around the world can't say which extremism—Christian, Jewish or Muslim—poses the greatest current threat to civilization.
When Joe Scarborough posed that very question to the NBC reporter on today's Morning Joe, Mohyeldin punted. Instead of talking about current threats, Mohyeldin reached back almost 1,000 years, countering with talk of the Crusades.
By Mark Finkelstein | August 1, 2014 | 9:17 AM EDT
Do Gaza civilians support Hamas' military operations that use them as human shields and store weapons in their schools and mosques? Ayman Mohyeldin would have you think so. On today's Morning Joe, the NBC reporter claimed that among Gazans, Hamas' military wing is "very highly revered."
To which Israeli spokesman Mark Regev had a stunning comeback: "I mean, if you walk down the street in Gaza with an NBC camera and you ask people, well, was Hamas shooting from this building that the Israelis targeted? No, everyone will say, of course, not. Because you have a regime that is ultimately authoritarian and violent to its own people and they have that ability to control the message. It's like walking down the street in Cuba with a camera and saying do you like Fidel Castro? What can people say?" View the video after the jump.
By Jeffrey Lord | July 26, 2014 | 5:37 PM EDT
Who’da thunk it? A winning Super Bowl coach and Israel combine to teach Americans a lesson in how the media’s religion bigots operate.
The coach, of course, is Tony Dungy, the now retired coach of the Indianapolis Colts, the team he led to the 2007 Super Bowl win over the Chicago Bears. And Israel? Israel is, thank God, still Israel. (Oops! Can I still say “God”?)
By Kyle Drennen | July 22, 2014 | 9:33 AM EDT
Appearing as a guest on ABC's The View on Monday, CNN Crossfire co-host S.E. Cupp – who is reportedly in talks to join the daytime talk show – told the hosts it was justified for CNN correspondent Diana Magnay and NBC correspondent Ayman Mohyeldin to be removed from reporting in the Gaza Strip after both expressed Anti-Israel bias. [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
After Cupp noted the social media comments made by Magnay and Mohyeldin, she observed: "Look, you're a reporter and your job, no matter how passionate you are about this issue, everyone has strong feelings, your job is to be objective." Co-host Jenny McCarthy asked: "So do you think it's okay for them to lose their job?" Cupp replied: "You know, discipline was necessary. Yeah, it was."
By Connor Williams | July 21, 2014 | 11:44 AM EDT
While NBC’s coverage of the latest Israel-Palestine conflict has been distinctly anti-Israel, NBC News foreign correspondent Ayman Mohyeldin is perhaps the worst offender. Despite the reality that Hamas has repeatedly rejected Israeli attempts at a cease fire, Mohyeldin touted Palestinian talking points with surprising consistency.
This time, in a report during the July 21 edition of Morning Joe, Mohyeldin cited “Palestinian medical sources” who described the recent Israeli surgical strikes “as nothing short of a massacre.” [MP3 audio here; video below]
By Scott Whitlock | July 17, 2014 | 4:30 PM EDT
NBC pulled reporter Ayman Mohyeldin from Gaza after the journalist witnessed an Israeli air strike that killed four children. Mohyeldin also made some derisive comments about Israel on his Facebook page, writing, "The #US State Department Spokesperson just said that #Hamas is ultimately responsible for #Israel shelling and killing 4 boys who were cousins aged 9-11 because Hamas didn't accept the #ceasefire. Discuss among yourselves."
Before reporting for NBC, Mohyeldin worked for Al Jazeera. On Tuesday, he parroted Hamas's denial that they use human shields, saying, "They definitely reject the labeling of using civilians as human shields....Hamas military wing people that we've been speaking to and others...they will say that this is the nature of the battlefield that they have to fight in."
By Kyle Drennen | July 15, 2014 | 9:15 AM EDT
Reporting from the Gaza Strip during MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell Reports on July 14, NBC foreign correspondent Ayman Mohyeldin, formerly of Al Jazerra and CNN, parroted Hamas denials that it deliberately placed missile batteries in civilian buildings in Gaza [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]:
They definitely reject the labeling of using civilians as human shields....Hamas military wing people that we've been speaking to and others – not just on these past few days, but in the past several years, because this is an issue that always comes up against Hamas – they will say that this is the nature of the battlefield that they have to fight in. That this is not an issue by design, but as a reality of what Gaza is like because it's so densely populated.
By Kyle Drennen | January 7, 2014 | 12:01 PM EST
Introducing a report on Monday's NBC Nightly News about Al-Qaeda forces seizing control of the Iraqi city of Fallujah, anchor Brian Williams went out of his way to blame the President George W. Bush for the deteriorating security situation: "U.S. fighting forces are gone from Iraq. But as so many predicted when President Bush chose to go to war there after 9/11, the fighting has started up again." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
However, in the report that followed, correspondent Ayman Mohyeldin featured a sound bite of President Obama – not President Bush – celebrating the "historic moment" of an abrupt U.S. troop withdrawal from the country after failing to negotiate a status of forces agreement with the Iraqi government. Mohyeldin noted: "Some warned the U.S. withdrawal left a security vacuum."
By Tim Graham | November 9, 2013 | 9:33 PM EST
On Wednesday’s NBC Nightly News and Thursday’s Today, NBC hyped the notion that Palestinian guerrilla leader Yasser Arafat “may have” been assassinated by poisoning. They let Palestinians accuse Israel, and bizarrely suggested only Israel “considered” Arafat a terrorist (forgetting decades where the U.S. officially agreed).
There was no NBC update Friday when NPR’s All Things Considered reported the Palestinian Authority released a separate Russian study that did not confirm the notion of poisoning with Polonium-210. NBC didn’t offer any journalist or government official who disagreed with the pro-Arafat line:
By Kyle Drennen | November 20, 2012 | 5:00 PM EST
Leading off Monday's NBC Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams wrung his hands over Israel suffering fewer casualties than Gaza in the ongoing Mideast conflict: "It is a lop-sided fight right now, the estimated death toll is more than a hundred in Gaza, with three Israelis reported dead. The fusillade of rockets from Gaza into Israel is being answered by air strikes, many from drones, many aimed at individuals inside buildings, inside densely packed neighborhoods."
Williams's desire for a fairer fight was reminiscent of former NBC commentator John Chancellor's reaction to the Persian Gulf War in 1992, telling then-Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw: "Greenpeace, the public interest organization, believes that the Iraqi death toll, civilian and military, before and after the war, may be as high as 198,000. Allied military dead are counted in the low hundreds. The disparity is huge and somewhat embarrassing."
By Matthew Balan | September 27, 2012 | 4:11 PM EDT
ABC's Good Morning America hasn't once reported on U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice's claim on the September 16, 2012 edition of This Week that the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya was "a spontaneous - not a pre-meditated - response to what had transpired in Cairo." Even worse, the morning show hasn't reported on the subsequent developments on the consulate attack over the past 12 days that cast doubt on Ambassador Rice's statement.
NBC's Today show also hasn't covered Rice's talking points on the attack, after she appeared on Meet the Press on the same day as her This Week appearance. News reader Natalie Morales merely reported on September 19 that "the White House says there is currently no evidence that last week's deadly attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya was planned and pre-meditated. Officials say it appears that the violence was sparked by that anti-Islam film made in the U.S." Two days later, Morales gave an update on how "the White House is now classifying the deadly attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya as a terrorist attack....But intelligence officials now believe it was a planned attack in the guise of a protest."
Both of those programs provided voluminous coverage of Romney's "47%" tape, but have no time to scrutinize the Obama administration's public statements about an incident that claimed the life of an American ambassador?