In response to communication from CAMERA’s Israel office, Reuters has deleted social media posts on X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook which erroneously cited Tel Aviv as Israel’s capital.
Using a common journalistic practice of citing a nation’s capital as a stand-in for the country, the June 12 Reuters posts erred: “Lebanon’s Hezbollah fired scores of rockets at Israel, Tel Aviv said, in apparent response to an Israeli strike which killed a senior Hezbollah field commander, further ratcheting up tensions in their eight-month-long conflict.” (Emphasis added.)
Jerusalem, not Tel Aviv, is Israel’s capital. Reuters has at least twice before corrected the identical error. (See here and here.) Numerous other media outlets have likewise corrected the same point, including Time, Associated Press along with The Los Angeles Times,Washington Post, Reuters, Newsweek and The Guardian, among many others.
The Israeli Knesset, located in the heart of Jerusalem, Israel’s capital (Photo by Chris Yunker from St. Louis, United States, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Following CAMERA’s correspondence with Reuters today, editors commendably deleted both posts.