UK Media Watch prompts correction and improved headline at Daily Mail

On July 20th, CAMERA posted on a story by Agence France Presse (AFP), about new Israeli legislation to allow for the ouster of members of Knesset accused of racial incitement, which included the following sentence:

The legislation was put forward after three Arab-Israeli opposition lawmakers sparked controversy when they visited relatives of Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces after alleged attacks in Israel.

The Daily Mail published the same AFP article, also referring to the attack as “alleged”, despite the fact that the piece is referring to Israelis killed in an actual (“successful”) alleged attack on Oct. 13, when two Palestinians boarded a Jerusalem bus and indiscriminately shot and stabbed passengers.

Following communication by CAMERA, AFP corrected the sentence to reflect the fact that the murderous attack was not in doubt.

Similarly, UK Media Watch contacted Daily Mail editors concerning the problematic language, and they too corrected the sentence.

On a separate issue, UK Media Watch contacted editors over the following headline accompanying another July 20th article.

As we noted in our post, editors failed to use language indicating that these were only Palestinian charges that have not yet been proven and have been  denied by Israeli officials.

We contacted Daily Mail editors to complain about the headline, and they responded by amending the headline to remove the claim that the boy was “shot dead”, by placing quotation marks around ‘Israeli Police’ to demonstrate these were merely claims (not facts), and adding the denial by Israeli Police to the bullet points.

Here’s the new headline and strap line:

new headline

Though the new headline is still quite problematic, it nonetheless clearly represents an improvement over the original insofar as it now at least conveys to readers that these are only allegations.

We’re still attempting to get additional improvements to the Daily Mail article and will update this post as needed.

 

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