From WNYKRC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone. On April 2nd, in response to a series of

deadly Palestinian attacks, the Israeli army invaded the West Bank town of Janine in search of

terrorists. 23 Israeli soldiers died in heavy street fighting there, as did a substantial number

of Palestinians. The actual number of Palestinian

dead, however, was unclear for weeks. A spokesman for the Palestinian Authority claimed the figure

to be in the thousands. Soon there were reports of mass graves and the stench of decomposing flesh,

and people began speaking of the Janine massacre.

Two months later, it is clear there was no such massacre.

The number of Palestinians who died in the Israeli operation was at most 56 in separate firefights.

But throughout the world, the unskeptical reports of a massacre and of Israeli war crimes were commonplace.

American news organizations were generally circumspect and cautious, but according to UPI senior news

analyst Martin Seif, the Europeans were particularly careless.

According to Seif, the restrictions on press access to Janine led the media down a dangerously speculative path.

The widespread assumption that media people had was that the Israelis were keeping them out because they had something to hide.

But there was another level to this as well.

You find that Israeli officials in the first weeks of April are very cautious in the response about this themselves

because they hear the Palestinian claims. They know heavy fighting is going on in Janine.

And they themselves do not know how many people have died.

Now, there was another complicating factor in that while the press couldn't get into

to Janine because the Israelis had closed it off,

...