The sum total of The Guardian’s 2011 news and commentary earned the paper last year’s Dishonest Reporting Award. The British paper’s cementing its lead for a repeat award this year — and it’s only June.
How bad has The Guardian gotten? Its Gaza live blog includes a post by Nader Elkhuzundar. The issue isn’t the post’s praise for Hamas. It’s the paper’s acceptance of a man who — in posts dug up by Harry’s Place — make an overt call to “kill a Zionist,” and poetically laud a “bloodbath.”
Elkhuzundar’s in good company at The Guardian. The Gaza package included an op-ed by Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s top dog in Gaza.
These are the twisted people The Guardian sees fit to confer legitimacy upon by giving them a soapbox. All this matters because The Guardian is one of the most widely read online papers in the world, and is influential among Britain’s intelligentsia: politicians, journalists and academics.
Now you can understand that the Gaza live blog is the proverbial straw that broke one media watchdog’s attitude towards The Guardian. My colleague, HonestReporting editor Simon Plosker, leveled unusually harsh criticism of the paper in a Times of Israel op-ed. After citing example after example, Plosker concludes:
Despite seeing many unpalatable things in the media over the years working for HonestReporting, I’ve always tried to err on the side of caution before branding any media outlet as an avowed enemy of Israel.
When it comes to The Guardian, however, the paper deserves to be treated as a modern-day Der Sturmer.
