National Public Radio watchdog Mytwords (NPR Check, 3/3/09) is moved to declare the network's Palestine/Israel coverage "worse than worthless" after "yesterday morning first featured Michele Kelemen redelivering Secretary of State Clinton's talking points (Hamas is a terrorist organization, blah, blah, blah, Hamas has to renounce violence, blah, blah, blah, U.S. is giving tons of money to Gaza, blah, blah, etc.)":

After that four-minute-plus State Department summary, what does NPR offer? Who would you go to for expert analysis? How about someone who has "has advised six American secretaries of state." Yep, NPR serves up the stale ideas of Aaron David Miller--again....

Miller mentions Netanyahu's negotiations with Arafat at the Wye River and the Hebron withdrawal. Throughout the interview, Linda Wertheimer just nods along like a bobblehead. I think she forgot to see how the actual settlement policies went under Netanyahu back when he was Prime Minister. Nothing about what that great Hebron concession really meant for Palestinians. Nothing about Netanyahu's provocations that even an editor from the rightist WINEP takes note of. Nothing about Netanyahu's Jerusalem expansionist efforts.

Mytwords imagines "it would be hard to do more pro-Likud, pro-Zionist coverage of the Palestine conflict." Indeed, you can read about NPR's long history of biased reportage on the region in the FAIR magazine Extra!: "The Illusion of Balance: NPR's Coverage of Mideast Deaths Doesn't Match Reality" (11-12/01) by Seth Ackerman.

Peter Hart asked the New York Times:

What should TV reporting of a civilian massacre look like, exactly?

Well, I guess the Times thinks they should be covered this way:

Extra!: How America's Leading Paper Covered a Massacre

...which is to say, they should be covered almost exclusively from the point of view of the community that the perpetrators of the massacres come from, with virtually no perspective from the people who are being massacred. Of course, this may depend upon the identity of the massacre victims.

When you routinely report about Israel and Gaza through the eyes of Israelis, the results can be awkward, like today's New York Times front-pager that frames what was a human catastrophe for many Palestinians--the killing by Israel of some 40 Gazans at a U.N. school--into a mere military and PR "pitfall" for Israelis. As the headline read, "For Israel, Lessons from 2006, but Old Pitfalls."

In the third paragraph of the story, reporter Steven Erlanger mentions the killings along with other earlier "pitfalls":

And then there are the sudden events that can throw off so many careful calculations and come to symbolize the horrors of war--like the deaths of civilians from Israeli munitions in Qana, Lebanon, both in 1996 and 2006, and the reports on Tuesday evening of as many as 40 people, including children, killed as they sought shelter in a United Nations school in northern Gaza.

In fact, neither of Israel's Qana attacks--the attack on a building near Qana in 2006 that killed 28 civilians, nor the 1996 attacks on the Qana U.N. refugee camp that took 106 lives--resulted from from "careful calculations" being "thrown off." As the Israeli daily Ha'aretz reported (8/1/06), the 2006 attack purposely targeted a three-story building near Qana because it was near the site of a previous Hezbollah rocket launch, even though the IDF, in Ha'aretz's words, "had no information on rockets launched from the site of the building, or the presence of Hezbollah men at the time."

In the case of the 1996 massacre, a U.N. investigation found that Israel Defense Forces had misrepresented key facts of the assault and had likely intentionally targeted the Qana refugee camp: "While the possibility cannot be ruled out completely, it is unlikely that the shelling of the United Nations compound was the result of gross technical and/or procedural errors."