I didn't post here yesterday because I was busy writing for Comment Is Free about the sacking of Octavia Nasr, CNN's senior editor of Middle East affairs.

While I do think her tweet about Ayatollah Fadlallah was ill-judged, the way she was hounded out of her job is worrying. Writing for Salon, Glenn Greenwald views it as part of a broader pattern of harassing journalists who don't toe a right-wing (and pro-Israel line) in the United States. Andrew Sullivan makes a similar point in his blog for The Atlantic.

The campaign against Ms Nasr came partly from the usual neocon elements (such as the Media Research Center and Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard) but largely from pro-Israel groups.

Honest Reporting, which organises mass emailings to news organisations that are not sufficiently sympathetic to Israel, urged its supporters:

"Octavia Nasr's position at CNN has been fatally compromised. CNN cannot continue to employ an apparent Hezbollah sympathiser in such a senior post. Please send your considered comments to CNN calling on the news organisation to take the appropriate action ..."

This is the organisation that gave an "honest reporting" award to newspaper magnate Conrad Black (before he was jailed for fraud). For more about Honest Reporting's background, see this article from 2001 by David Leigh.

Meanwhile, the Jewish Internet Defense Force claims to have been "on the forefront of a campaign to call her [Nasr] out on this, and call for her to be fired".

The Anti-Defamation League sent a letter to CNN which stopped short of calling for her to be sacked but said "It is clearly an impropriety for a CNN journalist/editor to express such a partisan viewpoint as Ms Nasr did in her tweet. We trust that CNN will deal with this matter ..."

Complaints of this kind are invariably based on an allegation of "bias", with the assumption that having a view about something it prevents the journalist concerned from doing his or her job properly. Of course, this perception of "bias" depends to a large extent on what kind of view the journalist holds. As I pointed out in my Cif article, if Ms Nasr had expressed delight at Fadlallah's death, rather than sadness, there would have been no fuss in the US.

Those who make such complaints are basically ignoring one of the central philosophical debates in contemporary journalism – about the nature of objectivity and the processes of journalistic verification. For anyone who is interested, Jack Shafer discusses it in detail in an article for Slate. The key book on the subject is The Elements of Journalism by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel (2001).