The Media Accountability Project  

Apologists Like Mr. Cohn's Can’t Blame Hezbollah for Everything

"Mackinnon's article seems to attribute all of Lebanon's ills to Hezbollah which is unfair. Hezbollah has only existed since 1982 and was created to liberate Lebanon from Israeli occupation, which began in 1982 and ended in 2000."

"Simply put, Thomson has failed to do his job as a professional journalist to present a fair and accurate description of the state of affairs between Israel and Lebanon.  As Parliamentary Bureau Chief of the National Post, his reporting in this story is shoddy and offensive."

"This paragraph not only glosses over the details of the Tal Al-Sultan massacre that you don't even name, but downplays the brutality of what Israel did and its responsibility: Tents were on fire, Palestinians were burned alive, burned, pulled and beheaded bodies were found, 45 Palestinians were killed, mostly women and children, including a headless child (Ahmad Al-Najar), and 249 Palestinians were injured."

"To be more accurate, you should mention that Israel violated the blue line multiple times after withdrawing from South Lebanon in 2000 and waged a war against Lebanon in 2006."

"Throughout your article, however, the onus is placed not on Israel as the occupying power but on its adversaries. Famously, Israel does not have declared borders. Its approach to illegal territorial expansion has always relied on a fluid and expandable frontier. To omit this well-established context, as your article does – while alluding to some two-way threat of conflict across Israel’s northern frontier – is quite simply to mislead your readers."

"The UN’s Partition Plan for Palestine was never fully realized. The proposal was adopted by the UN General Assembly on November 29, 1947 as Resolution 181, but no Arab states were established in accordance with the Plan in 1948, as the article suggests."

"While your coverage is thorough and gives your readers a detailed idea of what is happening with this developing story, there is no context given regarding who these Palestinian refugees are and why they are in a camp in southern Lebanon."

"By describing Fatah as mainstream, you are suggesting that their policies are somehow ‘normal’ or dominant, and others would not be. That is neither fair nor entirely true, and fails to provide listeners with accurate or relevant information."

"Failing to provide an authoritative Palestinian perspective or source results in a whitewash of the Israeli military’s policy and actions in Jenin. Residents of the Jenin refugee camp would disagree in describing the invasion as “targeted” as many described their homes being turned into military posts and barracks, and the theft and the destruction of their personal possessions."