Pun Salad

Here's a letter I sent to my local paper, Foster's Daily Democrat, about the latest instance of their occasional bad habit of letting "activist" opinion into their news articles (links added):

Your recent news article ("In Protest", page B1, Sunday February 26) erred in uncritically echoing the views of the activists holding the "peace vigil" in Dover the previous day, concerning the West Bank city of Hebron. The article held an obvious anti-Israel bias and presented the activists' claims, mistakenly, as fact.

Specifically: The article referred to "a massacre of 40 of [Hebron's] locals at a mosque by Israeli forces" eighteen years ago. A few minutes spent checking reputable sources might have revealed that the massacre was not perpetrated by "Israeli forces", but by one Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish extremist from the nearby settlement of Kiryat Arba. Goldstein was a maniac, acting alone. The body count is usually reported as 29, not 40; this doesn't include Goldstein himself, who was eventually overcome by the mosque's worshipers and beaten to death. Subsequent violence in Hebron claimed both Palestinian and Israeli lives.

It's fine if Foster's reports on the doings of local activist groups. It's not so fine when a news article acts as a mere conduit for a particular group's one-sided opinions and bogus "facts".