Media

"The Israeli assault on the West Bank town of Jenin has produced dramatically different media accounts," says Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz. "The British press is playing it as a massacre, while American newspapers say there's no such evidence.

"Every Arab is watching this closely," says an Egyptian attorney who, like his neighbors, has been glued to the television in horror watching the Israeli military offensive in the Palestinian territories. "It may be worse for us even than Sept. 11 was for you - because it goes on and on," he says. "Every time you turn on the television, it's as though you were watching someone beat you." According to the New York Times, the story's impact in the Muslim world is comparable "to the way television news reports from the Vietnam War shook Americans in the 1960s.

The Society of Professional Journalists is asking the government of Israel to stop the harassment of journalists trying to cover the conflict in the West Bank. "SPJ is deeply concerned that the Government of Israel is worsening the grave situation in the Occupied Territories by injuring and intimidating journalists who are attempting to report the biggest story in the world today," said SPJ President Al Cross in a letter delivered to the Israeli Embassy in Washington.

Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now reports: "Yesterday [Monday], Democracy Now saw a CNN news zipper announcing that the Ramallah offices of CNN, Fox and other networks had been raided by the Israeli military. It also said that the news organizations had been told to run their reports by the Israeli authorities. But after scouring the internet and wires last night, we could find no other reports of this, aside from a sentence buried in a CNN story confirming that 'Israeli forces raided the offices of several news organizations and one U.S.