Independent journalist John Felton conducts quarterly reviews of NPR's Israeli-Palestinian coverage. His 2011 fourth quarter report is now available online.

Felton reviewed 43 on-air segments and 28 website posts carried exclusively on NPR.org from October to December in 2011. Felton analyzed the coverage for accuracy, variety of voices, fairness, and balance. He also reviewed coverage of the International Atomic Energy Agency's report on Iran's nuclear program and the Israeli-Palestinian prisoner exchange that occurred in October.

As Felton notes in his report, NPR carried 232 items related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2011. Earlier reports from 2011 and quarterly reviews going back to 2008 are available online.

John Felton prepares the quarterly evaluations. He has covered international affairs and U.S. foreign policy for more than 30 years. His most recent book, The Contemporary Middle East: A Documentary History, was published by CQ Press in 2007. A former foreign affairs reporter for Congressional Quarterly and foreign editor at NPR, he has been a freelance writer and editor since 1995.

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Let's jump into what is a raging debate and side with a colleague, Arthur Brisbane, the ombudsman for The New York Times, not out of collegial loyalty—it would be more fun to disagree—but because he is right.

Brisbane asked the same question that NPR listeners and critics have been asking me: To what extent should reporters, in everyday stories, act as "truth vigilantes" in correcting statements by politicians. He has been roundly attacked and lampooned. Or as he put it: "A large majority of respondents weighed in with, yes, you moron, The Times should check facts and print the truth."

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"Roadside slim" from Roseburg, OR, wants to take a break. And he's not the only one.

Many of you have written—pleaded, really—for NPR to cut back on 2012 presidential campaign coverage. As Frank Range, from Athens, GA, put it, "The election is still 10 months off and we will have to endure a lot of hot air from the candidates. Please don't add to the wind."

Trust me, I hear you. You're not alone.

A survey by the Pew Research Center published yesterday found that 37 percent of Americans feel there is too much campaign coverage in the news. One problem for us is that about the same amount—39 percent—felt that they were receiving the "right amount" of coverage so far this year.

Much of the news media coverage is, of course, "horse race speculation." Most of us, including journalists, bemoan that, but we all want to know who is in first, too. The crowded Republican field does look a bit like the Kentucky Derby. I trust that NPR will continue to give us more substantive coverage as well, which many of you have written to say that you want. Let me know if you are dissatisfied, though it will be easier to judge once we get down to a more manageable number of candidates. In the meantime, here is a tongue-in-cheek solution from "Roadside slim," or at least I hope he doesn't really mean it:

Dear NPR:

We need to talk a little. Our 35+ year relationship of sharing the news of the day both in the morning and at night has been pretty stable, but recently you have seemed rather distant and preoccupied. Our great conversations about life, the universe, and everything now seem strained and only with perfunctory effort. I understand the bright lights, glitz and short term heart stopping lust of election analysis, but it is so fleeting like cigarette smoke, and becomes like warm stale wine and last night's muddy confetti.

I know there are things I can't understand but why would you throw your splendor and talent of delightful, provocative stories of home, culture, science, and far away cultures to the wind and then wallow with the hard, coarse and vulgar election street walkers of the other media, especially when street walking is not one of your best talents?

NPR, I bask in the air waves of both AM and FM stations located in the central part of western Oregon. But recently I have had to turn you off multiple times, both going to and coming home from work because we are just not talking on the same wave link.

NPR, I think you and I need space while you go find yourself. Perhaps you need time to explore the vulgarities enough to decide that is not for you. Understand that I will be fine. Now with the head spinning aroma of audio books and blogs misting from my silver IPOD and savory voices reading from my Kindle, Perhaps I could.... Maybe even... YES NPR, I do think we need space at least till next January after the inauguration. Maybe then we can hook back up. Play well NPR, just don't let the smoke and warm stale wine harden your voice, laughter, and desire for richness in the important things of life.

- "Roadside slim," Roseburg, OR

As always, we'll share your laments, odes and thoughts with the newsroom.

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When I wrote last week on the language used in describing the sexual assault of children, little did I realize that scientists just published a study on this very issue.

Interested readers might turn to Case by Case: News Coverage of Child Sexual Abuse, 2007-2009, which was published this summer by the Berkeley Media Studies Group, a California non-profit dedicated to researching media coverage of health issues. In a nicely presented, highly readable study of a random sample of 348 newspaper stories reporting on sexual abuse of children from 2007 through 2009, the authors found that the normally hardened news media is squeamish when it comes to this subject. Reporters and editors avoid it, except when a case hits the justice system. They also tip-toe by using ambiguous words such as molesting, abuse, sexually assaulted, lewd and lascivious acts, sexual acts and inappropriate sexual behavior—all with a child. Rarely do they say rape.

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Is it possible that journalism as we have known it is not going to die, after all? That the Digital Age gurus who have dominated the discussion for the last decade have been spinning self-fulfilling, if not self-beneficial, prophecies that sound like so much wisdom in theory but have little do with what is happening in fact?

Dean Starkman has shaken off the blues that dominates newsrooms today to stand back and look at just what the three leading gurus—Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis and Clay Shirky—are saying and concludes in a long, thoughtful essay in the current issue of the Columbia Journalism Review that the emperors have few clothes. They may, really, just be verbal bullies.

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Accusations of news media bias have flared in a polarized political climate.

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Accusations of news media bias have flared in a polarized political climate.

Updated 10/11 12:20 p.m. (Click for the latest): Economist and press critic Dean Baker weighs in on deeper bias in reporters' sourcing.

Hardly a day goes by without my receiving a complaint about "bias" on an NPR story. The dominant narrative has been that NPR is too liberal, though from time to time criticisms have flared from the left that NPR is too conservative — that it has been cowed by the right and is bending too far to please it.

The leftist view has reared in the last week. Several hundred listeners have written to complain that coverage of the ongoing Wall Street protests is insufficient. As one of those critics, James Eisenberg, mocked from New York: "Dear All Things Considered: You interviewed a guy dressed as a zombie, talking like a zombie, as the voice of Occupy Wall Street. Shame on you. I needs me a liberal radio outlet 'cause you don't get it."

Three months into the job, I haven't found any trends of actual political bias one way or the other in NPR stories. I promise to keep looking. As my colleague John Felton, a wise retired NPR editor, reminds me, bias is reflected not only in how stories are presented, but also in which ones are picked. NPR might run more stories on the environment and social concerns than, say, Fox News. This type of bias, however, is not inherently bad if the stories are themselves legitimate and fairly presented.

I thought it might help, in the meantime, if I share some quick thoughts and a particularly interesting study I have come across. When it comes to bias, both say as much about all of us as listeners and readers as they do about NPR's reporters and editors.

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Could the religious rhetoric in the current presidential campaign season begin blurring the separation between church and state?

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Could the religious rhetoric in the current presidential campaign season begin blurring the separation between church and state?

Like many Americans, I have conflicting thoughts about the role of religion in public life, and never more so now that some of our Republican presidential candidates are making an issue of it. I worry whether NPR and the news media are up to covering it correctly.

Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann have set off a storm of news stories and opinion columns as if the second coming were imminent. The question is whether the United States could become, if not a theocracy, at least a country with a much lower barrier between church and state than what we have now. The church is Christian, especially evangelical.