The reports should have been clear: A Palestinian gunman opened fire in the Old City of Jerusalem on Sunday morning, killing one Israeli man and injuring several others.
Instead, multiple news outlets around the world managed to mangle their headlines and reports to such an extent that the story ended up packaged as a “Jerusalem attack” with it unclear as to who was attacking, and who was attacked.
One of the first leading media organizations to document the shooting was CNN.
An early version of its headline read thus: “One dead, four injured, in suspected shooting attack in Jerusalem.”
In a tweet, HonestReporting swiftly drew attention to the fact that the headline lacked crucial information like the words “Israeli” and “Palestinian”.
Fixed your headline for you, @CNN. pic.twitter.com/ui4s4s1yEg
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) November 21, 2021
About an hour and a half later, CNN updated the article, but with nothing that made clear who the perpetrators were and who were their victims.
Instead, it added the detail that the “assailant” (still no identity mentioned) was “also killed.”
CNN was not alone in this regard. The initial version of the related Associated Press (AP) headline first referred to the Palestinian terrorist as opposed to the civilian that he killed.
Despite the fact that the AP later revised the headline, the original version was republished in numerous media outlets around the world, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, Minnesota’s Star Tribune, US News, and more.
While journalists must seek to establish the facts, which requires time, sometimes it is abundantly clear from relatively early on who is responsible for what.
Today’s attack is a prime example.
In fact, Hamas almost immediately praised the attack as a “heroic operation” and named the terrorist responsible for the shooting, Fadi Abu Shkhaydam, as a Hamas leader in eastern Jerusalem.
Nevertheless, there has been a collective failure by the media to clearly name Palestinians generally, or the Hamas terror group specifically, as the driving force behind violence.
See for example how Ireland’s RTE News covered Sunday’s attack:
Who was killed, @rtenews?
An Israeli.Who perpetrated the "Jerusalem shooting"?
A Palestinian.So why don't you tell your readers the facts? pic.twitter.com/tvUfcGEZX1
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) November 21, 2021
Similarly vague phrasing was used by Australia’s ABC News:
An Israeli is dead.
Four Israelis are injured.
A Palestinian man was responsible for the shooting.Not even one of these facts is clear from the @ABCaustralia headline. pic.twitter.com/KmeFllRtfB
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) November 21, 2021
And Britain’s national broadcaster, the BBC, also failed to make clear who was behind the shooting and who was being targeted.
Hey, @BBC, we saw you were missing some minor details in your headline, so we took the liberty of adding them… pic.twitter.com/G0nwT2RNbB
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) November 21, 2021
The fact that numerous large media outlets did not in their headlines clearly identify for readers that the shooting was perpetrated by a Palestinian member of Hamas, and that he targeted Israelis, including civilians, constitutes a gross failure to accurately convey the real story to the public.
Readers deserve to know the truth. And that starts by not obscuring the acts of terrorists and hiding the identities of their victims.
Featured Image: Menahem Kahana/AFP via Getty Images
