Some of America’s broadcast news media headlined with a startling question on Tuesday: “Did Israel’s prime minister deliberately mislead the United Nations about Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon?”

That question and similar leads and headlines on broadcast news networks in the United States are starting to look like an active, open campaign to discredit Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu — and possibly delegitimize the State of Israel — ahead of Netanyahu’s trip to Washington DC next week.

That particular question was asked on CNN in reference to an alleged disagreement between Israel’s international intelligence agency, the Mossad, and the prime minister over the estimated time necessary for Iran to be able to cross the threshold to become an international nuclear power.

It’s an old story that made the news and was put to rest in Israel literally months ago, one that was more a matter of semantics than anything else, as CNN correspondent Nick Robertson in London quickly made clear.

Robertson wisely reported on the truth of the matter, pointing out that the Mossad stated there was “no daylight between the view of Mossad and the prime minister.”

Apparently a briefing sheet distributed to reporters included an unclear point on “item 9” he said, which “someone has chosen to deliberately undermine the prime minister when he goes to the United States next week.” (ed: italics added)

Just a day earlier the same news media outright ignored a major verdict handed down in New York federal district court, ending a 10-year-long lawsuit by 10 families of victims of terror against the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority.

The court found in favor of the plaintiffs, deciding the PLO and the PA are civilly and financially liable for the injuries and deaths of American citizens in six terror attacks between 2002 and 2004 overseas. Damages in the amount of $655.5 million were awarded to the plaintiffs, to be paid by the PA and PLO.

It was a record-making, landmark decision — and not one television news network covered the story. To its credit, the New York Times headlined the bulletin within seconds after a verdict was reached.

But where were the broadcast news networks with their “Breaking News” bulletins? They were right there when it came to questioning whether Israel’s prime minister “deliberately misled the United Nations on Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon.”

But some of America’s mainstream broadcast news media seem to be “missing in action” when it comes to reporting on what is really happening in the Middle East — at least when it comes to Israel, Iran and the Palestinian Authority.

Let’s hope America’s viewers are more savvy — and demanding — and switch to media where they can find more accurate coverage of events in the Middle East.

An opposition group in Iran was slated to reveal new information Tuesday morning about the presence of a top secret parallel nuclear program being carried out at a site called Lavizan-3.

But suddenly, after first announcing the upcoming news story and the presence of the blockbuster top secret parallel nuclear development program in Iran – the headlines vanished. The briefing by the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) simply did not exist.

Instead, reports vanished about the upcoming news of the secret Iranian nuclear development program being carried on right under the very noses of the American and European negotiators while trying to reach a “good faith” agreement with Tehran.

They were replaced with headlines about “leaked cables” that reportedly showed Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Israel’s international Mossad intelligence agency “disagreed” about the extent of the Iranian nuclear threat.

Talk about the proverbial red herring.

To his credit, CNN correspondent Nick Robertson in London debunked that myth, reporting that the Mossad clarified there “is no daylight” between the view of the Mossad and the prime minister. Robertson noted that a briefing sheet distributed to journalists about the issue included one point that seemed a bit vague – “item 9” which, he said, “someone has chosen to deliberately undermine the prime minister when he goes to the United States next week.”

While the top secret parallel nuclear development program is humming away, world powers led by the U.S. are hammering out an agreement to allow Iran to continue openly its clandestine activities, aimed at achieving an atomic weapon of mass destruction.

“The U.S. and Iran are shaping the contours of a deal that would initially freeze Tehran’s nuclear program but would allow it to slowly ramp up activities that could be used to make nuclear arms over the last years of the agreement’s duration,” Fox News reported on its website Monday and Tuesday.

The details of the six-power talks with Iran were still not fine-tuned, according to the report, which said restrictions on the uranium enrichment program would be lifted as part of the deal, along with sanctions, as a reward for “good behavior” by Iran.

News about the briefing by the Iranian opposition group, slated to take place at 10 am New York time, was non-existent however — and the original headline vanished as if it did not exist on both CNN and Fox News.

The original announcement remained on Yahoo! News but no follow-up was available, leading to questions of how the story had been squelched.

The nuclear development site itself has been kept completely secret from the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and work there reportedly is continuing during negotiations with the P5+1 world leaders, including the United States.

The National Council of Resistance of Iran has previously provided highly reliable intelligence on Iran’s nuclear sites, however — and the U.S. representative office of the NCRI was slated to hold its news conference to reveal further information on the existence of “an active and secret parallel nuclear program in Iran,” the group said.

In the past, NCRI exposed some of the most significant parts of the Iranian regime’s nuclear weapons program, including information about the Natanz uranium enrichment and Arak heavy water sites in August 2002; Kalay-e Electric centrifuge assembly and testing facility in February 2003; Lashkar-abad Laser enrichment and Lavizan-Shian site in May 2003; Fordow underground enrichment site in December 2005; and Defensive Innovation and Research Organization SPND in July 2011.

It’s still not clear what happened with the briefing — nor is it clear how or why the U.S. news media suddenly ditched the story.

Approximately 30 Palestinian Authority Arab journalists are brushing up on their Hebrew at a six-week course at a college in Ramallah to improve their ability to read Hebrew newspapers on the “occupation,” the Bethlehem-bases Ma’an News Agency reported Friday.

It quoted television reporter Dalai Said as stating, “As the saying goes: Know the language of your enemy.”

A writer for a weekly magazine said, “We live under occupation so it is crucial that we know what the press says to be able to get the bigger picture.”

PMW director Itamar Marcus is to receive the Abramowitz Israel Prize for Media Criticism this month. Sponsored by Kenneth and Nira Abramowitz, the prize is awarded by Israel’s Media Watch.

The goal of the award is to encourage journalists, pundits, public figures and organizations to contribute toward a critical review of the media.

“One of the topics that the Israeli media is loath to cover seriously in the Palestinian Authority,” wrote Israel Media Watch chairman Eli Pollak and vice-chairman Yisrael Medad in describing the award.

“The Israeli media is dominated by those who believe that Israel’s future depends on the realization of the two-state vision. Our pundits describe PA President Mahmoud Abbas as a relative moderate, with whom one may cut a deal. This may be true or not, but the public deserves to know whether the facts support it.

“This is why Israel needs an organization such as Palestinian Media Watch. The organization, founded in 1996 by Itamar Marcus, has during the past two decades reported on the PA. Its material is available to all, yet the Israeli media is very loath to bring to the fore some of the egregious hate incitement in the PA, condoned by Abbas.

“This hate is not against the “occupation” per se, but is anti-Semitic. It encourages terrorism against Israelis and aggrandizes those who commit despicable crimes, such as killing infants in their beds, just because they were born to Israelis or “settlers.”

Why does the media ignore these warnings? One reason is that the idea of peace is so tantalizing that facts are not allowed to interfere. A more sinister motivation is racism – the Palestinians are not considered to be sufficiently civilized to be held to Western standards, and their behavior is discounted as that of primitives. Be it what it may, we at Israel’s Media Watch have found the Palestinian Media Watch and its founder and leader Marcus to be worthy of the media criticism prize this year.

Four pre-election polls published Thursday night and Friday morning show varying results, but two of them reveal that the popularity of Labor-Livni has grown by a solitary seat in the Knesset. Nevertheless, Israel’s establishment media are reporting the trivial news as if there is a rush of support for the left.

Polls are not  meaningless, but when a party registers one seat more or one less from week to week, it is virtually insignificant, numerically as well as statistically when taking into account the margin of error in small samples.

That has not stopped Israel Radio, known by the misnomer in English as the Voice of Israel, from promoting the results of this week’s poll as a victory for the “Zionist camp,” a label now claimed by everyone except for Neturei Karta.

Similarly,  three television polls show that the lead party is the “Zionist camp,” whose list of candidates likely to be elected includes those who want to turn over all of Judea and Samaria as well as half of Jerusalem to the Palestinian Authority, which has said that no Jew will be allowed to live there.

The same poll trumpeted by Israel radio also shows that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has a 4 percentage lead over Labor party leaders Yitzchak Herzog and Tzipi Livni when voters are faced with the question of who should be Prime Minister. However, Rafi Smith, who carried out the poll, said this is insignificant because of the margin of error, which apparently does not apply to results in favor of the left.

But that was the secondary headline.

The big news, according to Israel Radio, is that Herzog-Livni is now leading the Likud party by two seats instead of one.

The gap is 2, 4 and 1 in three polls on television channels 2, 10 and 1.

More significant is that Herzog-Livni still have no chance to form a coalition government without an ungodly collection of Meretz and Yisrael Beiteinu or Yisrael Beiteinu and Haredi parties.

After adding up all the numbers, the picture has not changed from last week or even last month: There are two camps: the anti-Netanyahu parties of Labor-Livni, Meretz and Yesh Atid, headed by Yair Lapid; and the pro-Netanyahu camp of the Likud and the Jewish Home, which according to all polls is holding stable with 16-17 mandates.

The most significant changes in the numbers relate to Yisrael Beiteinu, which has been in a clear trend of a decline in the past month. The four polls give the party 5, 6 and 7 seats, far less than when the current Knesset was dissolved.

After taking into account small differences in poll results for the other parties, Kulanu, headed by Moshe Kahlon, Yesh Atid, Meretz and Shas are not moving up or down significantly.

Eli Yishai, who split from Shas and formed his own party, still is on the borderline of being shut out of the Knesset.

There are other very significant indications: If Labor-Livni picks up any more seats, it will be at the expense of Meretz or Yesh Atid, and vice-versa. If Kulanu attracts more voters, they likely will move over from Yesh Atid, Yisrael Beiteinu and possibly the Likud.

There still are two months left before voters go to the polls, and Israel Radio and most of the television channels will try to convince voters that Herzog and Livni have the best chance to win.

If the combined party comes out on top, President Reuven Rivlin will have little choice but to give it the first crack at forming a government, which brings back to mind the elections five years ago.

Jerusalem’s planning committee has approved the construction of 243 new residential units in Ramot, a large neighborhood on the western side of city that international media have now officially termed a ”settlement.”

Most of Ramot is on public land that was occupied by Jordan from the end of the War for Independence until the Six-Day War in 1967. It was developed in the late 1970s  and almost never has been lumped in with similar areas in eastern, southern and northern Jerusalem.

The planning committee also approved another bureaucratic stage for building 270 homes in the same area.

Reuters reported, “Israel describes both settlements as Jerusalem “neighborhoods” and added that Palestinian Authority fears that the “Israeli enclaves will deny them contiguous territory” in a future state.

According to Reuters, Israel cites “biblical links” to justify the right to of Jew to anywhere in Jerusalem.

As much as the biblical links are true, as they are true for the entire existence of the State of Israel, Jerusalem built up Ramot because the city needed to expand and because a strong Jewish presence is Israel’s best security against more Arab wars.

Anticipating criticism from the United States, which backs the Arab world stand to shrink Israel back to the 1949 Armistice Lines, the Jerusalem committee stated:

There is no change in the policy of the municipality in recent years and we will continue to build in all neighborhoods of the city, for Jews and Arabs alike, according to the master plan. In the coming years, it is expected tens of thousands of housing units will be built in all sectors of the city.

New construction in Jerusalem is essential for the city’s development and for allowing young people and students to live here and buy an apartment.

 

Jerusalem city councilor Yosef Pepe Alalu, of the left-wing Meretz party, told AFP, “This kind of decision distances us from any chance of reaching an agreement with the Palestinians.”

While Reuters reported that Israel ”captured” Judea and Samaria and what is now Greater Jerusalem, AFP went one step further from the truth and told readers it “seized” eastern Jerusalem.

The CAMERA watchdog organization has posted five new billboards in midtown Manhattan to spread the message of The New York Times’ slanted reportage on Israel.

The organization, officially known as the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, still posts a billboard opposite the newspaper’s headquarters with a message that reads, “The New York Times Against Israel—All Rant, All Slant, All The Time. Stop The Bias!”

“We are expanding our effort to let the public know, beginning with the newspaper-reading public in New York City, that The Times persists—[and] has even doubled-down—in its long-standing pattern of prejudiced reporting and editorializing when it comes to Israel,” said Andrea Levin, CAMERA’s executive director.

One example of  The New York Times reports that play down terror is last month’s Times’ headline of the barbaric murders a Jerusalem’s Har Nof synagogue.

The original headline stated, “Four Killed in Jerusalem Synagogue Complex,” as if the four victims may have died in the collapse of the building or in a work accident.

“If The Times imagines it can escape scrutiny, it’s quite mistaken. As long as The Times keeps lying about Israel, we’ll keep telling the truth about them,” Levin said.