It must be a busy news day…

I just took a glance at the New York Times web site. The top stories (in the largest possible type size) are:

“Officer Suggests Iraq Jail Abuse was Encouraged.”

“American Hostage is Found by U.S. Forces in Iraq.”

“Kerry Struggling to Find a Theme, Democrats Fear.”

“Drought Settles in, Lake Shrinks and West’s Worries Grow.”

Off to the right in much smaller print, and sandwiched between a human interest story about “An All American Town with a Sky High Divorce Rate” and a business article about how a “Firm Pulls 100 From Saudi Arabia After 5 Deaths”, is a rather unremarkable looking link to a story about, “5 Israelis killed in Gaza shooting”.

Ho hum…more shooting in a place with lots of shooting…how sad. Now, what did the Dow Jones do today...?

What the Times (and CNN, Reuters, MSNBC, and some of the other on on-line news destinations) failed to mention in their headline/link (thus reinforcing the ennui of the reading public with the situation) is that a couple of Palestinian terrorists calmly walked onto a highway and began spraying passing cars with assault rifles. They targeted a car with a mother (in her eighth month of pregnancy) and her four daughters. Once the car was disabled, the terrorists walked up to it and calmly shot each of the inhabitants multiple times at point blank range. They then proceeded to target other vehicles (wounding several other people) until an army patrol arrived and dispatched them to the waiting arms of their 72 virgins.

Given the extensive journalism talent available to these various news outlets, and the fierce competition for readers, it is amazing to me that they all somehow managed to downplay this story by using the least compelling headline/link possible.

For the record, I’ve never taken a journalism class, and even my creative writing credentials are, um, limited to say the least. But I think that even I could have come up with some way of mentioning the deliberate, cold-blooded murder of almost an entire family, including the very pregnant mother, somewhere in the headline.

The story that few western readers will ever read is that a very pregnant Tali Hatual, 34, and her four daughters, Hila (11), Hadar (9), Roni (7) and Meirav (2) left home shortly after lunch time. They had no reason to think for a moment that by dinner time their grieving husband/father, friends and community would be placing them lovingly into their graves.

Maybe I'm demanding too much…but somehow I feel that the major news outlets could have deemed these modest facts worthy of mention.