By publishing Raeem Al-Raiyshi's “martyr” photo and highlighting her motherhood, too many media reports are inadvertently glorifying the female terrorist who killed four Israelis at the Erez checkpoint in Gaza on Wednesday, January 14. At the same time, many reports so far have failed to explore two key aspects of her attack.
The European Union's Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia commissioned a study of European anti-Semitism. When the report concluded that much of the anti-Jewish violence in Europe is perpetrated by Muslim immigrants, the EU shelved the report. Jewish groups protested by publishing the report online, and the EU relented and released the report, but they continue to insist that it is flawed.
Newspaper columnists have the right to express whatever opinion they want, but they do not have the right to disseminate inaccuracies, distortions or fabrications and present them as facts. Bryan Shuck, a student from the St. Louis Community College (Meramec campus), wrote an inflammatory column riddled with errors, including paraphrases that are the opposite in meaning to the actual quotations.
In a surprisingly candid op-ed (“The News We Kept to Ourselves”) in the April 11, 2003 edition of the New York Times, CNN's chief news executive, Eason Jordan, reveals that due to the real threat of torture and death to his staff and sources, CNN has for years been sanitizing its reporting from Iraq, rarely exposing the severely brutal nature of the Iraqi regime.
Words matter. In the Dec. 8, 2002 “Week in Review” section of the New York Times, a deceptive, opinion-laden adjective was included in a news-brief written by reporter Michael Wines: “After 26 months of Palestinian suicide bombings and pitiless Israeli retaliation, is there light at the end of the tunnel?”Pitiless is a word for those who blow up Israeli toddlers, school children and grandmothers going about their daily lives. Why is it applied to Israelis who are acting in self-defense against the savagery directed against them?