Over the past several weeks, Jewish organizations and other supporters of Israel have bombarded the news media with complaints of pro-Palestinian bias in their reporting on the current Mideast war. A grassroots group is calling for a boycott of the Washington Post. In Los Angeles last April, over 1,000 subscribers to the Los Angeles Times suspended home delivery for a day to protest that paper's coverage. The New York Times and National Public Radio also have been the objects of reader protests.

The Mideast story is complicated, infused with history and drenched in blood, making it difficult to cover well. When the news media have responded to charges of bias, they generally have chalked up their errors to honest mistakes. No doubt, some of the distorted or unbalanced coverage is the result of good-faith mistakes. But a close look at the coverage suggests that anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian bias (take your pick) is largely to blame.

This bias manifests itself in various ways: in sometimes blatant, but often subtle, erroneous or misleading presentations of supposed facts in news stories; and in the selective attention the media pay to events, which demonstrates what editors consider important.

Erroneous or misleading stories are commonplace. One popular genre is the story with questionable statements of fact suggesting that Israel is occupying the West Bank and Gaza illegally. For instance, MSNBC (in the person of its hip young star, Ashleigh Banfield) stated in a recent news piece that UN Security Council Resolution 242 mandates Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders. The Washington Post made essentially the same point in one of its recent stories. As various pro-Israel groups have pointed out to the media, however, the carefully negotiated Resolution 242 does not actually call for Israel's withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders, nor was it meant to, according to Lord Caradon, the British ambassador who sponsored it. Unfortunately, while the media are very good at speaking, they do less well at listening, and attempts to educate them about Resolution 242 appear to have failed miserably.

Certain factual mistakes are close enough that they might be honest errors, but their tendency to present the Palestinians in a more favorable light creates some doubt. For example, the Washington Post recently described the Palestinian “Catastrophe Day” as the commemoration of “the war that erupted with Israel's declaration of independence in 1948.” In fact, the Nakba, or “Catastrophe,” which Palestinians commemorate in much the same way that Israelis remember the Holocaust one day each year, refers not to the 1948 war, but to Israel's declaration of independence. As is often the case with inaccurate reporting on this controversial war, the factual mistake about the Nakba may seem small, but it is not trivial. Remembering the fallen in a war is one thing. But commemorating the founding of Israel as “the Catastrophe” (capital C), more than 50 years after the event, suggests that the Palestinians are not ready to accept and make peace with the Jewish state. How Palestinians regard the existence of Israel carries important implications for Israeli and U.S. policy makers, so one would expect the press to pay more attention to this issue than it has -- and to get its facts right.

Other factually dubious reporting is so blatant it's hard to believe that even a half-asleep editor could have missed it. Take this stunner from ABC News' Gillian Findlay, which must have pleased her boss, the pro-Palestinian Peter Jennings, no end: “Ever since the State of Israel was proclaimed on their land, Arabs who stayed in Israel have felt discriminated against” (my emphasis). Because Israel did not occupy Gaza or the West Bank before the 1967 war, the sentence appears to adopt the radical Hamas/Islamic Jihad view that the land within Israel proper belongs to the Palestinians -- a position which even Yasir Arafat does not publicly espouse (in English, anyway). The sentence also smears Israel with the implication that all Israeli Arabs believe they are discriminated against.

As the ABC News piece illustrates, the media frequently adopt the language of the Palestinian side. In mid-June, for example, the Washington Post reported that “weakness dictates Palestinian tactics,” as if Palestinian violence were justified and the lack of heavy weapons somehow “dictated” that Palestinians shoot or blow up pregnant women (as was reported in the story, “For Al-Aqsa Brigades, a Change of Tactics,” June 13.) If this is the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades' view, it should be reported as such, not re ported as objective fact.

To take a more general example of adopting Palestinian terminology, virtually all major media outlets routinely refer to what they call the Israeli “occupation of Palestinian land” or to the “occupied territories,” even though Israel views this land as disputed territory whose disposition is to be negotiated (as did the drafters of Resolution 242). In early 2001, a pro-Palestinian media watch group actually complained that fewer than one-third of New York Times stories on the intifida referred to the territories as “occupied,” meaning that nearly one-third did refer to “Israeli occupation” in some form. It's not surprising that the group, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), wants the word brandished about, for “occupation” conjures up powerful images of jackbooted Nazis and other villains. Other examples of the media's adopting Palestinian vocabulary include uncritically referring to Israeli “colonization” and Palestinian “resistance,” and applying value-laden adjectives like “bellicose,” “bloody,” and “brutal” to Ariel Sharon and the Israeli army, while omitting any such adjectives when referring to Yasir Arafat or groups like Islamic Jihad.

Though most of the media avoid calling violence against Israelis terrorism -- preferring to refer to Palestinian terrorists as “militants” or “fighters,” and sometimes even calling terror attacks “military operations” or “hit-and-run warfare,” as CNN and the Washington Post did in June -- they appear to have no problem calling terrorism by its name when it is directed at the U.S. (The pro-Palestinian FAIR would resolve this inconsistency by not labeling Al Qaeda a terrorist network.) When the victims are Americans, some of the media have even used the T-word to describe attacks on military targets like the USS Cole. The ombudsman of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which has been strongly criticized for just such a double standard, doesn't seem to grasp the importance of using labels that are accurate. “A lot of [the controversy] has to do with language,” he is reported as saying, as if one word were as good as the next. But language is important, and journalists have an obligation to use the most accurate descriptions possible.

Another stunning example of distortion through mislabeling came recently in the news reports that called the foreigners who raced into Arafat's compound and into the Church of the Nativity “peace activists,” rather than pro-Palestinian activists or, at best, “self-described peace activists.” It is difficult to see how anyone (other than perhaps the Nobel Peace Prize committee members who wanted to strip Shimon Peres -- but not Arafat -- of his Nobel prize) could describe these people as peace activists. After all, they support a gun-toting leader who espouses “armed struggle.” And they rushed the Church of the Nativity to give aid and comfort to Palestinian gunmen whom even the pro-Palestinian French refused to take in. Nevertheless, the New York Times, Washington Post and National Public Radio all applied the “peace activist” label, and persisted in doing so even after this practice was questioned. Clearly, the media would call any self-styled “peace activists” who took Israel's side supporters of Israel; yet somehow the cause of Yasir Arafat is unquestioningly equated with the cause of peace.

It is the job of a journalist to help his or her audience understand a complex story by providing the context in which events unfold. From a pro-Israel perspective, this is especially important because visual images of the war paint Israel, with its tanks and helicopter gunships, as a Goliath against a Palestinian David. Many journalists, like author and former New York Times reporter David K. Shipler, agree that the media have done a poor job of providing historical context in covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"Editors are very impatient with historical digressions," Mr. Shipler said at a recent Brookings Institution forum. “And yet it's very important periodically to make that digression because it's so important to the people who are acting on the basis of it.”

To understand the Israeli perspective on the war, it helps to know some recent history. Too often, however, a recap of a relevant event that took place in 1993, let alone 1967 or 1948, doesn't make it into a news story. Even what happened last month is frequently left out.

Consider this one-sentence paraphrase from the continuation of a front-page story in the Washington Post ("Attack Kills 2 Israelis at Busy Plaza," May 23 ): “Hamas spokesmen have said the [suicide] bombing campaign [against Israelis] would stop only when attacks against Palestinians halt, Israel pulls its forces back from Palestinian towns, and Israel begins negotiations on ending the occupation and on reaching a political settlement for creation of a Palestinian state.”

This sentence indicates that Hamas is interested in a political settlement with Israel, which is demonstrably false. It doesn't take a long memory to know that Hamas has openly and repeatedly stated its goal of establishing an Islamic state not only in the disputed territories, but also within Israel proper. Indeed, Hamas' charter calls for Israel's destruction. To report, then, that Hamas has expressed an interest in peace, while not reporting its stated goal of annihilating the Jewish state, is to leave readers who may not be well informed with a serious misunderstanding of the truth. At best, this is negligent journalism; at worst, it is little short of fraud on the reader.

Pro-Israel readers and viewers also find that such omissions of fact frequently set up a false moral equivalence between the two sides. A good example of this is the tally of the number of Israelis and Palestinians killed in the conflict, which had been running at roughly 3 Palestinians for each Israeli, and had been reported in the news frequently. (Journalists seem to be reporting the tally less often now, perhaps because the Palestinians have narrowed the death gap ratio to about 1:1 by stepping up their gruesome attacks.) When the ratio was still about 3:1, however, National Public Radio's ombudsman told the pro-Palestinian FAIR that NPR “regularly takes care to mention the imbalance in death tolls.”

What NPR and many journalists don't take care to do, even irregularly, however, is explain to their audiences that most of the Israeli victims have been civilians killed in terror attacks, while most of the Palestinians dead have been combatants, suicide bombers or even Palestinians killed by their compatriots for suspected collaboration with Israel. When asked by the pro-Israel media watchdog, HonestReporting.com, about a graph depicting just such a tally, the New York Times reportedly gave the following response: “The graphs are correct because everyone that they count as dead is in fact dead. All of them.” This argument could equally justify including casualties of the U.S. Civil War in the totals.

Some of the above practices might have been attributable to sloppy reporting or careless editing had the media corrected them after they were pointed out. But, on the whole, they didn't. The above example of the Times' response, while more dismissive than most, says something unfortunate about the arrogance of a largely unaccountable profession.

On March 13, the Washington Post ran the following headline for its lead story that day: “Massive Israeli Force Enters Ramallah. Thousands of Troops Assault City, Camp; 30 Palestinians Killed.” In the third paragraph, the story reported that Palestinian gunmen killed seven Israelis, six of them civilians, in other incidents. The editorial judgment that the murder of seven Israelis didn't merit its own story or even a mention in the headline or lead paragraph, is difficult to explain in benign terms.

While the American news media emphasize facts that make Israel look bad, facts that put Israel in a good light or explain its position seem to go missing. For example, Israel's earlier restraint in responding to lethal attacks by striking empty Palestinian Authority buildings was barely remarked upon. Contrast this with the following fairly typical paragraph which happened to be in the Post (“Israel Says Pair Aided Bomber,” May 31), in which the reporter goes out of his way to sympathetically explain the motivations of Palestinian suicide bombers:

Few Israelis have contact with the darkening prospects and sense of desperation of many Palestinians after 20 months of conflict with the Israeli army. Even before the latest Israeli offensive, Palestinians were embittered by the hemming in of their towns and cities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Apparently, the reporter saw the need to provide something close to a justification for suicide bombings, but didn't think it necessary to explain why Israel launched its “latest offensive,” why it was “hemming in” Palestinian towns or why the Palestinians had experienced 20 months of conflict with the Israeli army.

It seems to me that an individual story ought to be able to stand on its own. But even granting Mr. Getler's point, the cumulative picture will clarify over time only if most of the stories are fair and accurate; if they are not, the cumulative picture will only grow more distorted. Unfortunately, much of the press seems to be piling distortion upon distortion.

A study by the pro-Israel Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) found that in late March and early April, when Israel suffered a wave of horrific Palestinian terrorism, the New York Times ran a total of 18 photographs of Israelis (not including photos of Israeli leaders). Of these, 7 depicted the aftermath of sucide bombings and only 2 made it to the front page.

By contrast, the Times ran 45 photos during this period portraying Palestinians as victims, 11 of which appeared on Page One. The study, which is available on CAMERA's web site, concluded that, “The number and prominence (judged by placement and size) of news stories and photographs regularly cast Palestinians as blameless victims of Israeli aggression.” (The Times apparently also thinks that balance on the Op-Ed Page means publishing the views of both Palestinians and pro-Palestinian leftist Israelis.)

The taxpayer-supported NPR is almost as bad when it comes to balance. CAMERA evaluated 57 segments of NPR coverage that aired from March 27 through April 2. It found just 16 Israeli speakers, as compared with 43 Arab speakers, 6 pro-Arab speakers and 21 purportedly neutral commentators (including numerous journalists and left-leaning analysts who frequently criticize Israel). Unfortunately, there is little hope that NPR's coverage will improve anytime soon. Its foreign news editor, Loren Jenkins (whose dismissal CAMERA has called for) has called Israel a “colonizer” and likened Palestinian refugee camps to Nazi concentration camps in his writings.

While it would be nice to believe that the distorted and unbalanced reporting could be attributable to honest mistakes by hard-working journalists covering a difficult story, two factors tend to discredit this view: First, nearly all of the “honest mistakes” seem to be in the anti-Israel direction. Second, media outlets generally have persisted in their mistakes even after their errors were pointed out. (To be fair, the Washington Post has shown some improvement, in that it sometimes now refers to attacks against Israeli civilians as terrorism.)

Traditionally, the Israeli government has been held, and holds itself, to a higher standard. . . . and so when countries that are democracies, that have a very self-conscious commitment to principles of individual rights and freedoms, then engage in actions that would appear to be in violation of that self-image and those commitments, that's also news. In saying that, you of course open yourself up to all sorts of criticism, but I think that's a fact that also informs our coverage. (quoted in “Readers and Reporters -- Who's Biased?” Washington Post, March 24, ellipsis in original).

The Post's Mr. Getler acknowledges that the paper's coverage, at times, has been unbalanced, but believes it reflects no institutional bias. In one of his columns, he responds to criticism that his paper downplays stories about Israeli terror victims in favor of stories about Palestinian casualties. He argues that his paper was not biased in putting a March 5th article about an Israeli shelling that killed 6 Palestinian civilians on Page One, even though a story just two days earlier reporting that a suicide bomber killed 9 Israeli civilians had only merited a spot on Page A15. “On March 3 the Post had a number of strong front-page stories, and a suicide bombing isn't always an automatic choice,” Mr. Getler explained.

What were some of these “strong front-page stories” that beat out the terrorist attack for a Page One slot on March 3rd? A not particularly time-sensitive piece on Michael Jordan's tendonitis and this: “Public Primping Raises Eyebrows. Metro Riders Floss, Clip, Curl and Annoy.”

Not only are some of our most important media outlets in denial, but they often blame their readers rather than themselves. In an ombudsman column entitled, “Readers and Reporters - Who's Biased?” the Post's assistant managing editor for foreign news is quoted as rejecting the charge that his paper is pro-Palestinian. This criticism, he sniffs, is made by “people who are not unbiased observers.”

New York Times columnist Frank Rich makes a similar point in a recent piece, but he names names. The former theater critic essentially argues that many American Jews are so besotted with anger and despair over the situation in Israel that they have lost all reason, to the point that they now imagine the American press is largely biased against the Jewish state.