UKMW Prompts Correction to SKY News Claim on US View of Settlements
On January 15, 2017, Sky News ran a segment titled ‘Two-state solution under Trump’, focusing on concerns that Israeli settlement construction and the president-elect’s pledge to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem could “spell the end of the two-state solution”.
At roughly the two-minute mark of the roughly five-minute segment, the presenter, Sky News Middle East correspondent Alex Rossi, asserts – in an effort to contextualise construction across the green line – that the US views the settlements as “illegal”.
This claim is not accurate.
The US position since the early 80s has been that settlements are “illegitimate”, not “illegal”. Most notably, in September, Associated Press (AP) issued a correction (following communication with CAMERA’s Jerusalem office).
UKMW alerted Sky to the error in the following tweets – which we followed up with an email to the network.
Earlier today, UKMW heard back from Sky producers that they upheld the complaint and thanked UKMW for bringing the information to their attention – particularly the AP correction. Sky deleted the video in question, and re-published it without the false information on the US view of settlements. Sky also revised the accompanying online article, and deleted the Tweets and Facebook posts linking to the original video.
The full report on the correction can be read at:
https://ukmediawatch.org/2017/01/16/ukmw-prompts-correction-to-sky-news-claim-on-us-view-of-settlements/
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