Britain's Guardian news site sparked on Israeli social media on Thursday with the biased headline and sub-head it used on a story about the lethal terrorist shooting near the Givat Asaf outpost, which killed two IDF soldiers and wounded two civilians, one of whom was still in critical condition on Friday morning.
The headline about the shooting read, "Two Israelis and two Palestinians killed in West Bank violence," wording that fails to mention that the Israelis were intentionally targeted by Palestinian gunmen.
The subhead took the bias a step further: "Man shoots two Israelis dead at bus stop hours after Israeli forces kill two Palestinians," neglecting to mention that in both cases the Palestinians were guilty of terrorist acts.
Foreign media outlets frequently downplay terrorist violence in Israel to comply with their editorial lines, which are often blatantly pro-Palestinian. This summer, Foreign Ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon took the BBC and CNN to task for stating without context that IDF Staff Sgt. Aviv Levi had been "shot" rather than the victim of a deliberate terrorist attack.
Israel is no longer ignoring biased news coverage. The Foreign Ministry reached out to the BBC in August, asking that it change a headline about airstrike casualties to reflect the fact that the strikes were a response to hundreds of rocket attacks by Palestinians in Gaza against Israeli communities.
Nahshon thanked the BBC for changing its "misleading" headline to "report the facts."
