Ben-Dror Yemini: Tears of hypocrisy
Op-ed: We can’t prevent what is happening in Syria or in Somalia, but we can prevent a similar future in Israel. This bloodbath is the outcome of placing hostile populations within ‘one state.’ If it won’t work between Muslims and Muslims, why does anyone think it can work between Jews and Arabs?HonestReporting: The 2016 Dishonest Reporter of the Year: Why Headline Writers Won
The world is hurting over the situation in Aleppo. Emotional articles and posts are being published here and there. Syrian President Bashar Assad and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah are extremely moved. They know that no one will lift a finger to help. Interior Minister Aryeh Deri has asked Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to turn to the United Nations. Oh, come on.
US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power delivered a firm and moving speech in a recent Security Council briefing. "Are you truly incapable of shame?” she asked. “Is there no execution of a child that gets under your skin?" She knows how to speak. There were even tears. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei were unmoved.
The massacre won’t stop without action. And those who are getting all emotional, might I remind you, usually lead the camp that is against action. They lauded and praised US President Barack Obama for not intervening, even when it may have been possible to stop the bloodbath.
These emotions are the result of exposure to information. Because there are much greater tragedies occurring in other places as we speak. On the border between Nigeria, Chad, Niger and Cameroon, there are 1.4 million children who have become refugees, and 75,000 of them are on the verge of starvation. In Somalia, 200,000 have already died because the local jihad organization, al-Shabaab, has halted food deliveries, and 38,000 children under the age of five are in danger of starving. The Nigerians and Somalis’ situation is much worse than the Syrians’ situation. But they don’t have any Internet access, and no one there has heard about social media. So no one is moved.
The Dishonest Reporting Award typically goes to a clear-cut winner. Last year, the BBC won for a steady output of problematic coverage throughout the year. In 2014, the award went to Gaza war correspondents for their problematic handling of Operation Protective Edge. But 2016 didn’t have any comparable singular outrages like, say, journalist Donald Bostrom’s Swedish blood libel of 2009.News Literacy: Why Headlines Matter
Since a wave of Palestinian stabbing, car-ramming and shooting attacks began in 2015, 36 Israelis, two Americans and an Eritrean national have been killed. According to AFP‘s count in mid-December, 238 Palestinians, a Jordanian and a Sudanese migrant were also killed — mostly while carrying out the attacks, in clashes with the IDF in the West Bank or along the Gaza border, or in Israeli airstrikes on Gaza. HonestReporting readers objected to the slow and steady drip of headlines which, at times, mangled facts, lacked context, used loaded language or — in some cases — were poorly revised after being published.
Headlines don’t just skew our sense of the world as we scroll through our social media feeds. They also impact the way we read and remember content. We elaborate on this issue, in Why Headlines Matter.
We took some of the worst headlines of 2016 and broke them down to four categories. The first three are associated with The Eight Categories of Media Bias. The fourth reflects that sometimes, a revised headline can actually be worse.
1. Distorting the truth
2. Lack of context
3. Loaded language
4. Regressive revisions
Here’s what we found from a range of papers in the US, Europe, Canada, Australia, and international wire services.
Headlines certainly deserve scrutiny. It’s well-known that we don’t read most of the articles in our daily papers; we skim the headlines before being drawn to whatever draws our attention. The same habits apply on social media, where we scroll through our Facebook or Twitter feeds and click on whatever catches our fancy.
An April, 2016 academic study of bit.ly links shared on Twitter to BBC, CNN, Fox News, New York Times and Huffington Post articles found that 59 percent of the links were never clicked. And another study of push-through news alerts to mobile phones found that “People click on the alert about half the time.”
So for many casual readers who don’t follow closely follow the Israeli-Arab conflict, all they know about the latest in the Mideast is from the headlines and alerts of articles they don’t read.
This Columbia Journalism Review observation about the mobile alerts would also apply to headlines:
But push notifications are not news stories. They are snippets often written on deadline, akin to headlines that deliver the jist [sic] of a complicated event but little more. Yet there’s growing anecdotal evidence to suggest that readers may view news alerts as standalone stories, taking them at face value without clicking through to read more.