NBC News correspondent Ayman Mohyeldin often takes to Twitter to question the credibility of other journalists and lecture them over the complexity of Middle Eastern politics. He also derides and grandstands against other media, despite his own journalistic work being pockmarked by one damaging bias controversy after another.
On Tuesday, Mohyeldin attacked Fox News’ coverage of the Seth Rich murder. The network had just issued an editorial statement retracting an article published last week which Fox said did not meet its editorial standards. Mohyeldin lectured his Twitter followers that the story was a “lie perpetuated by right-wing media for weeks.”
No doubt, Mohyeldin would consider himself a perpetuator of left-wing media bias. The Egypt-born Mohyeldin — who grew up in Georgia and graduated from American University — has made a name for himself for his coverage of the Middle East, where he’s demonstrated a consistent anti-Israeli bias that’s at odds with the supposedly objective stance of his employer, NBC News (not left wing MSNBC). His fluency in Arabic gives him with the ability to cover scoops not typically available to other reporters, with on-site coverage of the 2011 Egyptian revolution and the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict. He was a even direct witness to the accidental bombing of 4 Palestinian children on a Gaza beach—a story that went viral during the peak of the short-lived war.
But Mohyeldin has courted increasing controversy over the years with his harshly partisan reporting. Speaking on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, he insinuated that the real Chris Kyle, the subject of the movie American Sniper, was nothing like his movie counterpart and suggested that Kyle may have had “racist tendencies” towards Iraqis and Muslims. He stated that Kyle’s supposed tendencies made him go on “some of these, you know, killing sprees in Iraq on assignment.”
Over 20 retired generals and admirals wrote a letter to Comcast, which owns NBC, expressing outrage at Mohyeldin’s unsubstantiated, and disrespectful claims about Chris Kyle, who was murdered at a Texas shooting range by an emotionally damaged veteran he was trying to help.
In October 2015, Mohyeldin was accused of anti-Israeli bias when he falsely claimed during a live broadcast that Israeli soldiers shot and killed an unarmed Palestinian in cold blood. His claim was interrupted on air by another journalist who disputed his take of the events. Video evidence showed that the dead Palestinian terrorist was indeed armed with a knife, prompting Israeli soldiers to act.
During his report,Mohyeldin managed to slip in multiple mentions of “the occupation” and condemnation of Israeli’s conservative politics. The Jerusalem Post described Mohyeldin’s odd report as a “rambling 35-second stream of conscious[ness]” that exposed his anti-Israeli bias. Israeli citizens unsuccessfully campaigned for NBC to fire him over his biased reporting.
More recently, Mohyeldin claimed that Jerusalem is considered by the US and “international law” to be “occupied territory since 1967,” stating that it was Palestinian land annexed by Israel. Unlike Mohyeldin’s seemingly straightforward narrative, the ownership of Jerusalem has been the subject of dispute for over half a century.
For all his grandstanding as a journalist, Mohyeldin is every bit as susceptible to the shortcomings and bias he accuses others of having.
Ian Miles Cheong is a journalist and outspoken media critic. You can reach him through social media at @stillgray on Twitter and on Facebook.