Media Research Center President Brent Bozell joined the Fox News Channel’s Neil Cavuto Thursday afternoon during his show Your World to blast the biased media coverage against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “the height of unprofessionalism” and challenged Republican presidential contenders to demand the “end [to] this hostility towards Israel.”
Cavuto introduced Bozell after reading a series of media headlines lamenting Netanyahu’s reelection that included part of a Time magazine headline that declared: “Netanyahu's tactics leave peace as road kill.” Observing that the slanted coverage has been “pretty blatant,” Cavuto asked Bozell for his initial thoughts to which Bozell cited FNC’s election night coverage in 2004 as “the best news analysis I’ve ever watched.”
While Bozell cited FNC’s work on the night of President George W. Bush’s reelection as delivered with “no emotion” and was real “journalism,” the MRC founder and president noted the stark contrast between that and how the liberal media have been behaving both before and after the Israeli election this week :
What you're looking at now in the media coverage of Netanyahu is simply the megaphone for Barack Obama, and the lack of professionalism, I think, is astonishing, and it's on newspaper reports, it’s on television, it’s all over the media, but there's no pretense of showing any sense of fairness towards this man.
The FNC host then summarized the media’s reaction to Netanyahu’s victory over his rivals and asked Bozell to chime in: “The wrong guy won, the wrong peace process is in place, that is no peace process, the way we, in the media, want to see it play out, and – this is going be a disaster. What do you make of that?”
Bozell responded by pointing out that Netanyahu’s treatment has been similar to that of the tea party as well as criticizing President Obama for “moving deliberately against the state of Israel”:
You're seeing – there's nobody who is saying unequivocally, Netanyahu won a well-run campaign and won a victory. Instead, the suggestion is that he resorted to all manner of demagoguery that he was like a tea partier the way he was behaving, and look what happened. Just like them, he was able to win and this is going to be – this is going to endanger peace. This is a man who’s been fighting for peace. This is a poor country that is surrounded by people who want to destroy it. I am – I am – I am very, very saddened that my President is moving deliberately against the state of Israel. Fine, but the media have no right to be doing this as well.
In his final comments, Bozell provided a few suggestions for Republicans seeking the White House in 2016 when it comes to addressing this anti-Israel and anti-Netanyahu bias in the media:
You know, if I were a Republican running for president right now, Ted Cruz, I would say that if elected, the cavalry is coming. I would announce to the American people that this is going to end this hostility towards Israel is going to end, but if I were a Republican, I would come forward and I would challenge the media themselves on their own terms, on their own sets, and really give them a tongue-lashing for what they're doing. It is the height of unprofessionalism.
