I had an experience last month that i keep thinking about.

I have heard complaints for a long time about bias in the media. This charge usually comes from Republicans and Religious Republicans and is leveled at at media outlets like NPR. When PResident Bush appointed XXX to head NPR, he went so far as to secretly hire a private consultant to prove bias at NPR. (Happily he was fired for it.)

In school, we learned about the phenomenon called "media bias". Apparently this is a well known effect. The upshot is that people with extreme views often feel that everyone else is biased against them, whether or not they actually are.

Which is a good segue to Israel and my story.

A few weeks ago there was a bombing in Israel by a Palestinian. Some group or other took credit for the attack and it was widely reported in the US. A Palestinian suicide bomber killed innocent people in Israel and broke the fragile peace/cease fire which had lasted for months.

Driving home one night, I heard a BBC report on the same bombing. They described the attack and the Palestinian group the same way the US media did. But the BBC went on to point out that Israel had assassinated a Palestinian leader of that group the week before. They put the two events together and concluded that the bombing was an act of retribution and not of instigation. An assassination? What?

In matters of fairness, it makes a difference who threw the first punch. The US story ignored any previous events that set the context and painted the Palestinians as the aggressor who broke the peace. The BBC reported a more complete story by connecting the dots and pointing out that Israel, not Palestinians, actually threw the first punch. Reporting both events lead to a very different story.

But the BBC went further. They actually included an reporters interview with a top Israeli official. (I cant ever remember the US media interviewing an Israeli official. We rarely interview our own officials.) This reporter asked about the bombing and then asked directly whether or not the Israeli assassination was a provocation of the Palestinians.

The official answered that Palestinians always want to kill Israeli's so it is not actually possible for Israel to provoke an attack. Pending attacks are the status quo so the assassination was irrelevant. I wasnt terribly impressed with that answer and neither was the reporter who kept asking about the link between the two events. (Asking hard questions is another thing that is almost nonexistent in the US media.)

Afterwards i kept thinking about these two very different stories on the same events and the interview. For the first time, it struck me that i was actually witnessing media bias, the real thing. It really made me question the validity of what we hear in the media. It really showed how a slight omission can completely alter the meaning. The experience gave me a lot to think about.

The one thing i can say is that you cant believe everything you hear, you need to ask questions, and you should always try to see things in context because perspective can completely change meaning. I guess that's three things.