UPDATE
Following correspondence with a senior editor, AP has acknowledged an error after a text editor was not made aware of updated photos from the scene of the terror attack. The older photos remained attached to the story.
It has been pointed out that all of those media outlets that republished the AP story were at liberty to choose their own accompanying photos. Simply put, they were not obligated to run the erroneous photos provided.
While AP’s may have been an honest error, it is also disturbing to see that other media outlets are evidently too lazy to check incoming wire service articles before republishing.
At least six Israelis were injured in a Palestinian terror attack in the city of Petah Tikva on Thursday. The terrorist opened fire on a bus, with two women and a man sustaining gunshot wounds, and then stabbed at least one other person in the neck using a screwdriver.
Civilians managed to stop the terrorist before police arrested him. Miraculously, no one was killed in the attack.
Why, then, did the Associated Press choose to illustrate its report on the attack with photos of the mourning relatives of a Palestinian who was killed in a totally unrelated incident?
The Palestinian was killed in an explosion in a tunnel between Gaza and Egypt. Israel denied any involvement and a Palestinian official said it was most likely the result of either an Egyptian airstrike or an internal explosion while weapons were being transferred through the tunnel. One of these seems to be the most likely scenario, since Israel generally confirms when it has carried out airstrikes on Palestinian terror targets.
So not only was the tunnel incident completely unrelated to the Petah Tikva attack, but the AP’s caption implies that Israel was to blame for it. Even worse, the AP is essentially generating sympathy for a Palestinian involved in terrorism – all in an article about a Palestinian terror attack on innocent Israeli civilians. And with this being an AP report, the article, along with the photos are republished on different news sites across the internet.
Israelis have been on edge after a terror wave beginning in 2015. In one of the most recent attacks, a Palestinian murdered four Israeli soldiers by driving a truck into a group of them who were touring in Jerusalem.
Media coverage of terrorism in Israel frequently results in headlines that equate or even invert attacker and victim. The AP manages to do the same thing with its terrible choice of photos. Is it too much for the AP to portray Israelis as victims when they are targeted by Palestinian terrorists?
