COMMITTEE FOR ACCURACY IN MIDDLE EAST REPORTING AND ANALYSIS
Following communication with UK Media Watch, Guardian editors amended a photo caption which misleadingly suggested that a far-right Polish demonstration in Warsaw included a pro-Israel contingent.
Despite the fact that we’ve prompted corrections on this point continually over the years, UK media outlets continue to make errors regarding Israel’s capital – by claiming, explicitly or implicitly, that Tel Aviv is Israel’s capital. We caught two such errors yesterday, one at the Daily Express and the other at the Daily Mail.
Following communication with UK Media Watch, editors at the Evening Standard revised the headline and text to make it clear that the incident on Israel’s northern border last week was started by an Iranian drone that penetrated Israeli air space.
In initial reports on Sunday and Monday, following hostilities on Saturday between Israel and Syria, the Iranian drone (which violated Israeli air space and caused the incident) wasn’t included in the headline and only appeared further in the article. However, a recent report in the Independent went a step further, omitting the drone altogether in both the headline and the text.
An op-ed in The Guardian by radical anti-Israel activist, and Code Pink co-founder, Medea Benjamin, included the outrageous claim that Ahed Tamimi, the Palestinian teen who was captured on video assaulting an Israeli soldier, was a “PEACEFUL human rights activist”.
Following communication with UK Media Watch, the Guardian agreed to amend the sentence and remove the word “peaceful”.
Following communication between UKMW and the Guardian, their editors also agreed to change their caption beneath the photo, used to illustrate a recent article (Israel imposes travel ban on 20 foreign NGOs over boycott movement, Jan. 7th), to reflect the more accurate translation of the Arabic sign.
An Independent article on the death of a Palestinian man on the Gaza border, during clashes with Israeli soldiers last month, included a passage suggesting that his death evokes Israel’s “killing”, in 2000, of a 12 year old Palestinian boy named Mohammed Al Durah. However, the article erroneously suggested that Israel’s responsibility for the young boy’s death was an indisputable fact.
UK Media Watch prompted a correction to a Daily Mail article which reported, as if it’s a fact, Gaza Health Ministry claims that Israel killed Ibrahim Abu Thuraya during violent protests on the Gaza border last month. The new article has several additional sentences outlining the IDF statement which casts serious doubt about these Palestinian claims.
The Dec. 19th article in The Independent failed to provide the Israeli response to the incident, leaving readers with a take on the the death of Ibrahim Abu Thuraya informed entirely by the unsubstantiated claims of Hamas officials.
A BBC report misled readers regarding the type of projectiles launched from the Gaza Strip.