Photo Tilt at the NYT
The New York Times rightly featured an image of the Palestinian terrorist attack in southern Israel on its front page on August 19, 2011. It was, after all, a deadly, multi-pronged attack from the Sinai of a kind not seen in many years. (The Times itself, needless to say, refrained from actually calling it a terrorist attack.)
Yet, while the attacks primarily targeted and killed civilians, the image was one of soldiers.
And, in what is virtually an art form of misdirection and circumlocution at the paper, editors managed to shade the language of the caption to omit the targeting of Israeli civilians, even to leave unclear the attack occurred inside Israel, and to omit identifying the perpetrators — Palestinians. In contrast to the un-named Palestinian actors in the attack, a bolded headline above the caption made clear how Israel responded — by bombing Gaza — and this was repeated in the text of the caption. It read:
Israel Responds to Attacks by Bombing Gaza
Wounded Israeli soldiers were treated Thursday after gunmen attacked them near the border between Israel and Egypt. Eight Israelis were killed and more than 30 wounded in multiple attacks in the area. Israel responded with air strikes on Gaza.
The original AP photo caption that accompanied the image was far more clear and direct, making clear the attack occured in Israel and identifying Palestinians as involved. It read this way:
Wounded Israeli soldiers are treated at the site of a shooting attack along the border between Israel and Egypt, southern Israel, Thursday, Aug. 18, 2011. Assailants armed with heavy weapons, guns and explosives crossed into southern Israel from the neighboring Egyptian Sinai peninsula on Thursday, killing six Israelis and wounding at least a dozen more in an audacious string of attacks that stoked concerns about Palestinian militants exploiting the recent instability in Egypt. (AP Photo/Yosi Ben)
More from SNAPSHOTS
The Palestinian Authority Paid Terrorists $347 Million in 2017
January 9, 2018
A Jerusalem Post graph illustrating how PA payments to terrorists are calculated, with amounts shown in shekels The Palestinian Authority (PA) paid imprisoned terrorists and their families 347 million USD in 2017, Israel’s defense ministry [...]
Foreign Policy Fails To Tell The Truth About UNRWA
January 9, 2018
An image posted on the official Facebook page of an UNRWA school As its headline illustrates, a Jan. 5, 2018 Foreign Policy article, “Nikki Haley’s Diplomacy of Revenge Targets U.N. Relief Agency,” substituted editorializing for [...]
Where’s the Coverage? Palestinian Leaders Spend Christmas Celebrating a Terrorist
January 2, 2018
PA President Mahmoud Abbas meets with Rafat Al-Jawabra on Dec. 25, 2017. Image courtesy of MEMRI Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and head of the Fatah movement, spent Dec. 25, 2017 [...]
Reuters Removes Photograph Implicating Israel in Deaths of Iranian Street Protesters
January 2, 2018
What do Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz have to do with the deaths of 10 Iranian protesters demonstrating against their regime? That's what Twitter users were wondering after Reuters [...]
‘Crux’ of the Conflict, According to The New York Times
December 24, 2017
What is the crux of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict? According to a New York Times headline in yesterday's print edition, and online here, it is religious settlers encroaching on Palestinian land ("An Israeli Settler, A Dead [...]
Where’s the Coverage of New Jersey Imam’s Call for Genocide?
December 21, 2017
On December 8, MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute, translated a sermon given in a New Jersey mosque. The organization summarized as follows: Sheikh Aymen Elkasaby, imam of the Islamic Center of Jersey City, [...]
DPA Captions Wrongly Blame Israel for Islamic Jihad Deaths
December 13, 2017
Deutsche Presse Agentur (DPA) published photo captions yesterday which incorrectly imply that an Israeli strike was responsible for the deaths of two Islamic Jihad members in Gaza. The photos and captions, distributed by major photo [...]
Reuters Rushes to Publicize Claim of “Israeli Attack.” You Won’t Believe What Happened Next
December 12, 2017
There may be times when "local residents" are good sources for a news story. But the death of two members of the Islamic Jihad terror group, killed in an explosion as they raced through Gaza [...]