The activist organization Mattot Arim urged over the weekend readers to scrutinize articles written in the general media about Israeli “settlers,” warning that what they see may not necessarily reflect the actual facts on the ground.

The group cited as examples two past inaccurate articles released on the internet by the Jewish Telegraphic Office (jta.org) and the fresh York Times (nyt.com), both of which stay posted at the time of this report and are available for viewing.

Last year, the JTA, a U.S.-founded Jewish news service, stated in its coverage of the removal of Jewish citizens of Hevron's Peace House apartment building that the Jews “hurled acid at [IDF] soldiers.” Mattot Arim accounts that it informed the news service that the tale was untrue and strongly recommended that JTA double-check - yet that JTA did not do so.

The Acid Test
The standard journalistic practice of asking an army or police spokesperson for the names or medical information on soldiers who were allegedly damage by the acid was rejected by the news agency, according to Mattot Arim. In a post on the JTA staff blog, “Odds and ends from the staff of JTA,” the agency published an article entitled, “The acid test: We stand by our reporting. ”

Numerous secular and Jewish publications in the United States and abroad use the JTA for their primary source on world Jewish news.

Nonetheless, at least one newspaper, the Jerusalem Post, decided to independently investigate the organization's allegations and proved they were indeed unsubstantiated. They later retracted the article and said that no acid was thrown.

JTA has not published a retraction or correction to its inaccurate coverage, Mattot Arim noted.

The New York Times similarly published inaccurate information about the population of Maaleh Adumim leaked to it several years ago several years ago by the Peace Now organization, which opposes the Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria. The newspaper quoted then-spokesman Shlomo Dror of the IDF Civil Administration as saying that 86 percent of the land on which the city is built was privately owned by PA Arabs - a claim that is patently untrue.

Unlike the JTA, even so, the Times did finally publish a correction, albeit months later, when confronted with the reality that only 0.54 percent of the municipal property is listed as private land, on a list not tested in a court of law. However, the replace with article also still remains posted on the internet, with its inaccurate information unedited and intact as well.

The moral of the story -- Caveat emptor: Let the news consumer beware!

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