Russia Today headline on Tel Aviv attack
Russia Today headline on Tel Aviv attackScreenshot

Some international media outlets on Wednesday continued to distort their coverage of the shooting attack in Tel Aviv in which four Israelis were killed.

The Russia Today news website was quick to publish a misleading headline on Wednesday that the terrorists who carried out the attack were “ultra-Orthodox Jews”.

The Russian site headlined its report on the attack, in which three people were killed, with “2 ‘ultra-Orthodox Jewish’ gunmen kill 3 in central Tel Aviv – reports”.

While the content of the report clarified that the two terrorists responsible for the attack were dressed like haredi Jews, the headline itself remained misleading until it was later replaced with “2 Palestinians dressed as Orthodox Jews kill 4 in Tel Aviv.”

CNN, similarly, angered internet users when it published an update on its Facebook page in which it wrote that two terrorists were captured but putting the word “terrorists” in quotation marks.

In this case, too, the update was edited and corrected.

The incident is the latest example of an ongoing trend whereby global media outlets distort reports on terrorist attacks in Israel.

Last month, the Reuters news agency chose to significantly distort the facts in a report on a car ramming terror attack in Samaria, using the headline “Israeli troops kill Palestinian driver who rammed soldiers in West Bank – army”.

With the almost daily attacks against Israelis over the past few months, readers have been able to see continual trends of media outlets refusing to portray Palestinians as anything other than the victims of Israeli violence.

After government bodies issued reprimands to several organizations, the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee invited members of the Foreign Press Agency (FPA) to explain themselves.

The FPA responded with a letter acknowledging that "in a few isolated incidents of reports about events only a few minutes after they took place, inaccurate reports were made. These reports were corrected as quickly as possible after various officials, including spokespeople for the State of Israel, brought them to the editors' attention."

Despite the pledge, many of these same inaccuracies continue to show up, and are often not corrected even numerous hours after all facts are available.