Read this headline from the New York Times (11/16/14):
This is what a Palestinian boy looks like. (cc photo: Giles)
Palestinian Shot by Israeli Troops at Gaza Border
Think for a second about what kind of image that calls up. How much does that image change when you read the story’s second sentence?
A spokeswoman for the hospital said the Palestinian was a 10-year-old boy.
Now, very few people read the full text of every story in any newspaper, so as an editor you have to ask yourself what a headline conveys on its own. I expect that most people who only read that headline assumed that the Palestinian referenced was an adult—and likely had a different reaction to the story as a result.
They were probably also less likely to read the story—the opposite of the effect that you usually want to have with a headline—which makes you wonder why the Times would leave this key fact out. Space, maybe? But “Gazan Boy Shot by Israeli Troops at Border” would have fit just as easily.
Or “Child Shot by Israeli Troops at Gaza Border,” for that matter, since the shooting victim’s likely nationality would be clear from context; there aren’t too many Israeli children near the border with Gaza. In any case, the victim’s age is arguably a more important fact than his ethnicity.
So—did the editors leave out of the headline the fact that it was a child who had been shot because they didn’t want readers to get too upset about Israel doing the shooting?
Surely they would say no—but recall that New York Times story (7/16/14; FAIR Blog, 7/17/14), accurately headlined “Four Young Boys Killed Playing on Gaza Beach,” that was rewritten for the print edition as “Boys Drawn to Gaza Beach, and Into Center of Mideast Strife.” Here the boys remained boys, but their deaths disappeared.
When Times public editor Margaret Sullivan (7/22/14) asked why the headline had been changed, executive editor Dean Baquet claimed that print headlines tend to be “a little poetic.” Keats it ain’t.
To take a quantitative look at this phenomenon, let’s move from the New York Times to an outlet that fancies itself to be the New York Times of the airwaves—NPR. FAIR’s Seth Ackerman (Extra!, 11/01) did a study of which deaths it reported in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict over a six-month period. He found that NPR reported 81 percent of the Israeli deaths during that time, and 89 percent of the deaths of Israeli children—but only 34 percent of the Palestinian deaths, and 26 percent of the deaths of Palestinian children.
So while NPR—understandably—thought that being a child made an Israeli victim’s death more newsworthy, if Palestinian victims were children, that made NPR less likely to report their deaths.
That’s an odd sort of news judgment—unless what’s being aimed at is not maximizing human interest, but keeping it to a minimum.
The NY Times was an outlier in this. Even the Jerusalem Post and Ynet had “child” or “10-year-old” in their headlines. For more on this story see http://www.TimesWarp.org, http://wp.me/p3zcQt-cD
What’s with passive voice? Why not
“Israeli troops shoot 10-year-old Palestinian” or
“Israeli troops shoot Palestinian boy at border”
If you read the NY Times article, you will find that it is basically a justification of why the boy was shot. The article is short on specifics, and comes complete with some hearsay provided by Israeli military authorities. But we thankfully learn about knife- and screwdriver-wielding Palestinians. So we can chalk this one up to justifiable homicide on the basis that Israel has the right to defend itself. Right?
I’m with Eric except I would say “Israeli Troops kill/shoot 10-year-old at the Border”… Does anything else matter?
Thank you yet again FAIR, for this. I’m so grateful you exist.The world is a much more hopeful place because you’re doing the work that you do.
i’m surprised they didn’t simply print “terrorism by suspected militant prevented”
The headline might as well have been, “10-year-old boy attempts to invade and conquer Israel”. The text could explain that he was fortunately killed before he could grow up, train an army, assemble a trillion dollars worth of weapons, and carry out his evil plan.
@ Barbara Erickson – Most Americans do not read (or probably even know they exist) the JPost or Ynet. The intent was to skew and manage what the majority of the NYT readers in America see.
Please do what you can, as am I, 2 instigate the idea of a campaign to get Media Matters and or PolitiFact to start working on the grotesque under coverage of Israel’s terrorism of Palestine.
Prophetic comments by 4 eminent Jews:
Senator Henry Morgenthau Sr., renowned Jewish American and former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, 1919: “Zionism is the most stupendous fallacy in Jewish history….The very fervour of my feeling for the oppressed of every race and every land, especially for the Jews, those of my own blood and faith, to whom I am bound by every tender tie, impels me to fight with all the greater force against this scheme, which my intelligence tells me can only lead them deeper into the mire of the past, while it professes to be leading them to the heights. Zionism is… a retrogression into the blackest error, and not progress toward the light.”
Asked to sign a petition supporting settlement of Jews in Palestine, Sigmund Freud declined: “I cannot…I do not think that Palestine could ever become a Jewish state….It would have seemed more sensible to me to establish a Jewish homeland on a less historically-burdened land….I can raise no sympathy at all for the misdirected piety which transforms a piece of a Herodian wall into a national relic, thereby offending the feelings of the natives.” (Letter to Dr. Chaim Koffler Keren HaYassod, Vienna: 2/26/30)
Albert Einstein, 1939: “There could be no greater calamity than a permanent discord between us and the Arab people…. Let us recall that in former times no people lived in greater friendship with us than the ancestors of these Arabs.”
Lessing J. Rosenwald, president of the American Council for Judaism, 1944: “The concept of a racial state – the Hitlerian concept- is repugnant to the civilized world, as witness the fearful global war in which we are involved. . . , I urge that we do nothing to set us back on the road to the past. To project at this time the creation of a Jewish state or commonwealth is to launch a singular innovation in world affairs which might well have incalculable consequences.”
I just want t say “Thank You” for your honesty, we rarely see that in the traditional media .
Does power corrupt majority ?
that is what I thought after I read the above four prophetic comments of 4 prominent Jews
My thanks to David for the 4 quotes that may help dispel the “Zionist = Jew” conflation that seems to be at work nearly everywhere.
^..^