WAPO To Leave No Stone Unturned

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Barack Obama, Deborah Howell, Donald Trump, Ezra Klein, Jeff Bezos, Journolist, Washington Post

Unified Patriots by Bob Montgomery

You may have heard that Bob Woodward, whom somebody told 40 years ago that there were cads in the Nixon Administration, has announced that the Washington Post has assigned twenty reporters full time duty to dig into every aspect of Donald Trump’s life. That is now…..this was then (8 years ago, not 40):

An Obama Tilt in Campaign Coverage

By Deborah Howell
Sunday, November 9, 2008

The Post provided a lot of good campaign coverage, but readers have been consistently critical of the lack of probing issues coverage and what they saw as a tilt toward Democrat Barack Obama. My surveys, which ended on Election Day, show that they are right on both counts.

Deborah Howell was the Post’s ombudsman in 2008. Soon after this article was written, she resigned on principle, as she could not in good faith give a credible accounting to the Post’s readers of the rationale behind the Post’s editorial decisions. And, again from Howell’s article, here is the rationale for the Obama decisions, as provided by the political editor
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State Dept Accused of ‘Disinformation’ Campaign; Falsely Claimed Top Israelis Officials Back Iran Deal

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Anti-Israel, Anti-Semitism, Disinformation, iran, Iran Nuclear Deal, israel, John Kerry, mainstream media, Marie Harf, Obama Administration, Propaganda, State Department, Washington Post

On July 22, 2015, Ishaan Tharoor of the Washington Post penned an article entitled, “How an Iran deal can be good for Israel, according to some Israelis who know what they’re talking about.”

Secretary of State, John Kerry wasted no time spiking the football and the following day Marie Harf, Kerry’s Senior Adviser for Strategic Communications shared the article on twitter with 39.6K followers. See below:

Is the Obama administration (and Washington Post) engaging in a disinformation campaign against Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu?

The Committee for Accuracy for Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) called out the Washington Post for the distorted headline, called for a correction of the headline and suggested that Harf mislead John Kerry and 40,000 of Harf’s twitter followers.

As pointed out by CAMERA, the Washington Post article was intended to convince Israelis that the Iran deal is a good deal through selective omissions, half-truths and fabrications allegedly asserting that four Israeli experts, i.e., Ex-Shin Bet head Ami Ayalon, former intelligence chief Efraim Halevy, former head of Israel’s Military Intelligence branch, Amos Yadlin and Meir Dagan, former Mossad chief) support the Iran nuclear deal.

A Washington Official, and the Washington Post, Fabricate Israeli Praise for the Iran Deal

….the article goes on to name four prominent Israeli security experts. The message for readers, then, is that even if Israel’s government and the largest opposition party are united against the deal — an inconvenient reality for the deal’s advocates in the American government and the media, who normally can find allies among Israeli politicians who are so often at each other’s throats — at least those in the know understand how truly good the agreement is.

Except it isn’t true. Let’s look at the security experts named in the piece:

Tharoor first mentions Ami Ayalon, a former head of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, and links to a Daily Beast piece entitled ‘Ex-Intel Chief: Iran Deal Good for Israel.…

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The Washington Post eventually published a clarification and CAMERA going beyond the article’s headline, thoroughly reviewed the article, did their homework and followed up in an article with an overview of Ishaan Tharoor’s earlier articles on Israel dating back to the beginning of 2015 which they describe as “skewing toward odd if not anti-Israel interpretations.”

This hardly is the first time Tharoor has failed to note important background and report uncritically. In one of several articles sneering at Netanyahu—this one for the prime minister’s comparison of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria—the blogger uncritically shares tweets and qoutes from Matt Duss, Michael Cohen, and Peter Beinart, commentators whose routine criticisms of the Israeli government frequently omit essential facts, as CAMERA has documented (“Selective Memory Bedevils Washington Post Op-Ed Contributors,” April 6)…..

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NOTE: At the time that the Washington Post article was falling apart and the State Department was outed, John Kerry stated “that if Congress rejects the nuclear deal with Iran, Israel might find itself more isolated and ‘more blamed by the international community’….I fear that what could happen is if Congress were to overturn it, our friends Israel could actually wind up being more isolated and more blamed…”

Oh, the Obama administration and their bullying endless and propaganda.

H/t Arutz Sheva.

LINKS:
https://twitter.com/ishaantharoor/status/623851319279927296
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/07/22/how-the-iran-deal-is-good-for-israel-according-to-israelis-who-know-what-theyre-talking-about/
https://twitter.com/marieharf/status/624240162655092736
http://jpupdates.com/2015/07/24/kerry-israel-would-be-blamed-if-congress-rejects-iran-deal/
https://twitter.com/marieharf
http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=38&x_article=3066
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/199027#.VcFCyPlbt1Q
http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=38&x_article=3066