Hacker Inserts Fictitious Anti-Israel News Item on ABC News Web Site
A web site featuring ABC News’s Good Morning America was hacked to include a highly inflammatory fraudulent anti-Israel news item. The problem was identified on July 31.
The item is titled, “The Ugly Crimes of the Jewish Nation,” and makes the fraudulent claim that “Israeli missiles this year have killed 3246 Palestinians, half kids. Stop slaughtering kids, mothers and fathers.”
A woman named Stephanie (she would not give her last name), who identified herself as the office manager for Good Morning America, indicated that the site, http://www.abcgma.com, was a doctored copy of the real site at http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/ . Several hours later, the original problematic site no longer contained the offending news item. However, it does appear that the hacked web site is an alternate web address for Good Morning America.
This is the third incident in recent weeks where CAMERA has identified an anti-Israel, anti-semitic or inaccurate posting appearing as an officially sanctioned item on a web site associated with a major news organization.
On June 7, About.com, a web site published by the New York Times that promotes itself as an on-line encyclopedia to the public, featured an article on Jewish immigration provided by Bradley Smith, a publisher and promoter of Holocaust denial literature. The article was written by Kevin MacDonald, a university professor notorious for his controversial theories about Jews and Jewish influence. In this instance it took several phone calls, e-mails and follow-up to get the item removed from the web site.
On July 28, CAMERA alerted CNN’s web site that it had neglected to update its posting of Israeli casualties in the on-going conflict with Hezbollah. The site listed only 300 Israeli civilian wounded. Shortly afterwards, the site updated the total to 1500.
The fact that these items were identified by chance suggests that misinformation about Israel and Jews may be rampant on the web sites of respected news organizations. This should also serve as a warning that there is insufficient oversite of these web sites. Since more and more people are getting their news from the internet, this could become a burgeoning problem.
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