[sc:graybox ]This guest post was contributed by Sarah Parsons Brown, a resident of Jerusalem.
It’s perfectly normal for media outlets to take stories and photos from wire services (e.g. Associated Press, AFP, Reuters) and make amendments to suit their own editorial style guides. But just how far will a newspaper go, making changes to the original content, in order to promote a particular agenda?
On December 18, 2015, The Guardian ran an Associated Press story about two Palestinians who were killed by Israeli forces: a driver reportedly killed in an attempted attack on Israeli soldiers in the West Bank and a violent protester killed while attempting to breach the border fence between Gaza and Israel.
But The Guardian’s framing of the original AP article may give the cursory reader the impression that the violence was Israeli and targeted non-violent Palestinians. This can be seen in the headline, the lead – the sections that a reader is most likely to look at when skimming – and in the article itself.
[sc:HR07SignupsInsideP-outbrn ]THE HEADLINE
There is nothing in The Guardian’s headline that implies that the two Palestinians killed by Israeli forces were actually doing anything wrong. Perhaps they were innocent bystanders. And even if not, perhaps the violence that flared was at Israel’s instigation.
Compare The Guardian’s headline to the one that tops the same AP article as it is reported in U.S. News and World Report:
Similarly, consider the headline of the same article as reported by ABC News:
While the U.S. News and ABC headlines attribute the claim to Israeli sources, they make it clear that the Palestinians were killed during an attack on Israelis and during clashes; there is no possibility that the article is describing innocent bystanders in random flashes of violence.
THE LEAD
The Guardian added a lead to the AP article that, like the title, lacks crucial context. This lead conjures up images of rather extreme enforcement of the speed limit in the contested territories by the Israeli military:
Troops open fire on driver of speeding car in West Bank and man attempting to breach border fence in Gaza Strip
While the second victim is portrayed as having been shot while attempting to breach the border, the first victim is described as having been gunned down by troops while speeding. It is only when readers actually read the article that they find out the context and learn that the driver was attempting a vehicular attack in the context of a violent conflict:
In one attack, a Palestinian man sped his car toward Israeli forces who were controlling a riot in the town of Silwad… The Israeli forces took cover behind concrete blocks and fatally shot the driver…
THE ARTICLE
If readers dive into the details of the story, continuing beyond the large print headers and the evocative photograph, they will encounter a text in which The Guardian’s re-calibration of the violence continues, as can be seen in two striking text changes from the original AP article:
– The article itself describes two incidents in which Israeli sources described cases of attempted vehicular terror. In the first case, which is described in the headline, the driver was killed; in the second, the driver was wounded and arrested. In both of these cases, the original AP article referred to a “Palestinian assailant,” while the Guardian article refers to a “Palestinian man.” Consider the following:
In one attack, a Palestinian assailant man sped in his car toward Israeli forces who were controlling a riot in the town of Silwad, near the West Bank city of Ramallah…. The Israeli forces took cover behind concrete blocks and fatally shot the driver….
Earlier in the day in the West Bank, an assailant a man sped toward soldiers and police at the Qalandiya checkpoint north of Jerusalem…. He got out of his car and started to charge the Israeli troops. The attacker, a man in his 30s and from the West Bank village Turmus Aya, was wounded in the leg and arrested.
The change from “assailant” to “man” clearly diminishes the culpability of the Palestinian drivers for the fate that befell them.
– All three articles state that the Palestinian Ministry of Health identified the man who was killed when trying to breach the border as Mahmoud Mohammed Saeed Alagha, from Khan Younis in Gaza. The U.S. News and ABC presentations of the AP article add: “The militant Hamas group later said Alagha was a 24-year-old member of the Hamas.” The Guardian, however, omits this background detail.
Could it be that the Hamas statement was not known when the article in The Guardian went to press? That does not seem likely, since the AP article cited by U.S. News and ABC News was posted on both sites at 3:21 pm Eastern Time, while the article in the Guardian was last updated a little over half an hour later (8.56 pm GMT) on that same day. It would thus seem that the omission of the aspiring infiltrator’s Hamas membership was intended to make the victim seem less threatening.
Eagle-eyed readers will also note that in the AP article, the Israeli police spokeswoman was referred to by name as Luba Samri; in the amended article in The Guardian, she is an unidentified police spokeswoman. While this could very well be a reflection of an editorial decision to eliminate detail that is unnecessary for the reader, it can also be seen as depersonalizing the news source and detracting from her credibility.
CONCLUSION
This article illustrates how a number of editorial choices – mostly in the way that The Guardian framed the core AP article – subtly shifted the center of violence away from the Palestinians and toward the Israelis.
In today’s world, in which many people scan news articles for information rather than reading in full, The Guardian’s framing may leave readers who suffice with the headlines and do not read the body of the article, with a distorted impression of Israeli violence and Palestinian innocence.
