The major media — wire services UPI, AP, and Agence France Presse (AFP), the television networks CNN, CBS, and the BBC — have singularly failed, recently, to report accurately on Palestinian terrorism in Judea and Samaria, a/k/a the West Bank. The errors range from misidentifying victims as “settlers,” to refusing to identify Palestinians murdering Israeli civilians as “terrorists” or even as “Palestinians.” More on this continued inability to report correctly can be found here: “Media Outlets Fail in West Bank Terror Coverage,” by Chaim Lax, Algemeiner, August 24, 2023:
Over the course of three days, three Israeli civilians were murdered in two separate Palestinian terror attacks in the West Bank.
In the first attack, which occurred on August 19, a father and son from the coastal city of Ashdod, were shot and killed at point-blank range while their car was being washed in the flashpoint Palestinian town of Huwara. The victims’ names were Shay Silas Nigreker and Aviad Nir.
Shay Nigreker and his son Aviad Nir had gone to the Palestinian town to run errands — giving their business to Palestinians in whom, despite everything, they put their trust. They also went to a local auto mechanic to get their car’s air conditioning system repaired and then to have their car washed; it was there that they were gunned down by a Palestinian terrorist.
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.
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….
It would have taken a simple phone call, or a minute’s searching of the Internet, for the journalists working for the BBC, AFP, CBS News, and UPI to discover that Shay Nigreker and Aviad Nir were not “settlers” at all, but came from Ashdod, on Israel’s Mediterranean coast. They preferred to stick with identifying them as “settlers,” because Israeli “settlers” — Israelis living in Judea and Samaria beyond the Green Line — have long been demonized in the international media, presented as fanatics living on stolen Palestinian lands who impliedly deserve whatever the Palestinians inflict on them, including death.
Neither CNN nor the BBC, with their immense worldwide reach and power to mold minds, ever mention the word “terrorist” in their accounts of the two murderous attacks on Israelis. CNN’s report on the murders in Huwara of the father and son also leave out the fact that the attacker was a “Palestinian.”
In fact, the only two appearances of the word “Palestinian” in the entire [CNN] 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….
The killer of Batsheva Nigri was not “attacking a car.” He was trying to kill a human being, an Israeli civilian, driving that car, and he succeeded. To report this as merely as an “attack on [a] car” is like covering that especially murderous terror attack in Jerusalem in 2001 by reporting that “someone attacked a Sbarro pizza parlor” rather than “a Palestinian terrorist detonated himself in a crowd of Israeli mothers and children at a pizza parlor.” And why did the BBC omit the word “Palestinian” from its headline? Wasn’t that identification essential, lest some think that the murderer might have been an Israeli settling a personal score? Many people never read beyond a headline; that’s why it’s so important that it not leave out critical information.
For the BBC, the Humara attacker (of the father and son) was not described as a “terrorist” nor, in the headline, identified as a “Palestinian. “But he was both those things. Why did the BBC hold back on properly identifying him, either in the headline, where the word “Palestinian” was omitted, or in the body of the story, where the word “terrorist” did not appear?
Why did CBS News and UPI identify the father and son who were killed in Huwara as “settlers” in the captions above their photos? Why did the BBC and AFP “insinuate” that both victims were “settlers”? Why did the BBC and CNN refuse to identify the killer of both the father and son at the Huwara carwash, and the killer of the schoolteacher driving her car near Hebron, as “Palestinians”? Why did they, and several other major media outlets, not identify either killer as a “terrorist” even though their victims were unarmed civilians, and the attacks were meant to strike fear?
The media have a lot of explaining to do.