The Commercial Appeal · Memphis, Tennessee · 15 November 1988
CP-1988-050
A child’s death
Richard B. Meek, Memphis
Transcribed from the clipping
“To The Commercial Appeal: It is sad to note that when a Palestinian child is killed by Israeli forces, it may be mentioned somewhere far down in the text of the story. However, when an Israeli child is killed your editors consider it worthy of a headline. There are only two conclusions that can be drawn from this fact.
Either The Commercial Appeal feels that a Palestinian child’s life is less important than an Israeli child’s or that so many Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli forces that it is no longer newsworthy. I suspect there is truth in both of them. RICHARD B. MEEK, Memphis”
Context added by this archive
A reader in Memphis in 1988 stating, in nine lines, the thing this archive counts: that the death of a Palestinian child goes into the text and the death of an Israeli child goes into the headline. He offers two explanations and declines to choose between them. It is the earliest clipping here in which a reader names the pattern rather than an individual story.
Cite this item
"A child’s death," The Commercial Appeal, 15 November 1988. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1988-050. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1988-050
More from the 1980s
- Gaza Strip: the forgotten stepchildNorthwest Herald · 4 January 1988
- 'Iron Fist' Enslaves Gazans In Their LandThe Herald Sun · 6 January 1988
- Israel condemns U.N. vote on deportationsThe Birmingham News · 6 January 1988
- Israeli soldiers fire on protestersCarroll County Times · 6 January 1988
- Undaunted Palestinians resume violenceThe News & Observer · 6 January 1988
- Israelis choke off Palestinian campToronto Star · 12 January 1988
- All 147 clippings from the 1980s →
This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American and Anglophone newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1799 to 2023. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.
The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the news agency that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary. The city is derived from the masthead, not read off the clipping.
Something wrong here, or something you know about this clipping? The archive is still being built and corrections are wanted: maria@rozumstudio.com, quoting CP-1988-050.
See it in the archive reel · Full text of every clipping · Dataset