Israel sunk the Titanic? New hashtag roils against anti-Israel media bias

CNN is the butt of a social media joke that aims to put into perspective the media bias against Israel.

By HANNAH BROAD
Updated: JUNE 10, 2016 09:36
Social media apps Twitter and Facebook [Illustrative] (photo credit: REUTERS)
Social media apps Twitter and Facebook [Illustrative]
(photo credit: REUTERS)
International media outlets provoked a firestorm of outrage on Thursday when a number of news purveyors including CNN, the BBC and the Guardian revealed media bias in their reports of the Tel Aviv attack at Sarona Market on Wednesday evening.
The attack, that left four people dead and 16 wounded, was perpetrated by two Palestinian men from Southern Hebron.
Most of the media outlets failed to identify the incident as an act of terror and even neglected to use the words "terror" or "terrorism" in their reports and instead labeled the tragedy a "shooting incident."
 
CNN's official report of the incident even placed the word "terrorists" in its headline in quotations.
But now, the fed-up public has decided to strike back with a new twitter campaign called #Stupid_CNN, that aims to make light of the increasingly hostile foreign media.

The social media offensive jabs at the stark anti-Israel tilt that presents in news items about Israel around the world, with titles that poke fun at US presidential candidate Donald Trump as well as Disney's classic Lion King, all at the expense of CNN.

The Israeli tweeter Amir Moyal, who uploaded the first meme of this sort commented on the media bias, "In lieu of the terror attack, we missed another scandal from the foreign press," he said in an interview with The Jerusalem Post.

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"The headlines are written in such a way that in effect, when they attack, we (Israelis) become guilty." Moyal added that even when the media organizations issue apologies after the fact, the damage is already done.
"This is not the first time something of this nature has happened. In the attack on the synagogue in Jerusalem in 2015, at first, the news agencies did not even differentiate between the victims and the terrorists, rather they included the terrorists in their toll of the victims in the attack."
Moyal remarked that his intention with the post was to make readers who trust these institutions aware that their reporting is done through a particular filter, even an anti-Semitic one.
"We can invest millions of dollars in public diplomacy, soften the military rules of force, refrain, be balanced, and with one keyboard stroke of an anti-Semitic news editor at CNN, the BBC, or RT, the terror attack against Israel becomes a title against Israel," nrg reported.
After the receiving waves of criticism, CNN issued an apology for the headline that called into question the legitimacy of the terror attack in Tel Aviv.