Objective media alert. Yesterday I caught this on Atlas who got it from Jihad Watch. The shrewish woman is former CNN producer Nidal Rafa who has some highly nuanced views of Israeli history:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zV82jXNtZbY[/youtube]

Surprise! None of the journalists in attendance, including reporters for the New York Times, reported this woman’s freak out. I wonder why?

According to Tom Gross media CNN dropped this woman recently, but not until she poisoned Western understanding of the Middle East with her virulently anti-Zionist views:

Rafa is an Israeli Arab, born in the Haifa area, and is well-known around town not only as a CNN producer but also as an extremely vocal critic of Israel. For example, she engaged in another anti-Israeli outburst at an IPCRI (Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information) event in Jerusalem in February.

On other occasions in 2007 and 2008, while employed by CNN, she has publicly called for Israel to cease to exist as a Jewish state. Several years ago, in an article on how Western reporters interview Palestinians about their views on terrorism, Israel’s leading liberal paper Ha’aretz noted that “Nidal Rafa [then working for another American TV network] decides what to translate [from Arabic for the American correspondent] and what to leave untranslated.”

“The person who finally decided what the news channel would broadcast from Bartaa was Nidal Rafa,” observed Ha’aretz.

In the past, Rafa has also worked on programs for the BBC and NPR.

And although CNN says they’re finished with her, she’s been passing herself off as affiliated with them:

I spoke with Kevin Flower, the Jerusalem Bureau chief for CNN, and he says Rafa’s contract with CNN has been discontinued though he declined to provide a specific reason.

Despite this, Rafa handed out her CNN business card to several people, including myself, after her outburst against Danny Ayalon, and said she was still working for CNN. Even if she no longer works there, the question is why CNN employed someone like this for at least the last two years?

(There are many examples of anti-Israeli articles co-authored by Rafa on cnn.com. For example, “Jewish settlers on ‘terror’ rampage,” December 4, 2008.)

When I spoke to Rafa it was clear that, like many (but by all means not all) Arab journalists working for CNN, Reuters, the Associated Press and other major Western news providers in the Middle East, she didn’t think there was any contradiction between working as a journalist for an international news outlet and holding extreme anti-Israeli views.

You mean getting news from stringers who sympathize with one side of a conflict doesn’t lead to objective journalism? Who would have seen that coming?