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Peter's Pro-Palestinian Spin; And His Palestinian Friend; Gumbel Prodded Arabs to Attack Israel; Moyers Rant; FNC's Liberal Bias? Correction: The April 4 CyberAlert incorrectly listed the CNN show on which Paul Begala asserted: "When the right-wing FBI spy, Robert Hanssen came up, the Clinton administration prosecuted him successfully by guaranteeing his rights. Walker Lindh was not allowed to see his attorney." Begala made his remark Tuesday night on Crossfire, which he now co-hosts, not on Inside Politics. Clarification: An April 4 CyberAlert item,
about how MSNBC's Ashleigh Banfield is eager to give terrorist murder
mastermind Osama bin Laden a forum from which to pontificate
("Personally, absolutely I would like to interview Osama bin
Laden....I'd be fascinated by anything Osama bin Laden would have to
say"), concluded that her attitude suggests she's a
"journalist first, an American second." As some e-mailers
reminded me, Banfield is Canadian.
Jennings teased at the top of his April 4 broadcast: "On World News Tonight: Under pressure. President Bush steps into the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. The Secretary of State will go there. In the region, the Israelis continue their assault against the Palestinians." Imagine Jennings referring to U.S. operations in Afghanistan as the American "assault against the Afghans." From Israel, Dean Reynolds concluded a subsequent story by espousing the loaded "liberation" term: "Many Palestinians are hoping the Powell visit will mark the liberation of Yasser Arafat and his Palestinian Authority. As one of them put it, 'there's a big difference between meeting Powell in your office and meeting him in your prison cell.'" Next, Jennings emphasized over video of protesters: "Just to make the point, by the way, there's no one single opinion on either side. In Tel Aviv today, police fought with demonstrators outside the U.S. embassy. Several hundred Israelis, both Jews and Palestinian Arabs, or Israeli Arabs rather, were protesting U.S. support for Israel's military campaign in the occupied territories." At least in Israel more than one single viewpoint is allowed since protesting is permitted. Jennings' Palestinian friends don't countenance any dissent in land they control. "Collaborators" are murdered and hung up on the street for display without any of the due process niceties guaranteed to Arabs who are Israeli citizens.
To view it in the format seen by fax recipients, access the Adobe Acrobat PDF posted by the MRC's Mez Djouadi: http://www.mediaresearch.org/realitycheck/2002/pdf/fax0404.pdf [2] The text of the April 4 Media Reality Check: Bryant Gumbel announced Thursday that he will quit as co-host of CBS's ratings-challenged Early Show, but even as he began packing up his stuff, Gumbel displayed, yet again, the agenda-driven questioning style that's made him a poster boy for bias. This morning, he seemed to push for a wider Middle East war to punish Israel for fighting terrorism. "Why have Arab states done so little in response to Israeli military operations in Palestinian territories," Gumbel asked the Secretary General of the Arab League, Amr Moussa. "You talk of unified action and you talk of all the rage and yet we see no action from the Arab states. Why not?" "What we need is not to go back to war-footing, what we need is to go forward on peace-footing," Moussa replied, looking more moderate than Gumbel, who did not ask whether the Arab League would ask terrorists like Arafat's Al Aqsa brigades to stop sending suicide bombers into Israeli civilian areas. And, the departing CBS host is hardly unique. Since the Israeli military campaign began, the broadcast networks, especially ABC, have shown increasing sympathy for the Palestinians and Yasser Arafat, while castigating both Israel and an allegedly neglectful Bush administration. On Thursday, for example, Good Morning America's Charles Gibson explained the procedures followed at border crossings through the eyes of hassled Palestinians, not insecure Israelis: "Only foot traffic can pass, Palestinians who work in Jerusalem, opening their coats, raising their shirts, showing no explosives are strapped to their bodies. They're made to wait in pens before being checked one at a time. It takes at least an hour, they say, to pass through....Even at the checkpoints where Palestinian residents of Jerusalem can pass back and forth from their homes to their jobs, the waits are a humiliation, they say." The pictures showed that the "pens," as Gibson called them, weren't little cages, but rather muddy waiting areas surrounded by low barricades. And he neglected to report that a terrorist bomb killed an Israeli police officer at one of these "humiliating" checkpoints on Tuesday. Friday, the day Israeli tanks seized Arafat's compound after a Hamas terrorist attacked a Passover dinner, killing more than two dozen civilians, ABC World News Tonight anchor Peter Jennings zeroed in on the U.S. government: "Almost everywhere you turn this weekend, inside the Middle East and out, you hear people criticizing the Bush administration for not doing more to end the violence." Two days later, ABC reporter Terry Moran editorialized on This Week: "His administration's response to this latest upsurge in violence has been hesitant, confused and contradictory. Mr. Bush himself has remained mostly aloof from day-to-day management of the crisis, unwilling to risk his personal political capital in such an uncertain endeavor." The next morning, April 1, Gibson relayed how one Palestinian "felt it was criminal -- criminal was the word used -- that the White House and President Bush have not involved themselves more to try to defuse what is such a high-tension situation here." But that hasn't been the worst spin job. On March 27, ABC's Jennings visited Beirut, and offered a positive portrait of an anti-American terrorist group: "It is Hezbollah, which means the party of God, that gets credit for liberating Lebanon from the long Israeli occupation....Its 38-year-old leader, Hassan Nasrallah, [is] a popular member of the political establishment. The Bush administration says Hezbollah is a terrorist organization. 'Hezbollah was proud to resist the Israeli occupation,' [Nasrallah] says. 'We gave our lives. We are not terrorists,'" Jennings translated. Later, at the site of America's former embassy, the ABC anchor recounted its destruction: "In 1983 a man simply drove his truck to the front door and blew himself up. Sixty-three people died. Later that year, the Marine barracks here were destroyed in much the same way, 241 Marines died." Actually, Hezbollah terrorists committed those murderous acts, not a random "man" with a truck, and Jennings knows it. Who does he think he's helping when he spins the truth to make the terrorists look like the good guys? END Reprint of Media Reality Check For more on Jennings failing to link Hezbollah
to the terrorist killings of Americans: For more on the Moran and Gibson reporting:
A few CyberAlert readers have e-mailed to remind me that a possible explanation of Jennings' view lies in the fact that he not only lived in Beirut for several years during the 1970s, but also had a relationship with a woman long-affiliated with the PLO, Hanan Ashrawi, now an official of the Palestinian Authority. Normally, CyberAlert does not delve into the personal lives of journalists or assume that personal connections influence reporting, but given Ashrawi's high-profile role as a spokeswoman for a cause which Jennings regularly covers, I think it's relevant. Shortly after September 11th, he even interviewed her on the air. Jennings' anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian skew was fully displayed back in early December. The December 4 and 5 CyberAlerts featured these three articles: -- Israel was the victim of an attack by a terrorist group. But Peter Jennings wanted to know if the Bush administration wished to "restrain the Israelis?" Jennings also referred to Hamas simply as an "organization." http://www.mrc.org/cyberalerts/2001/cyb20011204.asp#1 [5] -- In reporting on President Bush's decision
Tuesday to freeze the assets of a Texas group, charging that it funnels
money to Hamas, CBS, CNN, FNC and NBC directly or indirectly described
Hamas as a "terrorist" operation. But not ABC's Peter
Jennings. -- For the second night after terrorist
attacks which killed Israelis, ABC's Peter Jennings painted Israel as
the violent aggressors. He saw "an explosion of violence in the
Middle East" with "Palestinians dead and wounded" because
"Israelis have been on the attack again." But CBS's Dan Rather
cited "Israel's latest answer to a wave of Palestinian terror
attacks." The MRC's Rich Noyes tracked down how in a
"Washington Whispers" item in the December 30, 1991/January 6,
1992 edition of U.S. News & World Report, Charles Fenyvesi informed
readers: In a September 18, 1994 Washington Post review
of a book by Barbara Victor, Hanan Ashrawi and Peace, Robin Wright
relayed:
The MRC's Brian Boyd noticed that the tirade on the March 29 edition of PBS's Now with Bill Moyers occurred after the Washington Times had uncovered how environmental groups, specifically the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) which Moyers allowed to rail against "special favors for special interests," did have meetings with Bush officials early on in the policy development process. Washington Times reporter Patrice Hill disclosed in a March 28 story: "The NRDC yesterday conceded that the department obtained its recommendations and weighed them in drafting its energy plan. And the NRDC revealed it had three more previously undisclosed meetings with top energy task-force officials last year while the energy plan was being drafted. Two of those meetings were early in the drafting process, throwing into question the latest charge by environmentalists that they were left out until the very end." Despite that, as detailed in the March 27 CyberAlert, CBS Evening News Wyatt Andrews charged that "at least 36 times Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham met representatives of the energy industry to discuss the policy, compared to zero meetings with environmental groups." Noting how many of the documents were "censored," Andrews relayed that "environmentalists call this a coverup" and then tried to suggest some kind of illegal behavior as he asked an NRDC official: "Do you think the amount of blackout breaks the law?" On CNN's NewsNight, after reporter Kelly Wallace featured the NRDC's complaints about being shut out, Connie Chung interviewed Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank. Her first question: "Tell me, do these documents confirm the worse suspicions of influence peddling?" Neither show has yet clarified its skewed reporting. For on the CBS and CNN reporting and an
excerpt of the Washington Times story: On his March 29 show, Moyers ominously updated
his viewers: Another hour of PBS's Friday night liberal rant-fest, Now with Bill Moyers, airs tonight on most PBS stations at 9pm EST/PST, 8pm CST/MST.
On the April 2 edition of the 7pm EST newscast, Smith relayed this short item: "France. The Mideast conflict spilling over into Orley airport in Paris. A brawl breaking out between right-wing pro-Israeli activists and pro-Palestinian protesters." CyberAlert is just being fair and balanced in where we document liberal bias. -- Brent Baker [9]
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ABC News
on Thursday night adopted the spin preferred by Palestinian terrorists as
Peter Jennings portrayed Israel's military operation aimed at rooting
out the terrorist infrastructure as an "assault against the
Palestinians," as if all Palestinians were targeted, and moments
later Dean Reynolds relayed the hope that Colin Powell's visit will
allow the "liberation" of Yasser Arafat.
The text
of a Media Reality Check put together by the MRC's Rich Noyes and
distributed by fax on Thursday afternoon titled, "Deploring
Terror-Fighters, Not Terrorists: Criticism for Bush Administration and
Israeli Anti-Terror Effort, Sympathy for Palestinians & Arafat."
As
reflected in how item #2 above documented how ABC's Peter Jennings
refused to connect Hezbollah to the terrorist mass murder of Americans,
Jennings has a long record of hostility toward Israel and favorable
treatment of the injustices claimed by Palestinians to rationalize
terrorist attacks.
Bill
Moyers put his liberal polemical points ahead of any digging for what
really occurred as he served as a mouthpiece last Friday night for the
agenda of left-wing environmentalists trying to discredit the Bush
administration's energy policy because Bush officials consulted with
industry representatives.
Liberal
bias on the Fox News Channel? On Tuesday night, MRC analyst Patrick
Gregory noticed, Fox Report anchor Shephard Smith labeled one side
"right-wing," but failed to tag the other as
"left-wing."