“Palestinian girl facing Jerusalem eviction held on suspicion of stabbing Jewish neighbour”.
This is an actual headline by Reuters, an international news agency. The story was shared by Yahoo News, which remains one of the world’s most widely-read news portals.
The story itself, by reporter Nuha Sharaf, is equally as bad. The very first paragraph opens by again referring to “A Palestinian whose family faces eviction,” thereby priming readers to view the terror attack through that specific, narrow lens.
HonestReporting immediately called out Reuters on Twitter:
Can you imagine any country in the world other than Israel where a terrorist attack would be described this way?
Simply unacceptable, @Reuters. pic.twitter.com/QJcZulYFYk
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) December 8, 2021
The article also refers to the victim, Moria Cohen, 26, as a “Jewish settler” because she resides in eastern Jerusalem, over which Israel officially declared sovereignty in 1980.
A significant proportion of Jerusalem’s Jewish residents live in eastern Jerusalem, which Jordan occupied in 1949 until Israel gained control over the territory in the 1967 Six-Day War. With Jerusalem hemmed in on three sides (north, south and east) by the old armistice line and by protected forest land on the other (west), the only way for Jerusalem to naturally expand is out beyond the old frontiers.
Yet media reports routinely ignore this reality and insist on referring to Jewish residents of Jerusalem as “settlers,” as if they do not belong there.
In fact, Jews have been living in Jerusalem for some 3,000 years. The city was only ever divided for a brief 19 years in its history, and it has only ever been the capital of the Jewish nation.
Join the fight for Israel’s fair coverage in the news
As is typical with reporting from the region, the article misrepresents the Palestinians’ territorial aims in a boilerplate paragraph which states: “Israel captured East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza in a 1967 war. Palestinians want these areas for a future state.”
HonestReporting has previously investigated and found such descriptions to be categorically misleading, failing to make clear that Palestinian political and religious leaders routinely demand that Israel be dismantled for a Palestinian state to arise.
While there is space to mention the fact that the stabbing was perpetrated by an Arab resident of Sheik Jarrah/Shimon HaTzadik against her Jewish neighbor, and that the Arab resident is in the midst of a court battle over her right to live in a bitterly-contested property, this should never be the lead sentence in an article ostensibly detailing a terror attack. Such grievances never justify attacking a civilian, and giving them this degree of prominence serves to ‘contextualize’ the attack in a way that is inconceivable elsewhere.
“Student pilots believed to have collided with Manhattan skyscrapers” https://t.co/twi9Pw0xDF
— Avi Mayer (@AviMayer) December 8, 2021
Accuracy in News Wire Reports Especially Important
The importance of accuracy in wire service reports is generally under-appreciated by the public.
News wire services underpin the media industry. It’s not feasible for every news outlet in existence to have a reporter in every hotspot across the globe. Instead, many outsource, turning to independent news agencies who allow newspapers and websites to reprint their articles for a fee.
Reuters is one of many companies that produce reports which are then republished on websites and in newspapers the world over. When these agencies get their reporting right, it means that many millions of people are exposed to good coverage. When these wire services get things wrong, however, millions are exposed to false or misleading reporting.
Join us in demanding that Reuters correct this egregious headline and remove the needless ‘contextualization’ of the story from the first paragraph.
If you feel Reuters’ coverage is biased, write to:
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Photo credit: Shalev Shalom/TPS
