Huffington Post’s Entrenched Anti-Israel Bias Exposed in Documentary Film

The Huffington Post is a creature of the internet age. Named after its co-creator, media entrepreneur Arianna Huffington (shown above), it promotes itself as a balanced and credible source of news. The Huffpost boasts one of the largest worldwide audiences on the internet.

In an interview with the USC-Annenberg Online Journalism Review on May 3, 2005, Huffington stated “the news is not right-wing news or left-wing news, it’s the news. And that will be the sensibility, that will basically permeate our news coverage.” In an interview with Conde Nast Portfolio on Nov. 14, 2007, Huffington reiterated this point stating that the news site’s “editorial stance” is “to debunk the right-left way of thinking, which has become completely obsolete.”

Huffington’s lofty proclamations do not reflect reality. The Huffington Post is firmly situated on the left. Much of its political content could be described as far-left. Its editorials offer far more space to leftist political opinion than to right of center opinion and its news coverage skews in the same direction.

For many years, The Huffington Post’s talkbacks have been riddled with virulent anti-Zionism. Articles involving Israel or Jews routinely invite a barrage of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish invective.

While the Huffpost does on occasion run Op-Eds that are sympathetic to Israel, these are far outweighed by the torrent of anti-Israel material. Most discouragingly, in both the editorials and news coverage, there is not an apparent process for correcting factual errors or promoting balance.

Well, someone finally decided to methodically expose the problem.

Jon Sutz, a documentary film-maker at Save the West, has produced a chilling documentary providing strong evidence of what he contends is an intentional misrepresentation and distortion of events in Israel. The documentary restricts itself to scrutinizing the Huffpost’s coverage of the recent wave of Palestinian knifing attacks on Israelis.

The film is divided into approximately 10 minutes segments. Each segment describes the murder of a particular Israeli and examines how the Huffpost covered it. Through painstaking documentation of omissions, rewordings, distorted emphasis and even shocking banality, Sutz presents a powerful repudiation of the Huffington Post’s coverage.

By the end of the documentary, Arianna Huffington’s proclamations about the Post’s commitment to objectivity and providing quality news coverage lie in tatters.