Our seventh annual recognition of the most skewed and biased coverage of the Mideast conflict.

What a year of surprises.

Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip. Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas talked peace in the presence of Saudi and Syrian dignitaries. BBC journalist Alan Johnston was held hostage for nearly four months.  When Israel struck an unidentified Syrian facility, the only significant protest came from North Korea.

And then came Farfur, the Hamas mouse.

Who would've thought?

Of course, there were other unsurprising developments. Qassam rockets continued to fall on Sderot. This year's three unfortunate fatalities: Oshri Oz, Shirel Friedman and Chai Shalom.

Israeli MIAs Gilad Shalit, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev ended the year in captivity, as did other Israeli MIAs.

The Israel Lobby was a top selling book while The Man From Plains documented Jimmy Carter's controversial book tour.

On with the awards . . .

Worst News Director: Larry Register, formerly of Al-Hurra TV

Thumbs up to Joel Mowbray for a series of articles exposing how US taxpayer-funded Al-Hurra TV twisted its mission to showcase American democracy. Under director Larry Register, Al-Hurra pandered to Arab sympathies and gave a soapbox to terror propaganda and Holocaust denial. Register identified himself with the likes of Yasser Arafat and Bashar Assad.

He resigned in June.

Worst Use of Taxpayer Money (UK): BBC

The BBC spent £200,000 in legal fees to cover up Malcolm Balen's 2004 internal report on the news service's Mideast coverage. So far as the publicly funded news service was concerned, the money was well spent; the Beeb fended off a legal challenge by London lawyer Steven Sugar, who sought a copy under the Freedom of Information Act.

Sugar's success in an earlier stage of legal proceedings led to an avalanche of similar FOI requests (including one from HonestReporting). All were turned down.

Most Ridiculous Campus Article: Linda Quiquivix, The Daily Tar Heel

U. of North Carolina student Linda Quiquivix, who broke up with her "Zionist" boyfriend during the Second Lebanon War, describes her quest for love to Daily Tar Heel readers. Boys, don't bother with diamonds or flowers.

Most Curious Caption: Associated Press

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) militants stage a protest near the Eiffel Tower in a show of solidarity with kidnapped British journalist Alan Johnston, in Paris, Wednesday, June 20, 2007. Intensive negotiations are underway toward freeing British Broadcasting Corp. journalist Alan Johnston, who was kidnapped three months ago in Gaza, a senior Hamas official said Tuesday. (AP PHOTO/Christopher Ena)

Stupidest Unstifled Debate: The Doha Debates

Oxford students hosting The Doha Debates in May shook off the dark powers of suppression and agreed, by an impressive two-thirds majority, on the following motion:

"This House believes the pro-Israeli lobby has successfully stifled Western debate about Israel's actions."

The sheer stupidity of the topic wasn't worth the effort of suppressing -- had the motion failed, it would've been better "proof" that the issue was true.

Worst Advertising Account: International Herald-Tribune

In April, the International Herald-Tribune made waves for advertising an Iranian tender to build two nuclear power plants. Ironically enough, the ad also appeared in Israel where Haaretz distributes an IHT supplement. The IHT is owned by the NY Times.

Special Achievement in Verbal Gymnastics: Jeremy Bowen

The BBC's Mideast Editor wins for this sentence:

"There is no dialogue with those murderous terrorists," Mr Abbas said, referring to Hamas militants.

Most Blatant Photo-Opportunism: Ismail Haniyeh

Not only were Gaza’s Christian leaders intimidated into attending a November speech by Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas honcho literally strong-armed Father Manuail Musalam into a photo-op brought to us by Reuters.

Dumbest Reaction to Alan Johnston’s Kidnapping: National Union of Journalists

After BBC reporter Alan Johnston was kidnapped by a Gaza clan linked to "The Army of Islam," Britain's National Union of Journalists sprang into action - by boycotting Israel. This NUJ statement explains why:

We work closely with the Palestinian union through the International Federation of Journalists and the boycott call was a gesture of support for the Palestinian people - notably those suffering in the siege of Gaza, the community Alan Johnston has been so keen to help through his reporting.

Worst Film Editor: Charles Enderlin

In his legal battle over the Mohammed al-Dura video, French media analyst Philippe Karsenty forced France 2 TV to publicly screen for the first time cameraman Talal Abu Rahma's raw, unedited footage.

When the judge asked correspondent Charles Enderlin why only 18 minutes of footage were submitted – instead of an expected 27 minutes – the veteran reporter told the court that when he transferred the images to DVD for the court, he had to manipulate some footage that wasn't relevant for that day. Although a final ruling isn't due till the end of February, the development and the footage discredited the myths of Mohammed al-Dura.

Worst Moral Equivalence: Ed O'Loughlin

The Sydney Morning Herald's Ed O'Loughlin wins for this oversimplified background information on Qassam rockets:

Since peace talks were abandoned in 2000, 12 Israelis, including three minors, have been killed by Palestinian missiles in a deadly game of tit for tat across the border between Israel and Gaza.

Hundreds of Palestinian civilians and militants, including five children in the past fortnight, have been killed by artillery, tank and air strikes, which Israel says target only terrorists.

According to an IDF study, an estimated 2380 rockets have been fired at the western Negev in the last six years, killing 10 people. In addition, 1,600 people have been treated for shock. Half the rockets landed in Sderot.

Worst Pundit: Abd Al-Bari Atwan

Bari Atwan, a regular commentator and analyst for BBC and Sky News, told ANB Lebanese television he'd dance in Trafalgar Square if Iranian nuclear missiles ever hit Israel. He’s still a talking head for both news services.

Best New Members of the Pro-Israel Cabal: Walt and Mearsheimer

We're not kidding about the people who brought you "The Israel Lobby". Here's why.

Worst Cartoon: Jonathan Shapiro a.k.a. Zapiro

For the 40th anniversary of the Six-Day War, the South African cartoonist for the Mail & Guardian turned history on its head:

The Blog Post We Should've Taken Seriously: Fadi Abu Sada

After January's suicide bombing in Eilat, Palestinian journalist Fadi Abu Sada begged Israel to bomb Gaza. Why?

. . . it might be the only solution to stop the bloody fighting between brothers in the Gaza Strip.

Dishonest Reporter of the Year

This year's Dishonest Reporter voting marks a change for HonestReporting readers. Previous awards went to large, impersonal news services, but not so this year. One journalist made herself such a lightning rod in 2007 she easily defeated BBC and Reuters – the traditional disfavorites.

The results didn't surprise us, but the depth of anger and lingering resentment indicate that readers weren't just outraged by our winner's work; on some level, they were personally offended in a way far exceeding the rest of the MSM’s Mideast coverage this year. Which is why the 2007 Dishonest Reporting Award goes to Christiane Amanpour, for her in-depth, but tragically flawed CNN special series, God's Warriors.

The series sought to examine Jewish, Muslim and Christian extremism. It's not our intention to address God's Warriors yet again. However, reader criticism can be boiled down to four primary charges. In a nutshell, Amanpour's series:

• Equated years-old isolated cases of Jewish extremism with Islamic terror that has killed thousands of people in New York, London, Madrid, Bali, Amman, etc.
• Spuriously claimed that fringe elements of world Jewry succeeded in hijacking Israeli and American government policy.
• Addressed radical Islam with kid gloves.
• Belittled religious belief in general.

Religious extremism is a valid news story and an accurate, honest comparison of the three major monotheistic faiths would undoubtedly have a positive impact on public debate.

Unfortunately, the sense our readers and we have is that Amanpour didn't spend a year researching religious extremism, but rather reinforcing her own world views.

* * *

We covered a lot of ground in 2007.

And with help from readers, we'll continue to monitor and hold the media to account in 2008.

Most of all, we?ll remember 2006 for Israel?s two-front war in Lebanon and Gaza.

Our Dishonest Reporting awards primarily focus on ?fauxtography,? the manipulated images, staged photos, and inaccurate captions that repeatedly tainted Mideast coverage. Space didn’t allow us to elaborate on many other noteworthy incidents of skewed reporting. Visual veracity was the issue of 2006.

Our intent is not to make sweeping generalizations about all photojournalists. Most are honest people admirably working under difficult conditions; many risk their lives to record history?s first draft. But important questions remain unanswered. What safeguards help editors detect altered images? Where do the rush of deadlines and the speed of technology leave the slower work of fact-checking? What do ethical standards, if any, say about posed shots? Were some photographers simply duped?

Foreshadow of the Year: Zoran Bozicevic

This National Post photo editor anticipated ?fauxtography? days before war exploded in Gaza and Lebanon. As one dubious photo after another crept into the mainstream coverage, Jules Crittenden, a Boston Herald editor, validated Bozicevic. Crittenden?s blunt assessment:

 

Everyone in the news business gets taken for a ride sooner or later. It?s an occupational hazard. What is surprising is the scale of it in Lebanon. And what is tragic about this is, as a Boston Herald photo editor noted, editors everywhere can no longer trust the pictures from Lebanon. The public cannot know what is staged and what is real.

Worst Director: Salem Daher, a.k.a. Abdel Qadar, a.k.a. "The Green Helmet"

Though Daher insisted to AP that he?s just a Lebanese civil rescue worker, the German TV show ZAPP caught him directing other cameramen, posing for photos with casualties and having a body unnecessarily loaded into an ambulance a second time for better footage. ZAPP accused the ubiquitous Daher of abusing the dead. (Wikipedia clarifies the confusion over his name.)

Worst Caption (newspaper): NYTimes

The NY Times was caught up in the fauxtography scandal thanks to a break down in the caption-writing process. This caption in a slide show suggested the man was dead. Bloggers wondered how a man killed in the strike could look so very much alive in the slide show?s other images. Ironically, the Times had Hicks' correct caption for the same photo in a separate report on July 27. The Times issued a correction and apologized to Hicks for the bungle. In October, Hicks explained to Photo District News his view of the affair.

Worst Caption (magazine): Time

When a Hezbollah gunman was photographed near a billowing pillar of smoke, Time wrote a caption stating the fire was started by a downed Israeli jet. But Israel didn?t lose any aircraft over Lebanon. In fact, the fire was started by exploding Hezbollah rockets destroyed in an air strike.

 

As other questions threatened to stain the reputation of photographer Bruno Stevens, he posted the story behind the photo on Lightstalkers. He included other notable facts and photos from the scene.

 

Worst Use of Props: BBC

In this photo, a Lebanese child stands next to an unexploded Israeli shell. Is the child or the bomb the prop? BBC's Martin Asser explains that it was the boy:

 

When Um Ali Mihdi returned to her home in the southern Lebanese city of Bint Jbeil two days ago, she found a 1,000lb (450kg) Israeli bomb lying unexploded in her living room.

 

The shell is huge, bigger than the young boy pushed forward to stand reluctantly next to it while we get our cameras out and record the scene for posterity.

Worst Buzzword: "Disproportionate"

Although Israel?s air strikes were limited to Hezbollah targets, the word "disproportionate" became the standard catchphrase of criticism. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen debunked the disproportionate use of that buzzword. After the war, it became clear that Israeli strikes were anything but disproportionate.

Retraction of the Year: Kofi Annan

The outgoing UN Secretary General, who joined the global chorus unfairly blaming Israel for the Gaza Beach incident, to his credit, retracted criticisms of the IDF, saying he had responded to "media speculations." We await retractions from those media speculators.

Canard of the Year (USA): Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post

Ricks accused Israel of deliberately leaving Hezbollah rockets intact for P.R. purposes. Appearing on CNN's show, Reliable Sources, he said:

 

"Israel purposely has left pockets of Hezbollah rockets in Lebanon, because as long as they're being rocketed, they can continue to have a sort of moral equivalency in their operations in Lebanon?. It helps you with the moral high ground problem, because you know your operations in Lebanon are going to be killing civilians as well."

Canard of the Year (Europe): Robert Fisk of the Independent 

Rushing to judgment, Fisk declared Israel guilty of using uranium-based shells in Lebanon, though UN tests of soil samples were still in progress. The tests didn't detect any unusual traces of uranium, but Independent buried the findings. We await a retraction.

 

Sympathy for the Devil Award: CBC

 

When the CBC aired a sympathetic interview with the family of Samir Quntar about the possibility of the Lebanese terrorist's release in a prisoner swap (watch the interview here), they all but ignored the brutal attack that landed him in an Israeli prison, and didn't bother interviewing any relatives of his victims. After HonestReporting-Canada took action, the CBC followed up, interviewing Smadar Haran Kaiser, the woman whose family Samir Qantar murdered (watch the follow-up interview here).

Worst Cartoon of the Year: Martin Rowson of the Guardian

The day after publishing this nasty cartoon, The Guardian apologized, but only because the Jewish stars in the illustration "might have been interpreted as implicating Judaism rather than the Israeli government in the present conflict."

 

Worst News Executive: Dr. Snuki Zikalala of the SABC

 

Dr. Zikalala, the news director of the South African Broadcasting Corp., gets this award for blacklisting various reporters, commentators and analysts. Though most personalities were banned for their views on South African politics, Paula Slier found herself blacklisted because her coverage of the Mideast conflict crossed Zikalala's red lines. He wrote in a memo:

 

From the movement where I come from, we support PLO. But she supported what?s happening in Israel?. I said no, you can't you can't undermine the Palestinian struggle, you can't. For me it's a principle issue.

Worst Tangle of Media, Political & Judicial Interests: The French "Establishment"

French media analyst Philippe Karsenty was found guilty of defaming France-2 TV and reporter Charles Enderlin for criticizing the network's footage of Mohammed Dura. Karsenty, the founder and president of Media-Ratings discussed in an exclusive interview with HonestReporting how the trial touched on larger issues of anti-Zionism in the French media, the icon status of Mohammed Dura, Israel's response to the affair, the disturbingly close relationship between French media and political elites, the fairness of French justice, even the role of the new France 24 international news station.

 

A parallel suit against Pierre Lurcat was dismissed on technical grounds. A third suit against Charles Gousz is yet to begin.

Worst Hypocrisy: Arab Cartoonists

We were struck by the Islamic rage over the Mohammed cartoons, while Arab cartoons are rife with demonizing anti-Semitism and Holocaust-denial.

Most Consistently Manufactured News Event: Bil'in

Broadway would envy the longevity and theatrics of the scripted clashes at Bil'in each Friday at the site of the security fence. One week, the "media event" even included Reuters' participation.

Most Improbable Question of the Year: Is the BBC Pro-Israel?

Read Martin Walker's commentary to find out why the answer is no. If you?re still in doubt, consider the following: the BBC rejected key proposals put forward by the independent commission of inquiry, it stonewalls on Freedom of Information requests for the Balen report, and high level figures admit the Beeb is out of touch with viewers.

Dishonest Reporter of the Year: Adnan Hajj

Working for Reuters, Hajj was caught poorly altering one photo of Beirut destruction and another of an Israeli jet firing flares. The doctored images - first spotted by Mike Thorson and blogged on Little Green Footballs - suggested a greater extent of Israeli destruction than really existed. Unlike other "fauxtographs," the sloppiness of Hajj's work suggested not a breakdown of procedure but deliberate doctoring.

 

Hajj claimed he only used Photoshop to remove dust marks, but Reuters severed all ties with the photographer and removed all 920 of his photos from its database. The furor touched off the heightened scrutiny that led to our other ignoble honorees.

 

* * *

 

Hopefully, we'll see in 2007 better safeguards preventing another "Photoshop of Horrors," tighter caption-writing procedures, and clearer and enforced standards addressing posed photos. We also hope that the speed of digital photography and the rush of deadlines don't rush past the needs of fact-checking.

 

We covered a lot of ground in 2006, and with the help of readers -- our eyes and ears -- we'll continue monitoring the media in the coming year.

 

HonestReporting.com

Dear HonestReporting Subscriber,

Big media was clearly on the defensive in 2005. Dan Rather left the CBS News anchor desk under a heavy cloud while other executives were fired in the wake of Memogate. The use of anonymous sources put journalists like Judith Miller and the NY Times in an uncomfortable spotlight. Newsweek's erroneous report that US Marines desecrated a Koran touched off a firestorm of deadly protests around the world. CNN news chief Eason Jordan was forced to resign over comments at an international forum. And an Al-Jazeera reporter was even convicted for his links to Al-Qaida. In each controversy, bloggers successfully pressured the news services for accuracy and accountability.

Unfortunately, problematic coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continued. We couldn't address all the news services or journalists who were nominated by HonestReporting subscribers, but we thank readers for sharing their thoughts about 2005 and for making our fight for honest reporting your fight too. So without further ado, we proceed with our Dishonest Reporter of the Year Award. We begin with the runner-ups:

Reuters

Palestinian Stringers

C-Span

The Guardian

The Guardian found itself red-faced by what became known as Sassygate: As exposed by blogger Scott Burgess, the paper hired trainee journalist Dilpazier Aslam, whose coverage of July's London terror attacks included a commentary sympathizing with the bombers. It turned out that Aslam was a member of Hizb Ut Tahrir, an Islamist organization which calls for the destruction of Israel and the rule of a world-wide caliphate. When the dust settled, Aslam was fired and the paper's executive editor for news, Albert Scardino resigned. Aslam is now suing The Guardian for "racial and religious discrimination."

Eric Margolis

Readers provided a full laundry list of complaints and we found the most effective way to condense the biggest offenses was in a simple list form. The examples of bias from the year past indicates a pattern of naivete, dishonesty, forcing facts conform to a narrow worldview and, arguably, a desire to inappropriately influence events - all paid for by British television viewers through the TV License Fee, which costs the typical household 126.50 GB Pounds per year.

Here are the top 10 reasons (listed in chronological order) why the BBC is HonestReporting's Dishonest Reporter of the Year.

10. In January, Palestinian presidential candidate Dr. Mustafa Barghouti (not to be confused with his better-known distant relative, Marwan) tried to use Israel and the Western media to get some free publicity for his campaign by getting himself arrested at the Temple Mount. The Independent's Donald Macintyre saw straight through Barghouti's ploy, but the BBC's Martin Asser proved more gullible:

9. Every morning, listeners can tune into BBC for an uplifting "Thought of the Day." One February morning, Rev. Dr. John Bell used the feature to describe an Arab-Israeli acquaintance only identified as "Adam." According to Rev. Dr. Bell, this acquaintance was "conscripted" into the Israeli army, where "he was also imprisoned for refusing to shoot unarmed schoolchildren." See the full transcript here.

8. In March, the BBC apologized to Israel for reporter Simon Wilson's handling of an interview with Mordechai Vanunu. A former technician at the Dimona nuclear plant, Vanunu is prohibited from talking to foreign reporters, but Wilson, in 2004, was caught trying to smuggle tapes of his interview out of the country. Although the apology - which paved the way for Wilson to return to Israel - was supposed to remain confidential, it was inexplicably posted on the BBC's own web site for several hours. The BBC once intended to rent out a luxury apartment for Vanunu paid for by British television viewers.

7. He retired from the BBC, but former Mideast correspondent Tim Llewellyn (now an executive member of the Council for the Advancement of Arab British Understanding) makes this list for an interview he gave to Electronic Intifada. We are concerned Llewellyn's views are shared by colleagues within the BBC:

[BBC] are adopting what they see as an even handed attitude. To me this is a cowardly attitude, it is an attitude which confuses occupier with occupied...

6. In May, BBC correspondent Orla Guerin reported that construction linking Maale Adumim to Jerusalem would split the West Bank in two, destroying any possibility of a viable Palestinian state. HonestReporting noted that construction in the area known as E-1 doesn't take away territorial contiguity. A map produced by our colleagues at CAMERA highlights how the Palestinians would have continuous territory, which, at its narrowest, would be nine miles (or 15 km) wide - which also happens to be the width of Israel's "waistline" between the Green Line and the Mediterranean.

5. When members of the British Association of University Teachers considered a boycott of Israel's Bar-Ilan and Haifa universities, BBC radio tried to influence the vote with a report by correspondent John Reynolds from the College of Judea and Samaria. As Melanie Phillips wrote in May:

4. When terrorists linked to Al-Qaida struck the London transportation system in July, many thought the BBC would finally use the word "terror" to describe the wanton attacks on civilians. To their credit, a small handful of initial reports did. But appearances of the "t-word" in initial coverage were soon removed from the BBC's web site (but not before Tom Gross documented the inconsistencies). Yet Roger Mosey, the head of BBC's television news, contradicted BBC policy when he wrote in The Guardian that there was no ban in the first place!

Then there has been a controversy about our use of language - particularly the question of whether the BBC banned the word "terrorist". There is no ban. It's true the word is contentious in some contexts on our international services, hence the recommendation that it be employed with care. But we have used and will continue to use the words terror, terrorism and terrorist - as we did in all our flagship bulletins from Thursday.

3. Following the London terror attacks, the BBC admitted loading the studio audience with a disproportionate number of Muslims for Questions of Security: A BBC News Special. (See Biased BBC for links to video of the show.) Among the complaints, one viewer wrote angrily:

2. Within hours after Israel completed its pull-out from the Gaza Strip, Palestinians wasted no time desecrating synagogues and looting greenhouses. BBC's Orla Guerin was one of several journalists who actually justified the sad, senseless destruction:

1. Whatever happened to Malcolm Balen, who was appointed to help improve the BBC's Mideast reporting? Back in November, 2003, the BBC hired him as a "senior editorial advisor," or, as some put it, "a Middle East policeman." Some HonestReporting readers were hopeful when Haaretz reported that Balen was supposed to present a "conclusive and comprehensive report" to BBC executives. Balen even told Haaretz:

What I do is a long-term editorial review, and by definition, the review is retrospective, rather than a look at day-to-day output. The truth is, in any editorial job, you are so tied up with your program and deadline, that you simply do not have the time to stand back and look at the coverage as a whole," says Balen.

"Nobody has the time in a journalistic job to trace the course of a single story in an organization as large as the BBC, which is what I was appointed to do. I can concentrate on a single story and look at all sorts of angles and aspects. I can join the dots together, [determine] what the coverage feels like, what the tone is like - crucially, what the content is like, what the balance is like."

* * *

The stakes are certainly high. News services skewing reports from the Mideast are just as capable of warping other important areas of coverage. For the BBC, that's most notably Iraq. The BBC's royal charter expires at the end of 2006 - one year from now --  and officials must explain how it spends income from the TV License Fee. In 2003, this TV tax brought the BBC nearly 2.4 billion GB Pounds in income. Simply put, the British public is subsidizing lousy news.  

As far as we're concerned, the excuses and apologies have worn thin. The BBC must be held accountable.

On one hand, the media are looking better. This year, the western press became more careful in its reporting of the Mideast conflict, with news stories only rarely exhibiting the overt anti-Israel bias prevalent in previous years.

On the other hand, the bias that persists has become more subtle, implicit, and downright libelous. For example, the media have allowed the following terminology to gain broad legitimacy: The security fence as an 'Apartheid wall', Israel practicing 'ethnic cleansing' of Palestinians, and a sinister 'Likud cabal' infesting Washington ― such terms have gained currency on the pages of major newspapers, despite having no basis in reality.

Thanks for sending in your nominations. Now, without further ado, we present this year's Dishonest Reporting 'Award' winners:

	THE 'CAMERA SEES ALL' AWARD

Winner: While photojournalists were recording a seemingly candid expression of Palestinian suffering alongside the security fence, AP's Enric Marti shot the scene from another angle, including the pack of photographers in his frame:

This image speaks volumes about media coverage of Palestinian life. The photographers are not merely 'capturing the scene,' but rather creating it ― either actively (by asking the woman to pose) or passively (allowing themselves to be manipulated by her posing for their cameras).

The 'Award' winners in this category are the five unidentified photographers who sent to their newsrooms the version depicted here (at right).