Middle East

NPR Touts Leftist Groups' Protest of Israeli Company SodaStream
February 4th, 2013 6:01 PM
On Monday's Morning Edition, NPR's Larry Abramson boosted an "international boycott movement" against Israeli company SodaStream without mentioning the left-wing ideology of the organizations behind the protest. Abramson merely described the boycott organizers as "supporters of Palestinian rights."
The correspondent featured a soundbite of a December 2012 anti-SodaStream protest in Boston,…
NBC Hits Gore From Left on Climate 'Hypocrisy'; Ignores Al Jazeera's A
January 29th, 2013 10:41 AM
In an interview with former Vice President Al Gore on Tuesday's Today, co-host Matt Lauer fretted over the "hypocrisy" of the global warming crusader selling his news channel Current TV to the oil-funded Al Jazeera network. However, Lauer completely ignored the Arab news organization's history of anti-Americanism and promotion of Islamic fundamentalism. [Listen to the audio or watch the video…

CBS's Attkisson: Obama Admin. Has Stonewalled on Benghazi Since Octobe
January 22nd, 2013 6:08 PM
On Tuesday, CBS's Sharyl Attkisson broke on Twitter that the Obama administration "has indicated that it will not be answering Benghazi question we've been asking since Oct." Attkisson, who has provided hard-hitting reporting on the September 11, 2012 Islamist attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya, listed many of the questions that the executive branch has yet to answer about the story.
The…

Christiane Amanpour's Biblical 'Road Trip' Set to Air: Will It Be As B
December 21st, 2012 6:48 PM
Former This Week host Christiane Amanpour's reputation for biased reporting precedes her, despite her own denials. Despite this, ABC thought it fit to air a two-part special starting on Friday evening titled Back to the Beginning. The network's press release trumpeted, "Join...Christiane Amanpour on the ultimate road trip as she travels to the lands of the Bible....to investigate the roots of…

Virtually Absent From U.S. Press Coverage of Egypt's Constitution and
December 15th, 2012 9:21 AM
As voting on Egypt's constitution begins, an Associated Press story this morning by Aya Batrawy and Sarah El Deeb typifies how the U.S. press is only nibbling around the edges of its content. The headline reads "EGYPTIANS VOTE ON ISLAMIST-BACKED CONSTITUTION." In the story's content, the pair found an 23 year-old Egyptian engineer who told them, in their words, that "he felt the proposed…

Not News: Syria's Rebels Want Israel's Destruction Next
December 5th, 2012 9:11 PM
In August, President Barack Obama "secretly" authorized support for Syria's rebels. It was so "secret" that Reuters had a story about it. It "broadly permits the CIA and other U.S. agencies to provide support that could help the rebels oust Assad."
At the Daily Beast, former Obama administration State Department member P.J. Crowley believes that " Later this year or early next, Washington may…

Bill Kristol: 'I've Never Seen a More Worrisome Moment of U.S. Weaknes
December 2nd, 2012 7:35 PM
The Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol gave a rather sobering view of American foreign policy and the state of geopolitics this weekend.
Appearing on Fox News Sunday, Kristol said, "I've never seen a more worrisome moment of U.S. weakness and chaos following."

Remembering Some of Those Who Said the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt Was
November 30th, 2012 10:54 PM
Reviewing several dispatches from the past couple of days, the latest news out of Egypt is that Egyptian "President" Mohammed Morsi "is not backing down in the showdown over decrees granting him near-absolute powers," that "clashes between the two camps (Morsi's Islamist supporters and secular opponents) ... left two dead and hundreds injured," and that the country's Muslim Brotherhood-…

At the Associated Press, Benghazi Is Just a 'PR Disaster
November 27th, 2012 5:12 PM
Well, if the President himself can call a sacked consulate and four dead Americans who deserved adequate security and didn't get it "bumps in the road," why not?
Monday morning, the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, presented a story in advance of United Nations ambassador Susan Rice's meeting today with certain Republican senators -- a meeting from which Rice, who engaged in…
MSNBC Finally Reports Obama's Drone Hypocrisy, Three Weeks After the E
November 26th, 2012 5:33 PM
Filling in for Alex Wagner on Monday afternoon, Ari Melber of the left-wing Nation magazine did some thing on MSNBC's Now that Wagner and many of their colleagues have been reluctant to do themselves -- expose the deception and dishonesty of Obama on the subject of drone attacks. While there was a brief mention or two in the weeks and months that preceded the election, the coverage was never…

IBD and WSJ Editorials Make Morsi Power Grab-U.S. Praise Linkage the R
November 26th, 2012 9:05 AM
As has so often been the case for nearly four years, one needs to go to the editorial pages of the nation's two leading financial publications, the Wall Street Journal and Investor's Business Daily, to get to the truth behind news developments, especially the ones with potential to cast the Obama administration in a bad light.
There may not be a better example of the press ignoring the…

Klein Gobbles Obama's Benghazi Talking Points 'Like Thanksgiving Turke
November 26th, 2012 9:00 AM
At the end of Joe Klein's stupefying defense of Susan Rice and the Obama admin's misinformation campaign on the Benghazi outrage on today's Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough asked Time's Klein whether President Obama had invited him to play golf, "because you are just gobbling up the talking points like Thanksgiving turkey." H/t NB reader Carmel.
Here were some of Klein's astounding assertions:…

NBC Uses Dubious Propaganda Images from Gaza War
November 24th, 2012 10:13 AM
During the recent war in Gaza, NBC News used two images of which definitely one and possibly both qualify as deceptive propaganda against Israel's war effort.
The first example is the infamous image of a child who was killed by shrapnel from a rocket fired out of Gaza by the terrorist group Hamas, but which some news outlets, including CNN, attributed to an Israeli airstrike early on.

Reuters Social Media Director Wonders Why Israel Should 'Retaliate' (i
November 24th, 2012 8:37 AM
Well, that didn't take long. Fulfilling a fear expressed on Tuesday by David Horovitz in the Times of Israel, someone is already using the country's mostly (but to be sure, not completely) successful deployment of its Iron Dome missile defense system as an argument against Israel's right to robustly defend itself.
The assertion came the very next day in the form of a tweet from a member of…