The Washington Post: scary before Halloween

Eric Rozenman
CAMERA Media Analysis
05 November '10

The Washington Post’s Sunday Outlook section features a short "Worst Week in Washington" item. It bestows a "worst week" award to a politician or celebrity embarrassed by unsought headlines the previous seven days.

For a trio of self-inflicted failures in covering Israel, European Jewry, and American Muslims The Post itself should have been the undisputed winner at the end of October.

There he goes again

"Impasse in the Mideast; Israel’s settlements render a Palestinian state impossible" (October 29), a commentary by Saeb Erakat, the Palestinian Authority’s chief negotiator. Erakat basically recycled erroneous, tendentious arguments made in recent Post Op-Eds by George Bisharat, Daoud Kuttab, and Robert Malley and Hussein Agha (see CAMERA’s critique "September Days: The Washington Post’s Peculiar Israeli-Palestinian Commentary," September 17 here ).

Erakat has little credibility. When Palestinian Arabs alleged an Israeli "massacre" of civilians in the West Bank town of Jenin in 2002, Erakat infamously insisted to CNN that Israel’s forces had killed more than 500 people. In fact, Palestinian fatalities in house-to-house fighting totaled 53, nearly all combatants. Twenty-three Israeli soldiers also died.

Erakat’s trail of anti-Israel exaggerations and fabrications is long and public. Nevertheless, The Post gave him space for more, including:

(Read full analysis)

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