When the film “A Mighty Heart” was released last summer, Judea Pearl, father of murdered journalist Daniel Pearl, wrote an exquisite rebuke of the moral relativism on display in the movie about his son’s murder. In addition to shooting a tendentiously “open-minded” script, the film’s director, Michael Winterbottom wrote:

[“A Mighty Heart”] is about people who are victims of increasing violence on both sides. There are extremists on both sides who want to ratchet up the levels of violence and hundreds of thousands of people have died because of this.

Mr. Pearl should be commended for his ability to type after enduring such a sickening statement, let alone for his capacity to formulate the profound counterargument laid out in that must-read.

Today’s Wall Street Journal features a piece written by Judea Pearl to honor his son on the sixth anniversary of his murder. This article, too, is a necessary treatise on the state of affairs that contributed to Daniel’s videotaped beheading in Pakistan in 2002, and also on the way things have changed since then. Mr. Pearl focuses on the agenda-driven media’s contribution to global anti-Semitism. He cites the widespread broadcast of the Muhammad Al Dura hoax and news outlets’ willingness to serve up Hamas propaganda as legitimate news. He writes: “Eager to satisfy their customers’ appetite for self-righteousness, these channels have not thought through the harmful, in fact lethal, long-term effects of choreographing victim-victimizer narratives as news coverage.”

Judea Pearl proposes “the Daniel Pearl standard of honorable journalism. . .just choose any newspaper or TV channel and ask yourself when was the last time it ran a picture of a child, a grandmother or any empathy-evoking scene from the ‘other side’ of a conflict.”

The two articles work brilliantly together, as they demonstrate that impulses toward forced parity or toward heavy-handedness amount to the same thing: a dangerous distortion of the truth.