Misleading articles skew public opinion

Reading the July 22 AP article the Sun Sentinel chose to publish with a headline “6 killed in violence over contested Jerusalem site,” it would lead one to think that there was violence at the Temple Mount that resulted in six people dead.

The article itself goes on to report two completely separate incidents that the writer chose to inaccurately combine. Rather than lumping these two separate incidents together, the facts laid out in the article itself should be left for your readers to conclude. Three Palestinians were killed while engaging in violent protests in the streets of Jerusalem.

In a town many miles away, a family was sitting down for a celebratory Sabbath dinner celebrating the birth of a child. A terrorist (the article simply reads “Palestinian”) infiltrated their community, invaded their home and savagely stabbed and murdered grandparents, children and was pursuing the small children at their dinner table until an off-duty soldier/neighbor stopped the insanity by shooting the terrorist. The terrorist was taken to a hospital alive to be treated.

It is discouraging, disheartening and downright misleading that the Sun Sentinel publishes an article in this fashion: a) distorting what actually occurred by aggregating these two completely different tragic incidents, and b) using a misleading headline, establishing a de facto moral equivalency. This, like many other articles of its type, only reinforces and perpetuates the unfortunate role that media plays in skewing public opinion with regard to reporting on the tragic cycle of violence. Ted Struhl, Boynton Beach