There’s the Coverage: Forbes Faults Media for Ignoring Egypt Hate Speech
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.
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