Star Tribune · Minneapolis, Minnesota · 26 August 2001
CP-2001-018
Headline downplays dispute over how 3 Palestinians died
If you ran the newspaper
Lou Gelfand
Transcribed from the clipping
The caller, an advocate for Israel, said the second deck of a Monday headline was incomplete and, as a result, inaccurate. It said: “A Palestinian man and his children were among those killed when their home was shelled; the Israeli army denied responsibility.” The headline accurately echoed the opening paragraph of the New York Times News Service article.
But the basis of the complaint emerged from the next three paragraphs: “How they died was in sharp dispute early today. “Palestinian security officials in Rafah said that the Israeli army had aimed two missiles at the house” of Samir Abu Zaid, a member of the Popular Resistance Committee and he was killed, along with his son, 7, and daughter, 3.”
“The Israeli army denied responsibility. It said that Palestinians in Rafah had fired mortar rounds at an Israeli position but missed, hitting the Abu Zaid house instead.” The caller said that since how they died was in dispute, the headline should have begun: “Palestinians say...”
Comment: The headline needed to underscore the dispute over who was responsible for the shelling.
Context added by this archive
A newspaper auditing its own headline about three dead Palestinians, in print, under a standing head that asks the reader to imagine running the paper. What the reader’s representative accepts is that the headline was not doubtful enough.
Nobody in the column raises the main headline over the same story, which was Body count climbs in day of heated Mideast violence. The next item in the column is about a photograph of a two-year-old holding a latex balloon.
Cite this item
"Headline downplays dispute over how 3 Palestinians died," Star Tribune, 26 August 2001. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2001-018. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2001-018
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More from the 2000s
- Palestinians don’t want to give up ‘right of return’The Atlanta Journal-Constitution · 21 January 2001
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- All 138 clippings from the 2000s →
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-2001-018.
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