Today’s New York Times includes a collector’s item: an actual headline that reads “Israeli Police Attack Mourners”
BY JAMES NORTH
NEW YORK TIMES HEADQUARTERS
Today’s New York Times includes a collector’s item: an actual headline that reads, “Israeli Police Attack Mourners Before Funeral for Palestinian American Journalist.” Normally the Times hides the truth behind formulations like “clashes erupt,” leaving its readers with no idea what really happened, of who did what to whom. But any cover up was impossible after the circulation of the viral video of Israeli riot police assaulting the enormous Palestinian crowd as pallbearers tried to carry the coffin of the respected Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh to her funeral.
Jehad Abusalim جِهَاد أبو سليم@JehadAbusalimThis scene will be ingrained in our memory forever.
Even so, some of the rest of the Times’s coverage was flawed. By contrast, the Washington Post did a much better job. CNN was adequate. But the National Public Radio on air report was awful and biased, as correspondent Daniel Estrin gave the official Israel efforts to muddy the story plenty of time, while ignoring Palestinian eyewitnesses who were alongside Abu Akleh when she was killed on May 18.
This morning, you have to search halfway down the Times’s online home page to even find a link to the story. There is no photograph, even though the video of Israeli police clubbing pallbearers was so compelling that even President Biden had to react. Today’s Times print edition does run the story on the front page, but editors did slyly slip in a caption right under the photo: “The Israeli police said they had intervened because the mourners went against an arrangement.” Using the word “intervened” to describe dozens of Israeli riot police clubbing Palestinians is hardly accurate, and the existence of this “arrangement” is disputed.
The beginning of the article itself was a modest improvement over the paper’s earlier reports, probably because the biased U.S. media coverage so far has provoked a firestorm of criticism, which in today’s online world can’t be ignored. The paper did finally report that “Palestinian witnesses” said Abu Akleh “was shot by Israeli soldiers,” after several days of leaving that significant detail out.
The Washington Post did much better. Its home page today includes a stunning video/photo montage, which shows the sickening Israeli police assault in painful detail. The New York Times also runs videos regularly on its site, but apparently not this time. The Post’s actual news article was also less biased. It briefly included the official Israeli excuse for Abu Akleh’s killing in the third paragraph — “Israel has said she was caught in crossfire” — but put further Israeli efforts to confuse the story toward the end of the article, where they belong.
The Post, to its great credit, had already run a valuable report explaining out that Shireen Abu Akleh is not the only journalist who Israel has killed while reporting. (This site’s on-the-spot reporter, Yumna Patel, had already made this point in a compelling interview right after the killing.)
Meanwhile, the National Public Radio on air report yesterday was biased and pathetic. Daniel Estrin who is in Jerusalem, devoted a full minute of his 3:43 segment to advancing the Israeli government’s shifting effort to exonerate its army for the killing. He made no mention at all of the two witnesses who were alongside Abu Akleh when she was shot, even though they are fellow journalists and presumably his colleagues.
By contrast, a CNN on air report didn’t fall into the trap of dwelling on the Israeli government talking points. Its reporter, Atika Shubert, did point out that Israeli authorities had told the Abu Akleh family that they could not display the Palestinian flag. In the only useful part of Estrin’s report, he also revealed that Israeli police at the funeral march had ordered people to “stop chanting nationalist songs.”
This detail was missing in the U.S. mainstream reports. Americans (and others) might be interested to learn that Israel’s occupation of Palestine also includes telling a grieving family, and a grieving people, how they should mourn.
