Investigative journalist Richard Behar was struck when he saw footage, from 2010 but recently publicized by MEMRI, of Muhammed Morsi calling his Jewish neighbors “descendents of apes and pigs,” an anti-Jewish slur heard in the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Writing in Forbes, Behar states:

Needless to say, this was HUGE NEWS for American mass media! Only it wasn’t. (Knock, knock, New York Times? Anybody home?) In fact, to be fair to the paper of record, not a single major outlet has covered it. Not AP or Reuters. Not CBS News or CNN. Not Time magazine or U.S. News & World Report. Not the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, or USA Today. Etcetera. And therein lies a story, which this column can only begin to skin open here.

Behar argues that major-media reporters “need to hold Morsi’s feet to the fire over such comments – if not by asking him directly about them, then at least by reporting that he uttered them” But, citing CAMERA, he notes that

The New York Times rarely touches this stuff. In fact, a harshly critical mega-report about the newspaper’s Middle East coverage was recently released by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA). The Times can’t be too happy about it. “The failure of the New York Times to cover the hate indoctrination leads the pack, in a way,” CAMERA’s head Andrea Levin told me yesterday. “The fact that they deem it to be so unimportant helps to lay down that news decision for others as well. And, to us, it’s one of the greatest derelictions in current news coverage of the conflict.”

The story also quotes a respected former news editor, an Israeli ambassador, and MEMRI staff and board members. Read it all here.

HuffWatch forwarded to CAMERA an example of gross journalistic malfeasance on the part of the Huffington Post. An article titled, “US Ramps Up Pakistan Drone Strikes” is accompanied by the above AP photograph from a sectarian bombing in Pakistan.

The article briefly mentions an unspecified explosion and a terrorist bombing along with the U.S. drone strikes, but the piece is mostly about the U.S. drone strikes. The confusing presentation is evidenced by the main thrust of the talkback commenters, who conflate the mass casualties shown in the photograph with U.S. actions.

Huffwatch, a web site that monitors and exposes the Huffington Post ‘s bias, confirmed that AP had correctly labeled the photograph and the scene shown in it. This suggests that the Huffington Post either intentionally misled its readers by failing to label the photograph and attaching it to a story on U.S. drone strikes or that it is guilty of negligence.

The Washington Post for example, carried the same photo with the story of a sectarian terrorist bombing that killed 81 Pakistani Shiites.

CAMERA has previously criticized the Huffington Post’s coverage of Israel as marred by considerable inaccuracy and persistent anti-Israel bias. This example provides evidence of a more widespread problem at the Huffington Post.

In an interview on Palestinian Authority TV News on December 29, PA Mayor Mustafa Fuqaha asserted that the Israeli army, after training exercises, leaves behind explosives “shaped like pens and toys … to tempt children to touch them or pick them up.” He flatly alleged that “the Israeli army targets children and young ones.” (The video has been translated and posted by Palestinian Media Watch.)

CAMERA research has turned up no mainstream media coverage of this offensive and false accusation, made by a leader in the Palestinian Authority –often labeled as moderate by the press– and broadcast on official PA TV.

In the modern era, the traditional antisemitic blood libel that Jews murder children frequently appears in Arab media as accusations that Israel murders children. This falsehood is central to the pervasive demonization of Israel in the public sphere. CAMERA has reported numerous times on this modern blood libel though major media almost completely ignore it, when they are not abetting it.

CAMERA suggested to the media that they resolve in 2013 to report on the drumbeat of incitement to hatred of Jews and Israel in Palestinian media, schools and the public square. In this case, they are failing the test though it is yet early in the year. Let’s hope that next year, on the issue of blood libel and incitement, we will not still be asking… Where’s the coverage?

Presspectiva, CAMERA’s Hebrew Web site, is delighted to announce that it has been nominated to receive Israel Media Watch’s 2013 Abramowitz Israeli Prize for Media Criticism. Israeli citizens are invited to vote for Presspectiva by visiting the IMW site. One award is determined by the public vote, and another by a panel of judges. Earlier distinguished recipients include Dvorit Sargel, editor of the popular Israeli Velvet Underground blog (2012); Jerusalem Post reporter Khaled Abu Toameh (2011); and Dr. David Zangen, who challenged Mohammed Bakri’s film “Jenin, Jenin,” which had falsely accused the Israeli army of war crimes in the Jenin refugee camp during Operation Defensive Shield.

The prize entails a $5000 award.

Presspectiva was launched in May 2010 and since then has applied CAMERA’s successful model for promoting accurate media coverage to the Israeli Hebrew-speaking realm. It has prompted numerous corrections in media outlets including Ha’aretz and Yediot Achronot, and won an Israel Press Council hearing against Ynet. Presspectiva’s Op-Eds have appeared in the Seventh Eye, a prestigious journalism review in Israel; Yisrael Hayom, and Ha’aretz, and its work has been repeatedly noted by other media critics, including Ben-Dror Yemini of Ma’ariv.

Presspectiva has made the Israeli public aware of , Ha’aretz Lost in Translation, the well-documented phenomenon in which the media outlet’s English translators wrongly translate the original, accurate Hebrew text, whitewashing Arab violence and misdeeds, and injecting false charges about Israel that did not appear in the Hebrew original. Thanks to Presspectiva, many of those shoddy translations, including some in which the English meaning is diametrically opposed to the Hebrew, have been corrected in print and online.

Presspectiva was the first Hebrew outfit to expose the many distortions and falsehoods in Gideon Levy’s front-page “apartheid poll” story, which falsely charged that a majority of Israelis would support apartheid in the West Bank.

CAMERA commends Presspectiva’s many accomplishments, and looks forward to many more in the years to come.

Writing in USA Today, Michele Chabin explores what American viewers can expect from Al Jazeera on its newly purchased American cable channel, Current TV. She begins:

Media watchers in the Middle East say the Arabic news network Al Jazeera is well known for promoting radical Islamist causes overseas, but it remains to be seen how it will present the news on its newly purchased U.S. cable channel.

She cites CAMERA among other media observing, noting:

The news media watchdog Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America or CAMERA, which frequently takes U.S. outlets to task over errors in reporting on Israel, says the network has been assailed for bias even in the Middle East.

In 2004, interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi temporarily shut down Al Jazeera’s broadcast in Iraq because he said it was inciting violence and racial hatred. In 2008, former ABC-TV Nightline reporter Dave Marash, brought on to anchor Al Jazeera English for American audiences, quit after two years and said the anti-American bias at the station was “reflexive.”

“The agreement by Al Jazeera cable television network to buy Current TV is not necessarily a plus for U.S. cable operators or their audiences,” said Andrea Levin, president and executive director of CAMERA. Al Jazeera Arabic “is not the Middle East equivalent of CNN, as it is often but mistakenly described,” Levin said.

CAMERA says one of the network’s most popular programs is Shariah and Life, hosted by Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a former “spiritual guide” of the Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Qaradawi has called for conversion of Europe and North America to Islam and a Muslim-led genocide of Israel and the Jews, Levin said.

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Alan Berger

The narrow-minded refusal to see Palestinians as actors in the Arab-Israeli conflict continues to tempt some pundits. Look through today’s Boston Globe, and it’s there again: the stubborn, nuance-deprived narrative that fails to see Palestinian leaders as players with responsibilities, who are capable of making decisions that harm peace prospects, or who have and any role whatsoever in perpetuating the conflict.

In his column “Obama ought to meddle in Israeli vote,” former Boston Globe editorial writer Alan Berger states:

Israel must choose between occupation of the land conquered in 1967 and a conflict-ending peace that preserves the state of Israel created in 1948.

Never mind that Israeli leaders have made the choice again and again.

Menachem Begin traded land for peace with Egypt. Ehud Barak made a land-for-peace offer that was rejected by Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, and accepted a follow-up peace plan by Bill Clinton that was likewise shunned by Arafat. Ariel Sharon turned over the Gaza Strip to Palestinian control. Ehud Olmert sought to end the occupation in exchange for peace, but was rebuffed by Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat’s successor. Abbas, meanwhile, has basically refused to even negotiate with current Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The concept isn’t very complicated: Palestinians, too, have choices to make. But apparently it is too complex an idea to make it into Berger’s column.

NPR is another media outlet which must correct the false claim that Israel allowed construction materials into the Gaza Strip this week for the first time in five years. As noted yesterday on CAMERA’s Web site, the ban applied only to the private sector, and according to the United Nation’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), since June 2010, 40,041 truckloads of building goods entered the Gaza Strip from Israel, earmarked for construction projects sponsored by international aid groups.

The AP yesterday published a commendable clarification on the issue, and the International Herald Tribune informs us that their correction will appear tomorrow.

Listen to Sheera Frenkel’s inaccurate report on “All Things Considered” yesterday:

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The International Herald Tribune closed out 2012 with the following erroneous page-four headline yesterday:

Actually, in the last three years, tens of thousands of trucks carrying construction material earmarked for projects implemented by international aid organizations have crossed from Israel to the Gaza Strip. For instance, in 2011, more than 10,000 trucks containing construction materials crossed from Israel to Gaza through Kerem Shalom: 102 trucks with infrastructure systems (piping, etc); 382 trucks with iron, 1,629 trucks with cement, and 8,782 trucks with aggregates.

As the accompanying article correctly noted,

For the first time in five years, Israel on Sunday allowed truckloads of building materials into Gaza for use by the private sector, according to Israeli and Palestinian officials. . . .

Israel has strictly controlled the entry of building materials, limiting them in recent years to internationally supervised projects.

(A similar but longer version of the article which appeared in yesterday’s IHT print edition is available here.) May 2013 be a year in which headlines accurately reflect the correct information contained within the accompanying article.

Jan. 2 Update: AP corrects the identical error. Will the IHT now correct?

Jan. 3 Update: IHT Corrects Erroneous Headline