TEL AVIV – The BBC and other major international news outlets have distorted coverage of the murder of an Israeli mother of six, a media watchdog charged.
>HonestReporting said that while many top tier outlets – including CNN, the Guardian, NPR, The Wall Street Journal – chose not to report the terrorist attack at all, others either ignored or questioned the perpetrator’s identity as a Palestinian terrorist, choosing to focus on the fact that the victim, 38-year-old Dafna Meir, lived in a Jewish settlement.
The International Business Times (IBT) wrote the following headline: “Massive manhunt as Jewish woman stabbed to death by ‘Palestinian’ in her settlement home.”
The media monitor took IBT to task for putting quotation marks around the word “Palestinian,” saying: “Yet again we see a media outlet attempting to muddy the waters of Palestinian responsibility for terror.”
HonestReporting also challenged the BBC’s headline, which said, “Israeli woman stabbed to death in settlement home.”
A shorter headline appeared on the BBC’s Middle East homepage: “Israeli killed in settlement home.”
The watchdog blasted the BBC for emphasizing that the terror attack took place in a settlement, which they claimed was a way of detracting from Palestinian culpability. The BBC also failed to report many prominent details regarding the brutality of the attack.
HonestReporting wrote, “Just how bloodthirsty does a Palestinian terror attack against Israelis have to be to deserve coverage?”
The Independent described the terrorist attack in only two sentences in the 15th paragraph, as an afterthought to a story of Palestinian communities uniting against Israeli demolitions of terrorists’ homes.
As for the news wires, Reuters, in contrast to the Associated Press and AFP, didn’t even bother to publish a stand-alone story on the terrorist attack, instead referring to it as “the latest incident” in what amounted to a roundup of events.