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The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), now located in Boston, Massachusetts, was founded in 1982 by Winifred Meiselman in Washington, DC. CAMERA created chapters in major cities, including New York, Chicago, Fort Lauderdale, Los Angeles, Miami, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and in 1988 a Boston chapter and office, founded and led by Andrea Levin; Charles Jacobs became deputy director of the Boston chapter. In 1991, Levin succeeded Meiselman as executive director of CAMERA: "Under Ms. Levin’s leadership CAMERA’s membership grew within a few years from 1000 to over 20,000, and now numbers over 55,000, and besides the Boston headquarters the organization also has offices in Washington, DC, New York, Chicago, and Israel." The director of the Washington office of CAMERA is Eric Rozenman. CAMERA is a non-profit, tax-exempt media watchdog group based in Boston chiefly monitoring media coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict and focusing primarily on correcting coverage that it considers unfair to Israel. On its official website, CAMERA is described as "a media-monitoring, research and membership organization devoted to promoting accurate and balanced coverage of Israel and the Middle East" which "fosters rigorous reporting, while educating news consumers about Middle East issues and the role of the media." CAMERA further presents itself as a "non-partisan organization" which "takes no position with regard to American or Israeli political issues or with regard to ultimate solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict." Critics of CAMERA call its "non-partisan" claims into question and define its alleged biases. (See Some examples of commentary and critique relating to CAMERA.) CAMERA is a member of the Israel Campus Roundtable, which includes the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Anti-Defamation League, The David Project Center for Jewish Leadership, and other pro-Israel organizations. As a member of this Campus Roundtable, CAMERA operates on college campuses to combat what it perceives as "propagandistic assaults on Israel . . . creating harmful misperceptions of Israel" and "publishes a student-focused magazine, CAMERA on Campus, containing specialized information useful in countering misinformation."
Some examples of commentary and critique by CAMERA Among the organizations and works that have been criticized by CAMERA are: Some examples of commentary and critique relating to CAMERA In a 2003 profile of the organization in the Boston Globe, Mark Jurkowitz observes: "To its supporters, CAMERA is figuratively - and perhaps literally - doing God's work, battling insidious anti-Israeli bias in the media. But its detractors see CAMERA as a myopic and vindictive special interest group trying to muscle its views into media coverage." Nearly two decades later, after finding on CAMERA a "news story" that he had had initial difficulty "locating," former Mayor of New York City Ed Koch describes CAMERA as "one source you can rely on when it comes to keeping track of news stories on the Middle East. . . ." More recently, in his April 6, 2006 "Reply to the Mearsheimer-Walt 'Working Paper," entitled "Debunking the Newest – and Oldest – Jewish Conspiracy," Dershowitz cites Alex Safian's "Study Decrying 'Israel Lobby' Marred by Numerous Errors" posted on CAMERA for support five times. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) — "the largest liberal media watchdog" according to Michael Scherer in the Columbia Journalism Review — describes CAMERA as "media criticism from the right-wing of the Israeli political spectrum." Similarly, in August 2006, Nuclear Spin presented CAMERA as "a Boston based powerful ultra-right pro-Israel lobby group that tries to suppress criticism of Israel on US media. It uses its financial and political clout to force media elements to tow Israel's party line." (That text was deleted from its database in September 2006.)CAMERA was posted on Nuclear Spin as accessed on August 13, 2006. Nuclear Spin is part of http://www.spinwatch.org/modules.php?name | FAQ SpinWatch, "a project of Public Interest Investigations (PII), a non profit company," "not linked to any political party in the UK, Europe or elsewhere . . . and edited by a team of independent researchers who have extensive experience of researching the public relations |