Nothing written in the newspaper or presented on TV should be believed without independent verification. It is obvious that the newsmedia are not simply unbiased reporters anymore. Instead, they often stive to make the news rather than reporting it. It appears to me that some of the media are completely unreliable. NBC is bad as are ABC, CBS, PBS, CNN and MSNBC. Among news agencies Reuters is totally unrelaible, and AP is pretty bad. The famous Dan Rather story about George Bush and the Texas Air National Guard is an example. This story was so bad that a former air force officer told me it was fake after he heard about it on the radio, before all of the problems with the font on the forged letter was revealed. The situation with reporting from the middle east, particularly Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan cannot be believed because the information mostly comes from stringers who at least fear for their lives if they irritate al Quaeda, if they are not downright hostile to the USA. (The same thing happened in Vietnam where the news agencies unknowingly relied on communist sympathesizers for information.) The al-Dura affair is an example of how Arabs stage events to get their propaganda distributed in the West. Here is a good story about the whole sorry al-Dura affair.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/284xawsb.asp