So, just to make clear what they are saying: newspapers are not controlled by the lobby, but a “majority” of columnists, by virtue of their support for Israel, are part of the lobby, and therefore make the media serve its interest.

Where are the editors in all this? Why can’t they stop their newspapers’ op-ed pages from reading like press releases from the Israeli embassy? This is where the argument gets mushy. Walt and Mearsheimer, as they frequently do, quote people making offhand remarks and use that as the basis for a bigger argument. So they take two quotes by editors who openly expressed a pro-Israel bias - one overheard statement from Robert Bartley, the late op-ed page editor of the Wall Street Journal (surprise, surprise) and a quote from the memoirs of Max Frankel, the former - to make the claim that those who run newspapers are complicit in all this.

That’s on the opinion side, where the lobby works from within. On the news side, the professors decry the power of the lobby as manifested in watchdog groups who email and write letters and make phone calls when they find a story to be not pro-Israel enough. Pity the poor CNN executive quoted here who says he gets 6,000 email messages whenever he runs a story that is anti-Israel. We are told, of course, about CAMERA, the media watchdog group that calls NPR “National Palestine Radio” and generally makes a nuisance of themselves, and of a secret program to “co-opt prominent commentators” to become more pro-Israel by giving them tours of Israel (recent participants: Oliver North and Armstrong Williams). All this seems, to put it lightly, pretty harmless, and par for the course if you’re a good newspaper.

And that’s it. That’s the whole argument. What makes it so weak is that is based entirely on cherry-picked examples. No one would argue that the columnists they name are not pro-Israel. Furthermore, it’s obvious that among the pool of syndicated columnists that there are a large number who are conservative and therefore strongly back Israel’s hardest line. But it’s not clear how this adds up to a media universe that, in the professors’ words, “consistently favors Israel and does not call U.S. support into question in any way.”

As an exercise I looked back at the op-ed pages of the major papers during the months of July and August of last year. At this time, Israel was bombing Lebanon in an effort to eliminate Hezbollah strongholds in the south and in certain neighborhoods in Beirut. Walt and Mearsheimer argue that it was the collective power of the lobby that kept America from reigning Israel in when civilian deaths began mounting. Supposedly the media had a role in all this by not offering a critical enough examination of Israel’s actions.

But I found, among other things, an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times by Sari Makdisi titled, “Caught in the Crossfire; Israel’s Outrageous Offensive,” that called Israel’s bombing campaign, “terrorism in the true sense of the word” (he also had an op-ed earlier this week about Gaza’s children who are “growing up stunted”).There was also an op-ed in The New York Times by Michael Young, the opinion editor of Beirut’s Daily Star,who would be considered pro-Arab in Walt and Mearsheimer’s lexicon, who ended his piece demanding, “Israel must cease its attacks and let diplomacy take over.” Young then wrote a 5,000 word piece for the Times Sunday magazine. Then there was the long op-ed by Fouad Siniora in Washington Post, “End This Tragedy Now; Israel Must Be Made to Respect International Law.” And as far as columnists, you can’t get more anti-Israel than H.D.S. Greenway in The Boston Globe. The titles of just two of his many columns from the period in question: “Israel’s Misguided Strategies” and “Israel’s Perilous Overkill.” Then of course there’s Robert Novak in the Chicago Sun-Times who criticized Israel to no end during the bombing. And this is not to mention the editorials in the Times and the Post, which, though initially supportive of some Israeli action, quickly turned angrily against the bombing campaign when it became more aggressive and took a larger toll on Lebanese.

I know this sounds like I am selectively picking articles that make my point. But that is exactly what Walt and Mearsheimer do. It doesn’t make a very strong case either way.

What type of coverage of Israel would make the professors happy? They claim that their problem with the lobby’s influence on the media, from within and without, does not allow for a certain kind of commentary. What viewpoint is not being represented then? When they point to Thomas Friedman and Richard Cohen, they say that even though they don’t form part of the lobby, it’s not enough that they are occasionally critical of Israel. What is lacking is someone who will be a “champion of the Palestinian cause.” As they put it, “The truth is that the ‘other side’ has no equivalent of Safire and Krauthammer, or even Friedman and Cohen, at either the Times or the Post, or any other American newspaper for that matter.”