“Longtime ’60 Minutes’ correspondent Bob Simon, who covered riots, Academy Award-nominated movies and wars and was held captive for more than a month in Iraq two decades ago, died in a car crash on Wednesday. He was 73,” AP reports:
A town car in which Simon was a passenger hit another car stopped at a Manhattan traffic light and then slammed into metal barriers separating traffic lanes, police said. Simon and the town car’s driver were taken to a hospital, where Simon was pronounced dead.
The town car driver suffered injuries to his legs and arms. The driver of the other car was uninjured. No arrests were made, said police, who continued to investigate the deadly accident.
Simon was among a handful of elite journalists to cover most major overseas conflicts and news stories since the late 1960s, CBS said. He covered stories including the Vietnam War and the Oscar-nominated movie “Selma” in a career spanning five decades.
He had been contributing to “60 Minutes” on a regular basis since 1996. He also was a correspondent for “60 Minutes II.”
Anderson Cooper, who does occasional stories for “60 Minutes,” was near tears talking about Simon’s death. He said that when Simon presented a “60 Minutes” story “you knew it was going to be something special.”
But sometimes not in the ways that Simon imagined. That is him, isn’t it, at the start of Richard Landes’ influential 2005 video Pallywood, on the Palestinian propaganda mill, and the gullible Western journalists who mindlessly buy in:
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Later, Simon was a runner-up for the PJM/New Criterion 2012 Duranty Awards for his 60 Minutes segment “Christians of the Holy Land.” As our own Roger L. Simon (no relation, I believe to the late CBS reporter) wrote, the segment “blamed Israel for the plight of the dwindling Palestinian Christian community in Bethlehem.” Only to be rebuffed in a video made by “one of those Palestinian Christians whose family actually appeared in the 60 Minutes segment — a young woman named Christy Anastas currently living in the UK where she was granted political asylum in only three days,” and whose video “contradicts virtually everything Simon said.”
And in 2009, Simon described Israel as an “apartheid regime.” The previous year, as Kyle Drennen of NewsBusters adds, “Simon interviewed an Israeli Air Force pilot and remarked: ‘You don’t look like a killer.'”
Those, and many more examples of Simon’s anti-Israel bias collated on Simon’s NewsBusters page.
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