NPR Ombudsman Responds to HonestReporting Readers

On October 14, HonestReporting addressed a serious problem with a report broadcast on NPR. Emily Harris interviewed the father of a Palestinian teenage terrorist shot dead after stabbing and wounding two Israelis in Jerusalem.

When asked as to what motivated his son to carry out such an act, the father stated that it was anger at a video of a female Palestinian terrorist being shot dead by Israelis. However, Harris then interviewed the family of the woman in the video, who was actually alive and in Israeli custody. We took NPR to task for broadcasting the claim that she was dead without making it clear that this was patently false.

HonestReporting’s readers evidently complained en masse to NPR’s ombudsman Elizabeth Jensen who responded in a column on NPR’s website:

This week’s email brought a large number of complaints about Emily Harris’s Oct. 13 All Things Considered report in which she interviewed the families of two Palestinian teenagers who were accused of attacking Israelis. Many of the emails appeared to have been sparked by this article from the organization HonestReporting, whose mission is “Defending Israel From Media Bias.”

 

Many emailers referenced in particular the interview with Qassam Badran, whose son was accused of stabbing “two Israeli civilians as they walked near Jerusalem’s Old City,” according to the story. Israeli police later killed the son.

 

In the interview, Badran (speaking through an interpreter) made a misstatement. As a clarification added to NPR’s report notes:

 

In this report, a Palestinian father is quoted saying his son was angry about a video showing a Palestinian woman who was accused of attacking an Israeli and was killed by Israeli police. In fact, as we reported later in the story, the woman was not killed. She was injured and is in Israeli custody.

 

New York listener Yael Schlenger, expressing a sentiment of many, wrote to my office: “I am appalled at the poor journalism and lack of journalistic integrity that Emily Harris shows in this piece. She accepted a completely false narrative that she then actually proves false herself when she does not challenge the fact that the female who was wounded after she stabbed someone did not in fact die.”

 

Editors in the newsroom told me the mistake was not Harris’s. Larry Kaplow, NPR’s international editor for the Middle East, said the father’s misstatement was noticed in advance, during editing. Kaplow said he intended to have a producer remove the misstatement from the report’s audio, so there would not be any confusion for listeners, but he forgot to have the voice-over (the English translation from Arabic) corrected. As the clarification notes, Harris was well aware—and reported—that the woman was alive.

You can read the rest of Jensen’s column here.

We appreciate that NPR acknowledged the error and made a clarification. Out of all international news, nothing causes as much sensitivity as coverage of Israel and the Mideast conflict. It is therefore incumbent upon NPR and other media to avoid making such serious errors.

Thank you to our readers and subscribers for taking action and holding NPR to account. While one person may not make a difference, together thousands can.