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Founded by [[Winifred Meiselman]], CAMERA claims to be "a media-monitoring, research and membership organization devoted to promoting accurate and balanced coverage of Israel and the Middle East." According to its website, it "systematically monitors, documents, reviews and archives Middle East coverage" and its staffers "directly contact reporters, editors, producers and publishers concerning distorted or inaccurate coverage, offering factual information to refute errors."<ref>CAMERA [https://www.camera.org/about/mission/ Mission] organizational site, accessed May 3, 2019</ref>
In the 1980s CAMERA had chapters in Washington, D.C. New York, Chicago, Fort Lauderdale, Los Angeles, Miami, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Boston chapter. which was led by [[Andrea Levin]] founded the Boston chapter. According to CAMERA, its 1989 Boston conference “The Media, The Message and The Middle East" was "a large step forward."[[Norman Podhoretz]], professors [[Alan Dershowitz]], [[Ruth Wisse]], [[Jerrold Auerbach]] and [[David Wyman]] joined Levin and the Boston chapter’s Deputy Director, [[Charles Jacobs]], as speakers at the conference. Afterward, Meiselman passed on leadership to Levin, and the Boston office became the headquarters.<ref name=history/>
According to an interview with [[Andrea Levin]] Executive Director of CAMERA, other media-watching groups that do not focus on Israel are "in no way comparable to CAMERA with its sizable paying, activist membership."<ref>Manfred Gerstenfeld [http://www.jcpa.org/phas/phas-33.htm Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism] Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, accessed May 3, 2019</ref>
CAMERA is widely regarded as a pro-Israeli lobby group that as put by journalist and author Robert I. Friedman - "CAMERA, the A.D.L., AIPAC and the rest of the lobby don't want fairness, but bias in their favor. And they are prepared to use McCarthyite tactics, as well as the power and money of pro-Israel PACs, to get whatever Israel wants."<ref>Robert I. Friedman, "The lobby: Jewish political power and American foreign policy", ''The Nation'', June 6, 1987, page 244.</ref>
==Membership==
According to its Executive DirectorCAMERA, the organization has 55over 65,000 <ref name=history/> paying members and "thousands of active letter writers". The range of media monitored by CAMERA includes "all major print and electronic media in the United States as well as professional journals, websites, encyclopedias, travel guides, and so forth." [http://www.jcpa.org/phas/phas-33.htm]
==International office==
