Media watchdogs and Jewish groups on Sunday admonished the New York Times for publishing a headline about Palestinian stabbing attacks in Israel which “blur Palestinian culpability” in the incidents.
The “skewed” headline, “Israeli Police Officers Kill Two Palestinian Men,” appeared in Sunday’s edition of the prominent newspaper and detailed in the opening paragraph that the two “Palestinian men were fatally shot by the Israeli police after attacking officers with knives.”
“Why report the effect without the cause? Why continue to depict Palestinians as ‘just victims’?” watchdog group CAMERA asked in a blog post. “What is so hard about… [a] straightforward headline accurately depicting the nature and chronology of events?”
CAMERA also pointed out that, in the past, New York Times bias against Israel had been subject to criticism by the paper’s own public editor Margaret Sullivan.
Associate Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, said the paper “should at least revise the misleading headline for the record.”
“We aren’t dealing with possible police misbehavior in Baltimore or Cleveland, but uniformed officers targeted by terrorists in the Holy Land,” Cooper said in an email to the Algemeiner. He asked whether the headline was the result of “sloppy editing, or the bias of a headline writer and editor (mis)leading the readers.”
In an email to the Algemeiner, one reader alleged that in Sunday’s issue of the Times, another article that appears in print confirms an anti-Israel bias on the part of the “paper of record.”
“Even more interesting is another title in the same edition of the New York Times on an unrelated article: ‘Man, 24, killed by Detective in struggle during arrest’,” said New York native Noam Ohana. “So, in the New York case we are given a bit of context (there was a struggle) but when a Palestinian tries to butcher police officers/soldiers with a knife it apparently does not require any contextualization in the title.”
The New York Times’ public editor could not immediately be reached for comment on the story.
The New York Times has often been criticized for anti-Israel bias in its reporting on the Jewish state and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. CAMERA even maintains a billboard outside the paper’s headquarters criticizing the media giant’s coverage. Meanwhile, the New York Times asserts that it is criticized by both sides in the conflict.
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