HonestReporting

HonestReporting (HR) was founded as an email list by Jewish British university students in 2000, and sponsored by the Aish Hatorah Yeshiva, after a skewed news report in the New York Times showed a bleeding boy near a yelling Israeli soldier waving a club. The caption read "An Israeli Policeman and a Palestinian on Temple Mount". The picture was interpreted as depicting the Israelis as aggressors against Palestinian children and was used in an official Egyptian government website, in the Palestinian information center website www.islam.net and on online calls to boycott Coca-Cola for doing business with Israel.[4] In fact, the picture was of an American Jewish boy, Tuvia Grossman, being saved by the Israeli soldiers from a lynch by a mob in the Arab Neighborhood of Wadi Joz in East Jerusalem, during Yom Kippur, at the onset of the Second Intifada.[5] The boy's father sent a letter to the New York Times, but the caption was at first only partly corrected. The email list called for the readers to personally participate in getting the editors to show the facts, urging the readers to first carefully read the article and decide for themselves, and then to respond factually and correctly in their own words. The readers were also urged to send in similar news coverage that was infactual or written in a biased way. The list reported about success cases, the first being the full correction of the first article by the New York Times and the publication of the ordeal the boy actually went through.[4][6]

By 2003 the list had 150,000 subscribers and began raising funds for it to become an independent organization. In 2003, HonestReporting Canada (HRC) was founded as an "independent, non-profit organization" headquartered in Toronto, Canada.[7] In February 2006, HonestReporting was granted "independent Charitable Organization status in Israel to complement its US and Canadian status.".[8] In March 2006, a dedicated website by HonestReporting for covering the Media in the UK was launched by two expatriate Britons, CEO Joe Hyams, and Managing Editor Simon Plosker.[9] In 2011, the HR UK website was merged into the main HR.com site.[10]

The Australian branch HonestReporting Down Under was launched in March 2016, to cover Australian and New Zealand media.[11] For Portuguese-language media HonestReporting Brazil was launched in June 2016,[12] and for the French language media HonestReporting France was launched in June 2016.[13]

HR's self-declared mission statement claims that,

HonestReporting combats the false depiction of Israel in the media by challenging the biased coverage and demanding accountability. HR's mission is to educate the public about unfair media coverage of Israel and to empower the grassroots to respond in an effective manner.[14]

HonestReporting has prompted many corrections in the media over the years[18] including:

Following the threat of legal action, The Guardian was forced to change its style guide and publicly acknowledge that Tel Aviv is not the capital of Israel. As reported by The Times of Israel:

On April 22 [2012], the Guardian ran a page 27 correction apologizing for "wrongly" having called Jerusalem Israel's capital a few days earlier. The London-based paper then stated that according to its style guide, Tel Aviv is the country's capital. Indeed, the style guide at the time stated that designating Jerusalem as the capital is "a mistake we have made more than once."

After the Guardian's April correction—published after the paper ran a caption on a photo showing passengers on a train observing a two-minute silence for Holocaust Remembrance Day—Honest Reporting filed a complaint with the Press Complaints Commission.

The PCC, a non-governmental regulatory body which has the power to force publications to run corrections, initially defended the Guardian's position to call Tel Aviv Israel's capital, writing in its May ruling that "many countries" don't recognize Israel's classification of Jerusalem as its capital and that "those nations enjoying diplomatic relations with Israel have their embassies in Tel Aviv." Therefore, the PCC wrote, the Guardian "was entitled to refer to Tel Aviv as the capital of Israel. There was no breach of the code in this instance."

According to Honest Reporting, whose stated mission is "defending Israel from media bias," the London-based PCC ruling was flawed and had the "potential to further delegitimize Jerusalem's status as Israel's capital, giving the British media a carte blanche to follow The Guardian's lead." Therefore, Honest Reporting initiated steps to file for a judicial review of the decision, leading the PCC in July to retract its original ruling and to ask the Guardian to defend their position—which culminated in Wednesday's correction.[25]

The PCC later overturned its original decision, concluding that "the unequivocal statement that Tel Aviv is the capital of Israel had the potential to mislead readers and raised a breach of … the Editors' Code of Practice."[26]

The American Journalism Review described the organisation as a "pro-Israeli pressure group".[27]

After being criticized by HonestReporting for articles published by The Independent, author Robert Fisk wrote in the Independent that some of their readers sent him hate-mail.[28]

Following a 2004 article published in the British Medical Journal which criticised Israel for a high level of Palestinian civilian casualties and claimed that the pattern of injuries suggested routine targeting of children in situations of minimal or no threat, the journal received over 500 responses to its website and nearly 1,000 sent directly to its editor. In an analysis of the responses published in the journal, Karl Sabbagh concluded that the correspondence was orchestrated by Honest Reporting and aimed at silencing legitimate criticism of Israel. In his analysis Sabbagh pointed to evidence that the correspondents had not read the article. Sabbagh also documented a significant proportion of offensive, abusive and racist insults among the correspondence. An editorial by the BMJ referred to the campaign as bullying and said that the best way to counter such behaviour was to expose it to public scrutiny.[29][30] Daniel Finkelstein, associate editor of The Times, responded that Sabbagh's piece was "anti-Israel propaganda" that did not meet even "basic academic standards" of scientific analysis.[31]

HonestReporting Canada (HRC) is the Canadian branch of the organization. It monitors Canadian media coverage of Israel and the Middle East to promote what it calls "balanced, accurate, and unbiased reporting" about Israel.[32]

HonestReporting Canada (HRC) was established in 2003 as an independent, non-profit group headquartered in Toronto, Canada. Since then, HRC has opened an office in Montreal in April 2008,[33] giving them official national and bilingual status. HRC plans to further expand across the country to other large Canadian cities and extend their operations to include regular monitoring of college and university campus papers.[34]

The executive director of HonestReporting Canada is Mike Fegelman and Assistant Director is Paul Agoston. Prominent Canadian Conservative Member of Parliament and Cabinet Minister Peter Kent has served on the board of Honest Reporting Canada.[35]

• Arab Media Watch
• Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America
• Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
• Jewish Internet Defense Force
• Media bias
• Media coverage of the Arab–Israeli conflict
• Media Watch International

• Honest Reporting official website
• Honest Reporting Canada: the official Canadian affiliate
• HonestReporting.org, which reports critically on HonestReporting
• Media manipulators by David Leigh in The Guardian, criticizing HonestReporting
• HonestReporting.com's response to the "Media manipulators" article, at aish.com