Accuracy and accountability are among the most important tenets of journalism. In combination, they mean media organizations are expected to publish or broadcast forthright corrections after sharing inaccurate information. The following corrections are among the many prompted by CAMERA’s communication with reporters and editors.
The Boston Globe and columnist H.D.S. Greenway have corrected the erroneous claim that Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat died while in a bunker under Israeli siege. After wrongly referring to "Israel's practice of reserving some roads for Jews," the AP corrected its wording. But not before one newspaper published the erroneous language.
A Boston Globe article about an Israeli high court ruling allowing Palestinians to sue the Israeli military for damages was accompanied by a misleading photo of three Palestinian children killed by Hamas gunmen. In an Aug. 27 Boston Globe column, H.D.S. Greenway erroneously claimed that in a 1996 report written for Benjamin Netanyahu, Richard Perle called for the United States to overthrow Saddam Hussein "to increase Israel's strategic position." CAMERA alerted the Globe that Perle's report made no such suggestion, and a correction ran yesterday.
July 2 update follows. The foreign desk at the Associated Press wire service apparently has no mechanism in place to correct factual errors. Over the last year, evidence regarding more than half a dozen straight-forward substantive errors was passed from editor to editor until it fell by the wayside. This was the case in a June 10 error by correspondent Ali Daraghmeh, who falsely reported that in the West Bank, "Israel does not allow Palestinian officers to patrol in uniform."
CAMERA obtained the following correction noting that Yossi Beilin and Yasser Abed Rabbo, architects of the Geneva Accords, are former Cabinet ministers. In an op-ed, Herbert Kelman, the Richard Clarke Cabot Research Professor of Social Ethics and co-chair of the Middle East Seminar at Harvard University, misidentified them as current Cabinet members.