The Biased Press

Today's Washington Times has a good op/ed piece about the mainstream media's coverage of two military operations last week - the US attack on a "wedding party" in Iraq, and Israel's operation in Rafah. In both of these, most media outlets parroted the Arab propaganda lines without investigating any of the claims.

As more information comes out about both actions, it seems increasingly clear that both the United States and Israel were legitimately acting to stop terrorist activity. Unfortunately, some of the early press reports suggest that some journalists instinctively tend to blame democratic governments rather than the terrorists when noncombatants die as a result of actions taken on the battlefield.
[...]
Although major American news outlets generally have done a responsible job thus far of reporting on the Mogr al-Deeb strike, the same cannot be said of stories on Israel's campaign to destroy terrorists' weapons-smuggling tunnels in densely populated civilian areas in the Gaza town of Rafah. Major American newspapers like The Washington Post, for example, have emphasized the physical destruction caused by the fighting in Gaza, while ignoring or burying information that would put the story into proper context — like the fact that the terrorists bribe local residents to allow weapons tunnels to be built under their homes.

Without such essential information, stories from the battlefield become propaganda — the antithesis of real reporting.

This is despite the fact that the IDF tried to embedd journalists with army units so that they could see ad report what was actually happening. As Caroline Glick writes in this article:

And it isn't that the UN and the EU, the media and the human rights organizations do not know the truth. They do. They have all received documented proof, not only from Israel but from their own people that have shown them conclusively that the Palestinian Authority is a terrorist organization and that its method of fighting Israel while hiding behind civilians is by its very nature a war crime. They know everything, but they do not care. They believe that their national and institutional interests are best served by condemning Israel and embracing Palestinian war crimes as justified.

In an attempt to get the foreign media to report what is actually happening on the ground in Gaza, the IDF's spokesman's unit pleaded with foreign news agencies to join IDF forces in their operations and see for themselves. By mid-week, the IDF had to admit that the attempt was an abject failure. Almost no one took them up on the offer. The foreign media is not interested in showing the truth. They simply want to criminalize Israel.