Even the Israeli government has had to take formal diplomatic notice of the problem. The Israeli foreign ministry launched a formal complaint against CNN last October, and Prime Minister Barak was scheduled to meet CNN executives during a visit to the US in November to push Israel’s complaint further. (In the end, the meeting was postponed but a subsequent meeting apparently occured.)

CNN has never had a huge audience in Australia, and overseas its ratings have dwindled somewhat in recent years. But it’s audience is very influential - and that is what matters. Virtually all news professionals watch CNN compulsively, as do many key political and public service figures. These are the people who need most to be up on the news every moment, and so the biases of CNN are spread to a wider constituency.

One of the biggest problems, and possibly the root of many others at CNN, has been their extensive use of Palestinian stringers to do most of their coverage of the current Palestinian violence. While the ethnicity of reporters should not be an issue, it is CNN’s responsibility to rein in any partisanship on the part of its reporters. In fact, one of the factors of which Israel officially complained to CNN was that Palestinian reporters on CNN, when speaking about Israeli-Palestinian clashes, would openly say "we" in reference to the Palestinian side.

According to a claim from an Israeli employee of CNN, the network has been covering the "Al-Aqsa Intifada" in part by handing out video cameras to Palestinians, most with no journalistic experience, along with cell phones and contacts numbers, and inviting them to film things from their perspective for use on CNN. It is hardly surprising, then, given that it invites such one-sided input, with all its potential for selective and biased coverage, that the reporting has hardly been neutral.

Among the things CNN has done over the past four months are:

* On a number of occasions, CNN anchors have opened reports on the Middle East violence by stating clashes had occurred "in the Palestinian lands".

* In the early days of the clashes, CNN almost completely failed to report on the extensive Palestinian use of firearms against Israelis, insisting in virtually all reports that Palestinians were armed only with stones, and even occasionally referring to "unarmed and defenceless" Palestinians. Other news agencies were reporting these facts. CNN also portrayed virtually all Palestinian attacks as spontaneous demonstrations, and did not report, as other agencies did, Palestinian police and other security forces were taking part in clashes. Reports used language like, "Hostilites broke out…when Israeli troops started firing on Palestinians who had been throwing stones," (Oct 6). Furthermore, much of the news footage for stories has been Israelis firing at Palestinians, without any context for why the Israelis were firing.

* CNN has reported almost nothing about Palestinian official incitement against Israel, when other news agencies have done so. Furthermore, even when such written or verbal material has appeared on the screen in Arabic, CNN has on several occasions failed to translate it or translated it incorrectly in ways that makes it look less harmful.

* CNN has repeatedly done stories on the suffering of Palestinians as a result of Israeli closures of roads and other security measures. It has done almost no stories on Israeli suffering or the problems faced by Israeli residents of the territories who often cannot leave their homes without being shot at.

* In mentioning the casualties of the violence, Israeli victims rarely get a mention on CNN. Reporters often simply say, as one did in early December, "Two hundred seventy five Palestinians have been killed so far in the violence." More frequently, CNN has simply reported the total number of dead in the violence and added, "almost all of them Palestinians."

* Israeli actions to which Palestinians object are often treated as fact, while Palestinian actions are reported as Israeli "claims." For example, in reporting on the clashes following Palestinian gunmen firing into the Jerusalem suburb of Gilo, on a number of occasions CNN reported Israelis returned fire at gunmen in the neighbouring Arab town of Beit Jala and then added that this occurred after Israel "claimed" gunmen had fired from there into Gilo.

* The Israeli government has complained that CNN has provided more airtime for Palestinian representatives than Israelis. In addition, in interviews, the questioning of the latter has generally been much more hostile and confrontational. Most famous is the October 12 interview between Israeli Prime Minister Barak and CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, following Israeli rocket attacks in retaliation for the Ramallah lynching of two soldiers. Amanpour repeated false Palestinian claims that several people were killed in the rocket attack, basically backed Palestinian claims that the Israeli response was a "declaration of war", insisted "the settlers are a threat to the Palestinian people" and added, "nothing is going to change what the world sees here, and it sees a well-armed military force against civilians, some of whom have guns, a lot of whom have stones. There is no parity whatsoever, no matter what you say about it."

* Sometimes CNN just plain gets things wrong through their reliance on Palestinian sources. For instance, following a Palestinian car bomb attack in the Israeli city of Hadera on November 22, CNN reported that "Israeli forces have launched a rocket attack on the West bank town of Ramallah." Well, the "rocket attack" simply did not happen and CNN simply withdrew the story from their website, without apology.

A recent example of bias was CNN’s coverage of the massive non-political rally in Jerusalem on January 8 to protest plans to divide the city and turn over the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site, to Palestinian control. By account of the police, and all Israeli and international media, it was the largest rally in Israeli history, drawing at least 250,000 attendees, probably more. But on CNN, it was reported only as drawing "thousands," and later "tens of thousands." CNN’s coverage was minimal, and none of the speeches at the rally were quoted or reported. Instead a representative from the Muslim Waqf (religious trust) was quoted, saying it was "provocative." Of the Temple Mount, CNN said it was the third holiest site in the Islamic world," but no mention was made that the site is also holy to Jews, much less that it is the holiest site in the Jewish religion.

In fact, the problem with CNN’s Middle East coverage dates back to well before the current wave of violence erupted in September. In August last year CNN, on its weather page, changed "Jerusalem, Israel, to just "Jerusalem", alone among all cities in the world in having no country. After complaints this was later changed back, with an asterisked note about the city being contested.

CNN also continually featured deeply hostile coverage of the previous Netanyahu government. For example, on the day of Netanyahu’s election in 1996, the network declared Netanyahu "hardline" and "rigid", and said it was a "sad day and a loss, a big loss for the Middle East peace process." When Netanyahu visited America and gave a speech at the Washington Press Club, a CNN reporter said it was "a very slick effort by the arch practitioner of propaganda to re-ingratiate himself with the American public."

CNN may be the first and most famous of a "new" breed of news providers, but news providers, new, old or timeless, have a responsibility to follow basic rules of professionalism. In the Middle East, CNN has increasingly been failing in that responsibility, and sadly, given its influence on other media, may well be bringing others down to its standards as well.