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New York Times Trigger-Happy on Israel

[Jerusalem Post] Gilead Ini - On March 20, just one day after the story broke in Israel, the New York Times covered allegations about unarmed civilians being killed in Gaza in a front page story. A follow-up piece the next day repeated the allegations. And a day later yet another piece dealt with the issue. Even before the New York Times published its three pieces, those charges had been substantially discredited. Israel's Channel 2 television reported that the source of one of the allegations admitted his story was based only on rumors. Yet the three Times articles wrongly described the allegations as "eyewitness accounts." It took more than a week for the Times to finally reveal (on page 4) that the core of what it reported earlier was nothing more than hearsay, but the damage was already done. In March 2008, American veterans of the Iraq war got together near Washington to publicly recollect their battlefield experiences. They told stories of indiscriminate fire, the killing of innocent civilians and systematic cover-ups of wrongful deaths. Although these veterans' charges were clearly more relevant to American readers of the New York Times, the Times didn't report on it at all. The writer is a senior research analyst at CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.
2009-04-02 06:00:00
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