Ugly border clash today along the Israeli-Lebanese border, a.k.a. the Blue Line. Five people were killed including IDF Lt. Col Dov Harari, three Lebanese soldiers, and Lebanese journalist.
First, bungled wire service photo captions out there incorrectly state that Israel was cutting down a tree on the Lebanese side of the border.
What the captions don't tell you is that the security fence is a few meters inside Israeli territory, and is not the actual international border. Exhibit A is Reuters:
Exhibit B is Associated Press, which is even stranger. The same photo had different captions at Yahoo News and Day Life. Both sites aggregate whatever they receive from the wires, so I don't understand why Day Life had a more detailed, balanced caption than Yahoo News.
We saw similar facetious claims in 2006 that Israeli reservists Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser were kidnapped from the Lebanese side of the border, though Hezbollah's Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah boasted to the contrary.
UPDATE 10:05 p.m. Not only did AP bungle their caption, they bungled the photo credit too. Unfortunately, that's all they bothered to correct. If they can't get routine photo credits right, why should I take the rest of their captioning seriously?
UPDATE 10:58 p.m. Aaaaaah. AP corrects the location.
I'm left with a few questions:
- Does Yahoo just take longer to aggregate the wires than Day Life?
- How long till the correction makes its way to other news sites — such as a Washington Post slide show? Right now, that slide show (photo no. 4) includes the erroneous caption.
- Most importantly, how late the ever-shrinking news cycle is too late for a correction like this to make any difference?
© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
