Middle East

Ohio's press must have been forced into rationing newsprint and bandwidth during the past couple of days. I can't otherwise explain how the Toledo Blade, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Cincinnati Enquirer, Dayton Daily News (news; blogs), and especially the Columbus Dispatch, have thus far carried no coverage of this Ted Strickland appearance on Sunday: Monday, June 18, 2007 OHIO GOVERNOR SPEAKS AT…

Here’s something you don’t see every day: an Arab leader complaining about Al-Jazeera being biased.Yet, that's what happened Sunday according to Agence France-Presse (emphasis added throughout, h/t Charles at LGF):A senior Palestinian official on Sunday accused pan-Arab Al-Jazeera television of favouring Hamas in its coverage of the battles between the Islamists and rival Fatah.Al-Jazeera…

On Saturday, NewsBusters asked two important questions: “Will Media Report Palestinians Fleeing Gaza For Israel,” and will they address the theft of Yasser Arafat’s Nobel Peace Prize by Hamas looters? At this point, the answer to the latter is a resounding “No.” The answer to the former is “Not much.”To be more specific, extensive searches of Google News and LexisNexis have identified that no…

In an ideal world, a news consumer would get his or her essential facts from hard-news coverage, and would read op-ed columns solely to learn writers' opinions on particular topics of interest -- while perhaps being entertained in the process. We clearly do not live in an ideal world. If fact, the "news" is all often turned upside-down, as journalists supposedly covering the hard news end up…

Better stow all that needs to be stowed, sports fans, for this is guaranteed to evoke uncontrollable fits of laughter.Looting Hamas militiamen apparently broke into former Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat’s home and stole his – wait for it! Wait for it! – Nobel Peace Prize.Honestly, there’s no way you can make this stuff up.The Jerusalem Post reported the excruciatingly…

On Thursday, Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds was curious how quickly Israel would be blamed for Hamas’ activities in Gaza, with the answer expeditiously coming from the Boston Globe.Well, CNN’s Jack Cafferty one-upped the Globe Friday by actually blaming Hamas' takeover of Gaza on – wait for it! – President George W. Bush.Color me unsurprised.In his normal spot on CNN’s “The Situation Room,”…

Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs pointed out an interesting situation developing in war-stricken Gaza that will likely put America’s anti-Israel press in a peculiar position (emphasis added):According to the international left and the paleo-right, Israel is a fascist apartheid state, a brutal occupier, universally despised by the oppressed Palestinian people.So where do the oppressed…

The Middle East Media Research Institute published a rather concerning announcement Thursday regarding the Global Islamic Media Front’s new campaign to bombard non-Islamic websites with pro-Islamic propaganda (h/t Charles at LGF, emphasis added throughout):"What we expect from you brothers and sisters is for the [Islamist] forum to be like beehives during the raid... [whereby] one person takes…

As the Civil War in Gaza between Hamas and Fatah rages on (please see fabulous coverage on this by our friend at Gateway Pundit), Glenn Reynolds marvelously commented Thursday: “[S]ince it's Hamas killing people, nobody will really care -- unless, ironically, they can find a way to blame the Israelis.”Well, as he pointed out in an update, the Boston Globe unbelievably published an editorial…

Does "Good Morning America" have a masochistic streak? On Wednesday, GMA host Chris Cuomo allowed liberal filmmaker Michael Moore to claim that due to the failure of journalists in challenging President Bush’s claims about pre-war Iraq intelligence, ABC and other networks are "complicit" in the deaths of American soldiers: Video (2:22): Real (1.73 MB) or Windows (1.46 MB), plus MP3 audio (686 kB)

 Update Below:Fox News and Variety have reported that Larry Register, former longtime CNN producer, resigned Friday from Al Hurrah, which is a US government-funded TV station in the Mid-East that is supposed to be a type of Mid-East Voice of America combating the pervasive anti-US and anti-Israel rhetoric in on TV stations like Al Jazeera. As I noted here at NewsBusters in March, “within weeks”…

What is it about some news outlets that they can't report a story without trying to flavor it with their own biases? That they can't give "just the facts m'am" but have to throw in their snide asides and negative phraseology? And, it's bad enough when they do it in their normal attempts at "reporting" the news, but when they do it in between an upbeat report by one of our soldiers who's opinion…

Back in January, I reported on a particularly odd funeral over in the Palestinian territories of a 10-year-old girl named Abir Aramin, who was supposedly killed by the Israeli Defence Forces at an "anti-barrier" protest. Figure 1: Bassam Aramin, Jan. 20, 2007. Imagine my surprise, then, to learn from freelance journalist Hélène Keller-Lind over the weekend (en Anglais for we non-Francophiles)…