19-Nov-14: All in a day's work at CNN

The tragedy of this morning's savagery inside a Jerusalem synagogue is still too fresh to allow for the necessary perspective and cool analysis. Still, it has to be said that in relation to reporting the events, the reporters and editors at CNN did an exceptionally inept job, and maybe worse.

At some point during the day, an apology was issued by CNN which the Jerusalem Post duly reported and quoted:

As CNN updated its reporting on the terrorist attack on the synagogue in Jerusalem earlier today, our coverage did not immediately reflect the fact that the two Palestinians killed were the attackers.  We erred and regret the mistake.

Regretting its "mistake" certainly seems like a reaction that makes sense. But the journalist Tom Gross, who sent out an email to his subscribers this evening, suggests the producers at CNN

might want to ask themselves why almost every mistake they make about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is to Israel’s detriment. As Bret Stephens once wrote about the New York Times: When one carefully examines the New York Times’s corrections column, one can see that in all cases the mistakes were made against Israel. “In a more normal world,” wrote Stephens, “a newspaper’s mistakes, particularly in its political and diplomatic reporting, would more-or-less be randomly distributed... Yet while a search of NYT corrections over the past two years discloses the usual measure of forgivable bloopers, not once has the paper erred on the side of Israel. A pattern of bias, maybe?”