Harvard publishes paper criticizing media bias during the Summer Lebanon War

LGF's summary:

During Israel’s war against Hizballah, at LGF we were continually outraged by the media’s uncritical promulgation of terrorist propaganda, and their overwhelming bias against Israel. The barrage of staged and manipulated disinformation culminated in the infamous Adnan Hajj fauxtography incident; and it can be argued that the culture of tacit cooperation with terrorists was at least partly responsible for that stunning case of phony news.

How could Reuters’ experienced editors miss a fake picture that was so bleeding obvious, at every step of the way toward publication? Answer: because they just didn’t care.

It’s interesting that in an age of obsessive media focus on scandals, no wire service or newspaper has ever followed up on that story in any real way. Adnan Hajj seemed to simply vanish off the face of the earth; no interviews, no photos of him, no investigations, nothing; just that one statement where he claimed his fakery was to “remove dust.”

For blowing the whistle on Hizballah’s manipulation of Reuters, LGF was smeared by numerous leftists; the diversionary tactics ranged from personal attacks to attempts to minimize the importance of the faked photos.

Now the Harvard Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, hardly a bastion of neocon wingnut thinking, has issued a paper that absolutely skewers the media for their outrageously biased and terrorist-enabling behavior. Maybe this will be a little harder for them to ignore.

The full report (PDF)