If truth is the first casualty of war, some journalists covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are its undertakers. In the four years of the current intifada, the media have shown an astonishing lack of judgment and professionalism. From the BBC's false accusations of an Israeli "massacre" in Jenin, to a Le Monde article ruled to be defamation by a French court, examples of shoddy journalism fueled by ideological zeal abound.

The image of Palestinians being thrown out of their homes by the Israelis presents a particular obsession for much of Western media. False stories, such as Edward Said's claim that he grew up in Jerusalem and was made a refugee, have been amplified by the media. (It was later discovered that the late Columbia University professor spent most of his youth in Cairo and his parents did not even own a house in Jerusalem.) Similarly, claims of Yasser Arafat's Palestinian birth were for years accepted by the media at face value, despite ample evidence he was born in Egypt.

Canadians recently experienced such inaccurate reporting firsthand when Carolynne Wheeler, a Globe and Mail reporter in Israel, described the June 21 meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas as having taken place "on disputed home turf," in "Sharon's flag-draped residence in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City," from which the Arab tenants were "removed" after Sharon "purchased it."

None of this is true.

The meeting took place in the Israeli PM's official residence in West Jerusalem. The East Jerusalem home Wheeler was referring to had been bought in 1884 by Moshe Wittenberg, a Jewish immigrant from Russia. Despite Wheeler's assertion, "removal of its Arab inhabitants" never took place; on the contrary, the house's Jewish owners were evicted by an Arab mob in 1929. After the 1967 war, control of the property returned to the late Wittenberg's endowment. When Sharon expressed interest in moving into the house, the endowment terminated the leases of some of its tenants, compensating them to the tune of $10,000 dollars. Hardly a "removal" as Wheeler terms it.

Moreover, Sharon never "purchased" the East Jerusalem home, and it is not even registered in his name -- a mistake that the small correction that appeared in the Globe failed to rectify.

If Wheeler was in fact absent from the meeting -- otherwise, how can one explain the wrong location she repeatedly describes -- how does she know the Palestinian delegation emerged from the meeting "grim-faced"? How can one trust anything she writes about the delegation she apparently never met?

Wheeler seems to have joined those Middle East reporters whose coverage is based on misinformation fed to them by Palestinian "fixers" with a clear agenda to manipulate credulous Western journalists. Canadian readers deserve better.