Reuters downplays Jewish connection to Temple Mount, highlights Muslim narrative

The influential news agency first covered the Jerusalem crisis using balanced wording regarding the name of the site, called Al-Aqsa by Muslims. But after 9 days it started giving prominence to the Muslim name and playing down the holiness to Jews. Reuters did not comment

Reuters is one of the two biggest international news agencies in the world, with almost every major news outlet in the world subscribed to it and regularly publishing its content. The agency champions objectivity and balanced language, but has apparently abandoned this important principle during the past week in covering the latest crisis in Jerusalem's Old City. Instead, it provided its thousands of clients and many readers around the world with stories that favored the Palestinian and Muslim narrative regarding the name and nature of the holy site at the center of the dispute.
 
An examination conducted by nrg has found that for the first eight days, Reuters used balanced wording when mentioning  the Temple Mount complex, the holiest site in Judaism, which is also the third-holiest site for Muslims and revered by them as the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, or the Noble Sanctuary. Of the first ten articles published after the initial July 14 attack in which three Israeli Arabs opened fire at the site and killed two policemen – nine used balanced language.

But this changed on Sunday, July 23, when the agency began noticeably favoring the Muslim name and playing down the Jewish name and significance, sometimes not mentioning it at all. Out of the 23 stories published by the agency since that day until this article was published, 19 followed this pattern, giving prominence to the Muslim name.

Reuters has not responded to nrg's repeated requests for comment.
 
During the first nine days of the crisis which centered on Palestinian anger over heightened security measures at the entrance to the site, Reuters used neutral wordings in the headlines and lead paragraphs of almost all stories. Similarly to the other major international news agencies, AP and AFP, the words "holy site" or "Jerusalem's holiest site" were used. In the first mention of the site's name in each article, the wording used was "Temple Mount-Noble Sanctuary", and its holiness to both Jews and Muslims was detailed.
 
However, a sharp change in story editing occurred roughly on July 23. Since then, most stories have had the words "Al-Aqsa" or "mosque" in the headline as well as the first paragraph. "Al-Aqsa" became the default name used to refer to the site throughout the articles, and it was used repeatedly in many paragraphs of the same story. By contrast, the term "Temple Mount" and the fact that it is the holiest site for Jews were mentioned in most stories only once, typically not in the first few paragraphs, and in some cases they were not mentioned at all.

In all stories on the attack at the Israeli Embassy in Jordan that included a reference to the Jerusalem unrest, the site was only called "Al-Aqsa", and only its significance to Muslims was mentioned. The same occurred in articles about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's comments against Israel over the crisis.
 

Despite some exceptions, the change in editing was significant and clear, indicating that possibly Reuters has made a deliberate change in its policy on the matter. As a result, instead of receiving the full picture, depicting unrest over a site that is holy to both Jews and Muslims - most international readers have been getting an unbalanced story featuring a Muslim holy site named Al Aqsa, with only a minor and often inconspicuous mention of its holiness to Jews and of its Jewish name. Most readers, who typically do not read past the headline and first several paragraphs, probably did not even read those mentions.

This may have caused audiences around the world, who believed they were reading a balanced story by an objective and prestigious news agency, to adopt a skewed view of the nature of the site, and therefore of the latest Jerusalem crisis.
 

This is not the first time Reuters has been accused of bias against Israel. In 2006, during the Second Lebanon War, the agency distributed a doctored photo by Lebanese photographer Adnan Hajj. The photo, showing Beirut under Israeli fire, was edited to have more smoke and more damage than in the original. Following the outrage, Reuters cut its ties with the photographer and deleted his photos.

Four years later the agency cropped photos taken aboard the Mavi Marmara ship, which was raided by Israeli commando forces while trying to break the Gaza blockade. The original photos showed knives held by activists on the ship and the blood of a wounded IDF combatant, which were cropped out by Reuters. Following criticism, the agency replaced the partial photos with the originals.

Read this article in Hebrew

היכנסו לעמוד הפייסבוק החדש של nrg