If you thought dishonest reporting wasn't affecting the Middle East peace, think again

HonestReporting.com has published its annual "dishonst reporting" awards for covering the Israeli Palestinian conflict, and it's a doozy. I'd laugh at the manifest bias from our major news outlets if I weren't crying so hard:

Of all the coverage we saw of the Gaza pullout, nothing stood out more than this odious comment by Reuters in the lead-up days:

The [Gaza] closure will give about 8,500 settlers a taste of some of the military restrictions and bureaucracy endured by Palestinians living under occupation.

The wire service also remained consistent to its warped principles during the London terror attacks too, refusing to describe the bombings as "terror." To understand the logic behind Reuters' vocabulary gymnastics, see here.

That's just an ugly example, followed by others about the Guardian's hiring a man with affiliations to terrorist groups and the story of the Palestinian stringers and their biased photos. The real kicker is the list of ten examples showing why BBC wins, hands down, the award for being the most dishonest news outlet when it comes to reporting about the Middle East. Here are some examples (with hyperlinks omitted):

9. Every morning, listeners can tune into BBC for an uplifting "Thought of the Day." One February morning, Rev. Dr. John Bell used the feature to describe an Arab-Israeli acquaintance only identified as "Adam." According to Rev. Dr. Bell, this acquaintance was "conscripted" into the Israeli army, where "he was also imprisoned for refusing to shoot unarmed schoolchildren." See the full transcript here. After HonestReporting pointed out that Israeli-Arabs aren't required to serve in the IDF and that the allegations that soldiers have orders to shoot unarmed kids are wholly unfounded, the BBC apologized-but only for not fact-checking Adam's age and the issue of conscription. We still await a retraction about the non-existent orders to shoot kids. *** 3. Following the London terror attacks, the BBC admitted loading the studio audience with a disproportionate number of Muslims for Questions of Security: A BBC News Special. (See Biased BBC for links to video of the show.) Among the complaints, one viewer wrote angrily:

I do not pay my license fee to watch an unrepresentative Muslim audience like this.

The BBC's response?

In order to ensure a range of voices on these issues, the studio audience contained a higher proportion of Muslims in the audience than in the population as a whole - around 15% of the audience as opposed to 2.7% of the country as a whole....

This isn't the first time the BBC got in hot water for loading the audience. In 2001, anti-American invective from a Question Time audience discussing the 9/11 attacks got so out of hand that news director Greg Dyke had to apologize to US ambassador Philip Lader, who participated in the show. Can anyone imagine a BBC program on Israel loaded with Israelis and Jews?

Does anyone remember, precisely, when the BBC went from being a reliable news source to being a shill for the worst elements of the Left?