A leading US media watchdog has compared the New York Times‘ constant publication of misleading and even false reports about Israel to the behavior of an “addict” in need of an “intervention.”
Gilead Ini, a Senior Analyst with CAMERA, which monitors media coverage of Israeli and Middle Eastern issues for balance and fairness, was commenting on how the Times was compelled to run a story-changing correction to a January 30 report which claimed that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had not informed the White House before accepting House Speaker John Boehner’s invitation to address Congress on Iran – a major violation of protocol which flowed from the fact that “Netanyahu…and many pro-Israel lawmakers in Congress have urged a hard line.”
Later that same day, editors ran the following correction to the story by reporters Carl Hulse and Jeremy W. Peters: “An earlier version of this article misstated when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel accepted Speaker John A. Boehner’s invitation to address Congress. He accepted after the administration had been informed of the invitation, not before.”
“The Times‘ misreporting on Israel is looking more and more like an addiction,” Ini told The Algemeiner.
“An addiction to anti-Israel advocacy that has been preventing professional news journalism — and if there is anyone in the building that cares about the newspaper’s reputation for fairness, it is time for an intervention.”
In a commentary for Tablet magazine on the latest Times scandal involving Israel, Liel Leibovitz argued that the White House was also culpable for an outcome in which Israel’s Prime Minister was again portrayed as power-hungry and hubristic.
“If Bibi had followed standard protocol, and given the White House the diplomatically-appropriate heads-up, as the Times‘ correction clearly and unequivocally stated, that meant that the Times‘ White House sources had been woefully and entirely misinformed about a key matter of protocol—or, more likely, had invented the tale of Bibi’s outrageous behavior out of whole cloth in order to blunt his unwelcome criticisms of the Administration’s Iran policy,” Leibovitz wrote.
