WASHINGTON, May 26 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - An intense pressure campaign by several pro-Israel groups is seeking to influence U.S. news coverage of the Middle East, with tactics including boycotts of several top media outlets and massive phone, e-mail and letter-writing campaigns.

The ad hoc campaigns are directed at both large and small news operations, with a cascade of e-mails, letters and phone calls pouring in to editors and ombudsmen at newspapers, broadcast outlets and cable news channels across the United States.

"No one has ever seen pressure like this before," said Jeffrey Dvorkin, the ombudsman for Washington DC-based National Public Radio, a U.S.-wide radio network.

"In the last three months I've received 14,000 e-mails and 9,000 of them deal with the Middle East," he said. "E-mail traffic in the last month has overwhelmingly accused us of having a pro-Palestinian bias."

Such campaigns are said to be motivated by a concern that media coverage of the Middle East - especially articles and broadcasts deemed sympathetic to Palestinians - could weaken public support for Israel and influence what is generally seen as a historically pro-Israel U.S. policy.

The Boston-based public radio station WBUR, which relies on private donations, corporate sponsorship and some government funding for its operating budget, reports losing one million dollars so far in cancelled funding since the campaign began - seven percent of its annual financial support.

Subscription boycotts also have been launched against the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune.

About 1,000 subscribers to the Los Angeles Times newspaper suspended delivery for a day to protest its Middle East coverage, while a Chicago Tribune official said that since October, 47 readers had canceled subscriptions outright for the same reason.

A boycott of the Washington Post is planned for mid-June, sponsored by a group charging that the newspaper "favorably reports the position of terrorists".

Washington Post ombudsman Michael Getler, who like others with his title, is charged with assessing the fairness and accuracy of his newspaper's coverage, refuted the charge of bias.

"Is it possible that so many major American news organizations are getting this story wrong -- that some sort of national media conspiracy is at work here?" he asked in a column appearing earlier this month in the newspaper.

"That, of course, is not the case, and news organizations will persevere in reporting this story in an unflinching, unintimidated fashion that reports the news in the most accurate way possible for their entire readership," he wrote.

In a Washington Post article published May 5, entitled “Caught in the Crossfire”, Getler wrote, “Fifty years of Israeli-Palestinian hostility has always brought charges of bias about the way the conflict is reported. But the escalating brutality of recent months has caught the American press in the crossfire as never before.”

“… a number of people - some on their own and others as part of write-in campaigns - challenge what they view as a fairly consistent anti-Israel bias.”

That viewpoint was echoed by other media executives.

"It's a little bit like 'you're with us or against us'," said James Naughton, former executive editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer and now president of the Florida-based Poynter Institute for Media Studies.