Reuters Incorrect “Correction”

June 27, 2012 12:33 by Yarden Frankl

When I checked my e-mail this morning, I was pleased to see that Reuters responded to one of our readers who contacted  them about the issue raised in yesterday’s video – namely that the headline of their article accused Israel of breaking a truce with Hamas by responding to a rocket attack.

It does not take expert anaylsis to understand that if Hamas is launching rockets at Israel, there really is no truce that Israel could break with a response.

So as I said, I was pleased that one of our readers had pointed out their error and assumed that they had fixed the mistake — no doubt caused by hasty editing rather than a purposeful attempt to malign Israel.

But then this is Reuters. And when I read the new headline, it wasn’t much better.

Here is the original headline:

and here is the correction:

And the article leads with:

(Reuters) – Israel launched two air strikes in Gaza on Friday, killing two Palestinian militants and wounding five other people as rockets fired from the enclave slammed into its southern region, threatening to unravel an Egyptian-brokered truce.

The rocket attacks — according to Reuters own reporting — took place a few hours before the Israeli air strikes. They did not happen simultenously. Israel did not launch strikes “as” the “rockets fired” (notice, Reuters did not write “Palestinians fired rockets,” “Hamas fired rockets,” or even “militants fired rockets.” But that’s another issue.)

Nothing “shook” the truce. Palestinian terrorists fired rockets at Israeli civilian areas. Hours later, Israel attacked (from the air, lest anyone think that the word “raid” implies that Israel entered Gaza on the ground) terrorists preparing to launch more rockets.

Would it be asking too much for Reuters on their correction to get the story right?

You can comment on the revised Reuters article here.

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