President Donald Trump’s declaration recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital has generated huge volumes of media coverage. The public debate that the announcement has prompted is legitimate. Getting the facts wrong, however, isn’t.
Here are a few of the errors that HonestReporting has exposed.
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Daily Mail Needs Some Religious Education
Only days after the Daily Mail demonstrated its capacity to make a historical mess of its Israel coverage, more evidence that someone at the media outlet needs to employ a decent fact checker.
Two stories in the Daily Mail include a backgrounder “Three Faiths and Thousands of Years of History Have Shaped the Embassy Battle” (excerpt below):
For once it’s not just about Israel and the Jews. The Daily Mail has managed to get it wrong on all three major religions.
- It’s the Western Wall, not “West Wall.”
- The Temple Mount is Judaism’s holiest site, not the Western Wall.
- The Al-Aqsa mosque, not the Dome of the Rock, is Islam’s holiest site in Jerusalem (its third holiest site in the world).
- The holy sites mentioned are not all on the Temple Mount as written in the first paragraph. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is in another part of Jerusalem’s Old City.
In another story, a backgrounder “Why is Jerusalem Contested?” states:
The greater metropolitan area of Tel Aviv includes other cities such as Givatayim, Ramat Gan, Bnei Brak, Holon and Bat Yam.
The city of Tel Aviv-Jaffa, however, where those embassies are located, is not Israel’s largest city, either in area or population size. That status belongs to Jerusalem.
Following our complaints, the Daily Mail corrected the inaccurate text in all of the stories above.
Listen: Radio Presenter Claims Tel Aviv is Capital
The UK’s LBC talk radio station spent a significant amount of time discussing the Jerusalem issue. Unfortunately, presenter Shelagh Fogarty decided to not only prejudice the discussion but to also state a complete falsehood when she said:
For Israelis it’s the eternal capital. At the birth of the modern state of Israel in 1948, parliament set up in Jerusalem. As things stand, its capital is Tel Aviv; it’s where all the international embassies are.
We’ve sent a complaint to LBC pointing out that Shelagh Fogarty is not entitled to promote factual inaccuracies nor to unilaterally decide where Israel’s capital is irrespective of whether or not one recognizes Jerusalem’s status.
It’s one thing to imply that Tel Aviv is the capital. It’s worse to actually state it as fact. We also noted that this very issue was raised by HonestReporting in 2012. The since replaced UK Press Complaints Commission ruled against The Guardian, which had also declared Tel Aviv to be Israel’s capital.
NPR Unilaterally Upgrades US-Palestinian Diplomatic Relations
It’s been an increasingly common error over the past few weeks. While NPR‘s headline and intro text correctly referred to Husam Zomlot as the leader or “head of the Palestinian delegation to the U.S.,” interviewer Mary Louise Kelly conspicuously bestowed the status of Ambassador upon him.
As we pointed out to The Independent (which corrected its error) recently, not even Zomlot’s own Twitter feed describes himself as “Ambassador”:
The US doesn’t recognize Palestinian statehood. Therefore, Palestinian diplomatic representatives in the US do not have the status of an Embassy or Ambassador. It’s not for Mary Louise Kelly to upgrade US-Palestinian diplomatic relations.
We’ve lodged an official complaint with NPR.
ABC Australia Switches the Rejectionists
It’s worth remembering how Israel came into possession of the western half of Jerusalem in the first instance following the end of the 1948 War of Independence. The 1947 UN Partition Plan, which recommended dividing the land into Jewish and Arab states, called for Jerusalem to be a separate internationally administered city (corpus separatum).
While the Jews accepted the Partition Plan, the Arab states rejected it in its entirety and launched a war of extermination.
But not according to an analysis by ABC Australia’s Anne Barker:
Given the circumstances following the war, it would be a bit late for Ben Gurion to reject a resolution that had been rendered moot by the facts on the ground. Israel was in control of part of Jerusalem as a result of a war started and lost by the Arabs.
But since when was it a problem for the media to paint Israel as the rejectionists?
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