The top anchors of ABC News, Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, who anchored the last televised debate between senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton last week, a few days before the primary Democratic election in the key State of Pennsylvania held last Tuesday, have been blasted by colleagues and others for their mean attempt at "taking down" Obama, the front-runner, by repeatedly asking questions already raised in earlier debates.

"For many viewers, including me," wrote David Carr, the media columnist of The New York Times, "it was a disgusting spectacle, a tableau that etched not the bankruptcy of politics but of the people covering it." The fact that Stephanopoulos had once served in the Clinton White House was not overlooked by some TV watchers and critics.

Another scandalous expose, unearthed by The Times, dealt with the so-called "military analysts" who appeared regularly on various television programs to give "authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world," and as The Washington Post wrote: "to help sell [the Iraq] war that was not going well."

The Times revealed that "hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration's wartime performance," an effort that began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day. What was more appalling was the revelation that "most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air."

The American media, by and large, are not much better off when they focus on the Arab-Israeli conflict, allowing pro-Israeli columnists, some of them Jewish, to have a field day in decrying Arab views or actions, but rarely, if ever, condemning Israel's bloody attacks against the Palestinians, especially those in the Gaza Strip, described nowadays as an open-air prison.

Much to the surprise of some of its readers, The Washington Post published last Thursday a well-argued Op-Ed by Mahmoud al-Zahar, a surgeon and founder of Hamas, and a former foreign minister in the Palestinian unity government. His bottom line: "No 'peace plan,' 'road map' or 'legacy' can succeed unless we are sitting at the negotiating table and without any preconditions."

But it seemed the paper had mischievously carried Zahar's column only to cut down his views in its editorial on the opposite page as well as to condemn former President Jimmy Carter for "embrac[ing] Hamas terrorists" during his ongoing Mideast tour in the hope of energizing the peace process. It ridiculed Carter's justification for meeting the Hamas leaders and his "arguments about the value of dialogue with enemies."

The Post's pugnacious editorial argued that Carter missed the point. "Contacts between enemies can be useful: Israel is legendary for such negotiations, and even now it is engaged in back-channel bargaining with Hamas through Egypt."

But the paper failed to note, for example, that Israel had not bothered to move a single inch out of the occupied Palestinian territories since the launching of the Annapolis Mideast peace conference nearly five months ago and in the hope of reaching an accord by the end of the Bush term next January.

The Post's editorial writer would have done well, and may learn a lesson or two, had he noted the front page photo in The New York Times appearing on that same day that showed two Palestinian boys atop each other with their bicycles after being gunned down by Israeli troops.

In fact, the lackadaisical Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations have "regressed," as the former president correctly observed, and much to the chagrin of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who is scheduled to be in Washington this week along with Jordan's King Abdullah in an uphill effort to convince U.S. President George W. Bush to inject more life into the peace process.

It was ironic that both U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and al-Qaida's number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, should find themselves on the same side this week when each criticized the talks between the much-respected former president and the Hamas leaders.

She chided Carter for meeting with Hamas, "because there would be no sense that Hamas was somehow party to peace negotiations." Likewise, the al-Qaida leader lashed out at Hamas for its reported willingness to consider a peace deal with Israel. "How can they put a matter that violates Sharia [Muslim law] to a referendum?"

Maybe we have to look in other international newspapers for more commonsense and fairness. The Independent of London editorialized, "The policy of isolating the Islamists is destructive and myopic," while Gideon Levy writes in the Israeli paper Ha'aretz, "The terrorists of yesterday all became the statesmen of tomorrow, once they came to power or became partners in negotiations."

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George S. Hishmeh is a syndicated columnist. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the views or opinions of the Middle East Times.