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Of Headlines and Whipping Boys: Some Recent SF Chronicle Explorations

The headline is probably the most important part of a newspaper article. Often, in fact, it is the only part of a news item that readers actually read. It would be reasonable to assume, therefore, that any major metropolitan newspaper would be able to publish headlines that accurately and impartially reflect the main point of an article or, at the very least, do not contradict the information contained in the accompanying text. Editors at the San Francisco Chronicle, however, have either had some trouble recently keeping this basic journalistic principle in mind or else they have decided to demonstrate that readers who assume too much will only make an ass, to paraphrase the old saying, of themselves.

The Chronicle has had some problems over the years with its coverage of the Middle East, most notably in the editorial department. History doesn't seem to matter to the editors. Thus, readers were constantly subjected to arguments built around "facts" with no basis in reality, such as "Arab aggression" as the cause of the 1967 war, a recurrent theme in both letters and opinion pieces. Although the Chronicle seems to have cut out some of the worst ahistorical submissions, they have taken up the slack elsewhere and begun publishing absolutely preposterous items on the future "Syrian" threat that look like they could have come straight from the Israeli government.

But some of the most spectacular recent failures have been connected with front-page Chronicle headlines. Specifically, these examples have involved treating the Palestinians as the whipping boys for the problems of the region, and even beyond when possible. In one case, Palestinian actions were grossly misrepresented; in another, Chronicle editors simply invented a Palestinian connection which did not even exist.

Case No. 1: On 15 November 2002, Palestinian guerillas attacked a group of Israeli soldiers and armed settlers in the occupied city of Hebron, killing 12 of them. How did the Chronicle decide to cover this? The following day's edition included a front-page, 40-point headline for this incident that read "Attack in Hebron traps worshipers". In reality, however, not a single "worshiper" was killed in the attack. Some settlers who had been praying before the attack at the nearby Cave of the Patriarchs were eating their dinner at the time.

Why did the Chronicle publish this clearly inaccurate headline? We obtained a letter that a concerned reader wrote to the newspaper on 17 November to seek an explanation for this travesty and ask for a correction. In the letter, he noted that according to the information in the article 1) hospital staff could not provide a breakdown of the victims, and 2) some Israeli army soldiers were known to have been killed. He further inquired as to the rationale for the use of the term "worshiper" in the headline, when it was clear at press time that not all the victims were "worshipers".

The Chronicle put its "Readers' Representative", a person going by the name Dick Rogers, in charge of responding. In a letter dated 19 November 2002, Rogers wrote:

"The paper said this in a Page 1 story on the following day: [Direct extended quote directly from article - "Israeli authorities initially had said... no worshipers were injured."]

Saturday's headline reflected, among other things, this paragraph from the first story: "The militant group Islamic Jihad reportedly claimed responsibility for the ambush, whose victims included settlers and the soldiers protecting them, army and media reports said. Hospital officials were unable to immediately provide a breakdown of the victims. There was no indication whether all the gunmen escaped."

What? Did Rogers think that the writer of the letter to editor needed to have everything said to him twice before he could understand it? What kind of response was this intended to be? Rogers did not even try to answer the questions the letter raised, in particular the use of the term "worshipers", which was clearly inaccurate based on information readily at hand when that headline was written. In fact, he hardly wrote anything at all in his response - his original writing totaled a mere two sentences, with the remainder taken up by long quotes.

The concerned reader tried again. In a letter dated 20 November 2002, he wrote:

Dear Mr. Rogers,

Thank you for responding to my letter concerning your coverage of the recent Hebron attack.

Your response, unfortunately, does not address a single issue I raised in my original correspondance. First, there is the issue of the veracity of the headline's claim. Even at your press time, it was clear that at least some soldiers had been killed in the attack, in addition to victims identified as "worshipers". As I pointed out in my original letter, there had been no positive identification of the deceased at that time. Let me quote your own article to this effect: "Hospital officials were unable to immediately provide a breakdown of the victims." It is obvious from these two considerations alone that your headline should not have made a factual claim as to the identity of the victims, since they were not known. Your headline, however, did make this claim. As it turned out, it was false, since not a single "worshiper" was killed.

Second, and more importantly, there is the issue of the headline's language, something which you did not address at all. Let me add a few points. Why, when there was not a "breakdown of the victims" available, did the editors choose to use the term "worshipers"? Why not, for instance, the term "settlers", which would still have been incorrect, but at least more neutral? Or better yet, why not "Israelis"? This term, based on information that was available at press time, was the only positive identification that could have been assigned to the victims as a group. Yet the headline writer chose the religiously loaded term "worshipers" instead. As I stated in my first letter, this implies that the victims were targeted solely or primarily due to their religious orientation. Since there are more issues involved in the Palestine-Israel conflict than religion, the inclusion of the term "worshiper" amounts to unfounded speculation as to the attackers' motives.

In fact, the term "worshipers" in the context of this attack makes no sense whatsoever. According to the article's lead, "Palestinian gunmen ambushed Jewish settlers walking from Sabbath prayers under army guard..." [emphasis added - Manumission]. It is clear that the settlers had already finished worshipping, based on the information readily available in the article. The only way the term "worshiper" could have been used accurately is if the gunmen had attacked the victims while they were in the act of worshipping, something which was known even at press time not to have been the case.

Your citation of subsequent articles that contained accurate information on the attack, comprising the bulk of your reponse, is irrelevant to the points my original letter raised. It is good that your newspaper published accurate articles; that is what newspapers, in my opinion, should do. These accurate articles, however, do not excuse the false and misleading headline on page 1 of the 16 November 2002 edition of the Chronicle, nor the lapses in editorial, journalistic, and logical judgement that produced it... But this also goes beyond a false and misleading headline. It also concerns the Chronicle's apparent willingness to accept and report the unverified statements of one party, in this case the Israeli foreign ministry, hardly an independent or impartial body to the conflict, as gospel truth. This is lazy, unprofessional journalism.

Your policy statement regarding corrections on page 2 states that the Chronicle "strives to cover the news accurately, fairly, and honestly". I have shown in this case that the Chronicle failed the first two of those standards. Unless a correction is forthcoming, the Chronicle will also fail the third.

Rogers never responded. Nor did the Chronicle ever issue a correction or clarification of this faulty headline. In the Chronicle's version of history, there will always be an incident in which some Palestinians "trapped" innocent, peace-loving "worshipers", although such a thing never happened.

One final point: the Chronicle used very similar language, including the term "worshiper", to describe the 1994 Hebron massacre carried out by American-Israeli settler fanatic Baruch Goldstein. In this case, the language was entirely appropriate: Goldstein entered a Hebron mosque and murdered 29 Muslims who were in the act of worshipping. Could it be that the Chronicle was equating an attack against soldiers of an occupying army with the cold-blooded murder of 29 worshipers?

Case No. 2: On 28 November 2002, unknown assailants bombed a Kenyan hotel, killing 15 people, including three suicide bombers. A nearly simultaneous missile attack almost brought down an Israeli-chartered airplane leaving Kenya. How did the Chronicle choose to cover this tragic incident? The newspaper's main, 45-point headline read "Terror in Kenya". There was a box, located inside the text of the main article on the front page, with a caption reading "Eyes on al Qaeda: The place, style and timing of the attacks call to mind the terror network, analysts say" leading readers to a second story. So far, so good. But there was a second headline, known as a "kicker" in the journalism business, underneath the main headline on the front page of the print edition. This headline stated "Palestinian group claims responsibility for 15 deaths" [emphases added - Manumission].

Let's review again what was on page 1 of this edition of the Chronicle. One the one hand, they had a second, "analysis" article quoting experts speculating that Al Qaeda was behind the attacks; on the other, they made a clear statement that a "Palestinian" group claimed credit for the attack. What was going on here? Did the headline writers for the main article bother to read this second item analyzing how the attack was carried out according to Al Qaeda's modus operandi?Was the Chronicle suggesting that Al Qaeda is a Palestinian group? Where did they even get the notion that "Palestinians" were involved?

A reader would have to go the 15th paragraph, past an account of an unrelated attack on Likud voters in northern Israel which was tucked into the article, to find any mention of anything related to "Palestinians". There, it is revealed that a "previously unknown" group calling itself, according to the article, "Government of Universal Palestine in Exile, The Army of Palestine", claimed the attack. In the very next paragraph, however, the writer notes that "[d]espite the claim of responsibility, suspicion fell on Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terror network". Taken together with an entire article fingering Al Qaeda, there should have been no reason at all for the Chronicle to attribute the attack to "Palestinians". Why did the Chronicle blame "Palestinians" in its front-page headline, when all the information printed in the same issue pointed to Al Qaeda?

The same letter writer wrote back to Dick Rogers asking for an explanation in a letter dated 1 December 2002:

Dear Mr. Rogers,

It is now clear why you never responded to my most recent letter dated 20 November 2002 concerning the Chronicle's refusal to issue a correction for a false and misleading headline ("Attack in Hebron traps worshipers", 16 November 2002). Rather than considering that type of headline as a mistake to be avoided, the Chronicle instead apparently viewed it as a model to emulated...

Mr. Rogers, what exactly made the group who carried out the attack "Palestinian"? There is nothing at all in the article that would justify this headline. Apparently, your headline writer seized upon the claim by an unknown group, the "Government of Universal Palestine in Exile, Army of Palestine". If this is the case, then a number of questions relating to the Chronicle's journalistic standards arise... Would the Chronicle consider an attack on its offices by a group of white, suburban youths calling itself the "Palestinian Republican Army-San Mateo Branch" an action by a "Palestinian" group?... Did it simply seem to your headline writer that this attack could be safely subsumed under the rubric of "Palestinian terrorism"? Or perhaps it was the assumption that if there was a terrorist act, then Palestinians must have been involved?

...Compare the headline's claim that the attack was carried out by "Palestinians" with the contents of the box inside the body of the article on page 1, "Eyes on al Qaeda: The place, style and timing of the attacks call to mind the terror network, analysts say". Is the Chronicle suggesting that Al Qaeda is a Palestinian group, despite the fact that its leader is a Saudi (i.e., not Palestinian) by birth and that not a single Palestinian is even known to be a member of this group?

Rogers, again, never responded. And again, the Chronicle refused to run a correction admitting that it had made a blunder. Perhaps it is worth noting that this second headline does not appear in the internet archive of the Chronicle. But, in a society where over 50 per cent of adults think that Saddam Hussein was behind the 11 September attacks, despite not a single scrap of supporting evidence, the damage has been done.

An open society depends upon the quantity and quality of information available. It is difficult to determine whether the Chronicle is deliberately publishing headlines it knows are faulty or whether they just don't care enough when an article involves Palestinians even in the most tangential fashion. Either way, their Pravda-style journalism does not advance the idea of the open society. This should be of concern to any concerned citizen, regardless of his or her views on the Israel-Palestine issue.