NY Times Headlines: A Study in Contrasts

By Published On: November 12, 2014

When it comes to double standards in coverage about Israelis versus Palestinians, The New York Times delivers without fail.

Yesterday we noted how New York Times editors modified what had been a clear headline about a fatal Palestinian attack (“Palestinian Stabs Israeli Soldier at Tel Aviv Train Station“) in order to downplay Palestinian violence. The result was:

nyt Palestinian suspected.JPG

Note the passive language (“Palestinians are suspected”) which downplays Palestinian culpability, as does the formulation that the Israelis “die,” as opposed to “are killed.” Moreover, editors inserted the word “suspected,” though Islamic Jihad and Hamas had already confirmed that the culprits were Palestinian.

Compare yesterday’s sanitized language about Palestinians stabbing Israelis to today’s straightforward headline about Israeli forces shooting a Palestinian:

nyt headline Israeli forces kill.JPG

Israeli forces just kill. Unlike Palestinian killers, they’re not “suspected.”

Matt Seaton, a staff editor for The New York Times opinion page, recently tweeted that the paper, which has run a series of Op-Eds charging Israeli society at large as essentially racist, would dedicate space to Palestinian racism as “soon as they have [a] sovereign state to discriminate with.”

seaton twitter.jpg

Will Times headline writers also hold Palestinians to the same standards as Israelis only once there is a Palestinian state?

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