Thursday, April 02, 2009

The Headline Now-You-See-It-Now-You-Don't of the New York Times

My good friend Josh Hasten alerted me to this story that appeared a few hours ago at the New York Times website at this URL:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/world/middleeast/03mideast.html?ref=world


Ax Attack Kills Teen in West Bank

An attacker wielding an ax killed a teenage Israeli and wounded a child in a settlement in the West Bank, officials said.


To rephrase his comment to me, the headline basically makes an amazing physics assumption, that an ax, all by itself, must have just floated through the air and, with its own intention - for it was an 'attack' - it killed a person. If you were skipping through the paper, the fact that the ax actually was wielded by a person might have been missed.

Moreover, the headline leaves out one of the basics of journalism, the "who". It doesn’t state that it was an “Arab attacker”.

I went and checked the URL and found this there instead (I now have the permalink there):

Israeli Minister Questioned by Police

Avigdor Lieberman, the new foreign minister of Israel, was questioned under caution by the national fraud squad for more than seven hours on Thursday, according to a police spokesman, as part of a long-standing investigation into suspicions of bribery, money laundering and breach of trust.

Also Thursday, a Palestinian wielding a pickax struck and killed an Israeli boy, 13, and wounded another, 7, in a Jewish settlement in the West Bank before fleeing, witnesses and the Israeli authorities said.


On the one hand, the attacker is identified and the ax reverts to being an instrument, not it's own person. But the headline and lead-in is centered on Avigdor Lieberman.

His investigation, within a matter of a few hours, becomes more important than death, terror and grief.


P.S. Other headlines:

Reuters:
Palestinian kills Israeli in West Bank settlement: police

AP:
Palestinian kills Israeli teenager with pickax

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