One thing I am fascinated by, is the American media's disbelief that the Catholics inside the Church of the Nativity have given sanctuary to all those Palestinians and internationals who entered the building to get away from the Israeli shelling and machine gun fire.

CNN and the other major media outlets can't seem to decide what to report on this. I recently heard a journalist from the Palestinian Indy Media Center, Sean Riordan, being interviewed on CNN, say that the international citizens evacuated from Bethlehem today were actually evacuated by the British, not the Americans, and that those people were international peace activist brigades in the area acting as independent observers.

Despite the fact that MSNBC interviewed an American Jew who is working with those international observers yesterday in Ramallah, the mainstream media seems to be dismissing the information being provided from both independent western media organizations like Indy Media, as well as the international peace activists, as "one sided"!

They aren't talking at all about the Catholic premise of sanctuary, which seems to be at the crux of the current standoff between the IDF and the Vatican, no less. And of course, the fact that at least a dozen of the international peace activist/observers are still inside Arafat's compound in Ramallah.

Why do people suppose the reporting of independent journalists (ie with no affiliation to any western mainstream media organizations) and international peace activists are being ignored by the mainstream western media?