In a recent online column published by The Wall Street Journal, Mark Dubowitz and Jonathan Snow from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies made the case that the West must act to block Hezbollah’s Al Manar television network, along with its recent clone, Hamas’ Al Aksa television.

They argue that without such action, “Hamas’ hate TV could become the must-see fall programming for a new generation of terrorists.”

At least viewers know that these journalists have an agenda. Consider the approach of the respectable news media toward Israel’s conflict with the Arabs.

The British Broadcasting Corporation is heard worldwide, including on Philadelphia’s listener-supported public-radio station, WHYY.

In 2003, the BBC asked Malcolm Balen, a former editor of its own “Nine O’Clock News,” to evaluate its coverage of the Middle East. His report was thought to run to 20,000 words. Rather than let the public see what Balen concluded, the BBC has spent thousands of pounds fighting freedom of information requests.

This suggests that not much has changed at the BBC since 2001, when one of its reporters stated at a Hamas rally: “Journalists and media organizations [are] waging the campaign shoulder-to-shoulder together with the Palestinian people.”

Us? Duped? Never!
The French television network, France 2, made Mohammed Al Dura famous, sending video images around the world of his supposed murder by Israeli troops at the start of the intifada, as he hid with his father behind a barrier. Subsequent investigations have produced abundant evidence that al Dura’s “death” was staged for the network’s cameras. Rather than admit that they had been duped (or were coconspirators in falsely framing Israel), France 2 is suing those who criticized them for “striking at their honor and respectability.”

A Reuters’ photographer was recently videotaped urging Palestinians to throw rocks at Israeli vehicles.

Previously, Israelis found Palestinians using armored cars intended to protect foreign journalists, transporting a Hamas associate in Gaza.

CNN’s Jason Eason publicly confessed to suppressing news of Saddam Hussein’s atrocities. He argued that maneuver was necessary to maintain “access” and to protect his staff.

And during the recent war in Lebanon, The New York Times — whose famous slogan is “All the News That’s Fit to Print” — ran 19 photographs of Israeli troops, many engaged in combat. Their coverage included just a single picture of two injured Hezbollah fighters escaping the fighting. There was not one picture of Hezbollah rockets being fired at Israel’s cities from Lebanese civilian areas, a key part of the war’s story — because Hezbollah apparently had told them not to.

Then there are the countless newspapers and networks that won’t call people who fly fuel and passenger laden airplanes into buildings “terrorists” because that is judgmental, though they have no problem with labeling the intifada a Palestinian “uprising,” as The Philadelphia Inquirer did in a recent story on Palestinian olive trees.

This is despite the fact that the second intifada was the late Yasser Arafat’s response to Israel’s promise of statehood, and most Palestinian Arabs already lived not under Israeli occupation, but under the corruption and oppression of his Palestinian Authority. News reports commonly refer to those who blow up Iraqis by the hundreds and thousands as “resisting American occupation,” although it is obvious that Americans — Republicans and Democrats alike — are eager to leave Iraq, differing over the details, none wanting to turn it into an American colony or 51st state.

Al Manar and Al Aksa viewers know that they are watching reporters hired to get across a specific message. In the long run, that may be less dangerous than journalists who hide their bias behind righteous indignation and claims of neutrality.

This column was written for the Israel Advocacy Task Force of the Israel Center of the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia.