At 5.20am, a rocket fired from Gaza struck a family home in the community of Mishmeret, north of Tel Aviv, injuring several people. This was CNN‘s initial headline and our tweeted response:
No ?@cnni?, the rocket didn’t just ‘land.’ Planes land, birds land. This rocket took out a house. #HeadlineFail pic.twitter.com/VWZVUtDhEK
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) March 25, 2019
To describe the rocket as ‘landing’ might be appropriate had it fallen in an open area causing minimal damage.
In this case, however, there was nothing benign in the resulting destruction of the house where a British-Israeli family of Susan and Robert Wolf were awoken to the sound of an air raid siren before the explosion that could have killed them.
In response to our tweet, CNN, to its credit, amended the headline:
However, while we used an image of the original CNN headline taken from its mobile app, we are disappointed to note that a similar amendment on that platform has not been implemented. Indeed, the app headline (that links to the full article with the corrected headline) currently says: “Rocket fired from Gaza lands deep inside Israel.”
A welcome but, as yet, partial success. We will be requesting a further change to CNN’s mobile app headline.
