Media bias skews reports on massacre

In the wake of the terrorist attack in the Kehilat Bnei Torah synagogue in Jerusalem’s Har Nof neighborhood last week, Western media organizations rushed to downplay the culpability of the Palestinian terrorists who perpetrated the attack.

Five people were murdered, including three American citizens; at least seven other Jewish worshippers were wounded.

The U.K.-based newspaper The Guardian published a Reuters story about the attack that was originally headlined “Palestinians kill four in Jerusalem synagogue attack,” but changed the headline to “Four worshippers killed in attack on Jerusalem synagogue.” (Both headlines came before the death toll in the attack rose to five when a Druze policeman died of his wounds.) The Guardian also removed all references to Palestinians from the text of the article, writing only that “two men” had perpetuated the attack.

A Canadian Broadcasting Corporation article on the attack was headlined “Jerusalem police fatally shoot 2 after apparent synagogue attack,” implying that most of the culpability lies with Israeli police for responding to the attack.

In what might have been an accidental — though still highly irresponsible — gaffe, CNN mislabeled its initial TV coverage of the terror attack with the headline, “Deadly attack on Jerusalem mosque.”

“I would say [the CNN ‘mosque’ error was] predisposed — an honest mistake that was probably not consciously made, but revelatory of [an] underlying predisposition or bias,” said Eric Rozeman, Washington director for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA). “Israelis and Jews are filtered through the false history of ‘the Palestinian narrative’.”

Such factual errors, as well as alterations to the context surrounding terrorist attacks and other violence by Palestinians against Israelis, are frequently documented by CAMERA.