US journalists thus bear a heavy responsibility for their country's crumbling policies in the Middle East. There is nothing new in this lop-sided reporting. In this, American journalists have fallen into line with Israeli law. Similar attempts to play down Israel's responsibility for killings in the Middle East could be identified in 1996 when Israeli artillery slaughtered 106 Lebanese refugees sheltering in a UN battalion headquarters at Qana in southern Lebanon. But the paper did not question how Israel could break the rules of war by firing at a clearly marked ambulance.
History continues to be short-changed in the American media.
After one terrible suicide bombing in Jerusalem, the mother of an Israeli girl victim wrote that it was Mr. Netanyahu's policies rather than the Palestinians who had killed her daughter. The Los Angeles Times put the bombing on page one, and the mother's remarkable statement on page five. Academics may one day decide how deeply the American public has been misled by the persistent bias of the US media, and the degree to which this has led them to support US policies which may destroy America's prestige in the Middle East. Robert Fisk is a journalist.