The Sept. 30, 2000, video of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy, Muhammed al-Dura, caught in a crossfire on the West Bank riveted the world. The voiceover said the boy had been deliberately targeted by the Israeli military. The Arab world responded vehemently. The incident still reverberates as a symbol of Israeli brutality and Palestinian victimization.

But it never happened. Shortly after the original broadcast, its veracity was questioned in many quarters. Evidence emerged that Israeli soldiers could not have shot the boy but that Palestinian fighters could have.

French media watchdog Philippe Karsenty accused Charles Enderlin, who as Mideast bureau chief for the official French TV network France2 had done the broadcast’s voiceover, and his Palestinian cameraman, of creating a hoax. Mr. Enderlin sued Mr. Karsenty for defamation.

At trial, evidence of a hoax was abundant if not conclusive. A stock film clip of an Israeli soldier shooting had been spliced into the broadcast video. Mr. Enderlin, who was not present, relied on his cameraman’s word that the child had been killed. Frames edited out of the video showed the boy alive after the shooting stopped. France2 initially refused to hand over minutes of relevant video footage. When it was finally released, it showed Palestinians practicing for a range of hoaxes, including scenes of “wounded” Palestinians being rushed to ambulances (and then emerging with smiles on their faces).

Now a verdict exonerating Mr. Karsenty has been delivered by a French judge, Mme. Laurence Trébucq. Mr. Karsenty’s acquittal amounts to the disgrace of his accuser, and shines a much-needed spotlight on the “fauxtography” that sometimes masquerades as television news in the Middle East.

The verdict has been greeted largely with silence not only by the French media but throughout Europe, the Mideast (except Israel), and to an extent even in the United States. It is not beside the point that exonerations (seven so far) in the trial of eight U.S. Marines in the Haditha case have similarly attracted little attention, despite blanket coverage in the aftermath of charges of a massacre in Iraq in 2005.

The Palestinian cameraman who shot the al-Dura footage, Talal abu-Rahmah, once bragged that “I went into journalism to carry on the fight for my people.” Objectivity is not always the lodestar of journalism as practiced in the Muslim world, but it should be for Western media. The role of faux news in covering the Mideast deserves more scrutiny.