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Several international media outlets failed to uphold their journalistic duty by either mislabeling the Israeli victims or by leaving out the Palestinian identity of the perpetrators.
By Chaim Lax, HonestReporting
Over the course of three days, three Israeli civilians were murdered in two separate Palestinian terror attacks in Judea and Samaria.
In the first attack, which occurred on August 19, a father and son from the coastal city of Ashdod, Shay Silas Nigreker and Aviad Nir, were shot and killed at point-blank range while their car was being washed in the flashpoint Palestinian town of Huwara.
Then, two days later, an Israeli woman, Batsheva Nigri, was killed in front of her six-year-old daughter when the car they were riding in was peppered with bullets during a drive-by shooting outside Hebron.
Several international media outlets failed to uphold their journalistic duty by either mislabeling the Israeli victims or by leaving out the Palestinian identity of the perpetrators.
CBS News & UPI Mislabel Israeli Terror Victims
Both CBS News and the UPI wire service incorrectly captioned their photos of the Huwara attack with the false claim that the two Israeli victims were “settlers” even though they were residents of Ashdod.
As HonestReporting noted earlier this week in a piece that called out both the BBC and AFP for falsely insinuating that the terror victims were “settlers,” Palestinian terrorists target innocent Israelis, both those who live within the Green Line and those who live beyond it.
By labeling Shay Nigreker and Aviad Nir as “settlers,” the media not only impart false information but also tacitly engage in victim-blaming instead of treating them as they would the victims of terrorism from any other country.
CNN & the BBC Erase Palestinians From Terror Coverage
Both terror attacks were committed by Palestinian terrorists.
This information is, however, conspicuously missing from CNN and the BBC’s coverage of the two attacks.
CNN‘s Huwara report never once mentions the fact that the terrorist was a Palestinian. Instead, it refers to “suspects” and a “murderer,” the latter appearing in a quote by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In fact, the only two appearances of the word “Palestinian” in the entire article are passive references to Huwara as a “Palestinian town” and to the Hamas terror group as a “Palestinian militant movement.”
The BBC‘s headline noticeably omits the word “Palestinian” in its coverage of the drive-by shooting. In addition, the British broadcaster referred to an “attack on [a] car,” blunting the destructive and murderous intent of the terrorists who purposefully opened fire on Israeli civilians.
As studies have shown that many news consumers just read the headline, this absence of vital contextual information leaves these readers misinformed and without a full understanding of the event in question.
By leaving out the Palestinian identity of the terrorists, CNN and the BBC are effectively whitewashing Palestinian culpability for anti-Israel terrorism and misrepresenting the reality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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