It was a busy day for media coverage of Syria. First came the appalling chemical attack on the Syrian city of Douma allegedly carried out by President Bashar Assad’s forces followed by hand wringing by the civilized members of the international community.
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Then, in what was most likely an unrelated event, Israel was widely seen to be behind an air strike on a Syrian air base which killed 14 people, including a number of Iranian military advisers.
The Syrian chemical attack and the alleged Israeli air strike became part of the same story for many media outlets. Many of the headlines ran with the most recent incident – the air strike. However, in the absence of any images from the scene, some media chose to use the highly emotive images resulting from the Syrian chemical attack.
This was the resulting Associated Press report:
Unfortunately as a wire service provider to thousands of global media outlets, the headline and accompanying image spread rapidly leaving casual readers under the false impression that Israel was responsible for killing or injuring Syrian children.
While AP dug its heels in, even in the face of a significant backlash on social media, HonestReporting persevered and finally received confirmation that editors had relented and replaced the image.
But AP was by no means the only offender.
The Times of London and Halifax Today changed their photo following complaints from HonestReporting. Here are the before and after images.
We also succeeded in getting the Irish Examiner to completely remove the following Facebook post and story after we pointed out just how inappropriate and inflammatory the image was in relation to the headline.
Still online at this time of writing despite our complaints was a similar problem at the Washington Times and this atrocity courtesy of Perth Now:
UPDATE: After being contacted by both HonestReporting and the Zionist Federation of Australia, Perth Now’s editor flatly refused to change the image. This despite the relatively simple fix needed. Is such a gesture of goodwill too much to ask for in a case as blatant as this? Please let Perth Now know what you think by sending your emails to [email protected].
The prize for the day’s biggest headline fail goes to San Francisco’s ABC7 News (cached version), which wrongly alleged that Russia blamed Israel for carrying out the Syrian chemical attack:
ABC7 revised the headline, but the error still lives on — Yahoo News aggregated the story but not the correction.
The effect is even more pronounced on Twitter, where images illustrating tweets don’t even have captions. If all you knew about the air strike was from skimming through a Twitter feed past the Chronicle’s zero-context tweet of its report (also by AP), you’d think Israel gassed these kids.
Ultimately, this story demonstrated just how widespread the damage can be when a wire service gets it wrong and its media clients follow suit without bothering to take responsibility.
In addition, we witnessed other media outlets that lazily chose to pair images of suffering Syrian children with headlines concerning the presumed-Israeli air strike.
No wonder we received complaints from around the world.
If you see your local media outlet indulging in the same abysmal behavior, let us know through our Red Alert page.
Featured image: vectors by Vecteezy;
