Israel Is Forever: Special feature to the Calling Out Community, Posted January 25, 2016.

For a shocking second time in the last three months, yet another American news media organization, that definitely should have known better, has literally wiped Israel off of the map.

Founding logo

This time the guilty part was National Public Radio (NPR), the 45-year old “privately- and publicly-funded non-profit membership media organization that serves as a national syndicator to a network of 900 public radio stations in the United States”, according to its related Wikipedia article.

Media watchdog HonestReporting.com first reported the story earlier today (January 25) and immediately contacted NPR, after the following map of the Middle East was published on the NPR site:

HonestReporting noted that “Israel” is missing from the map, instead replaced geographically by something called “Palestine” – even though no state by that name has legally existed since 1948 – 67 years ago.

Our readers may recall that the self-named “Global News Leader” CNN committed the same ludicrous faux pas last year, replacing “Israel” on its map with the bizarre “Palestina” – the Spanish-language translation of “Palestine”, made equally more bizarre by the fact that the rest of the map was in English.  Based on the English context, this Palestina was as imaginary as Narnia or Middle Earth – no nation has never existed by that name in human history.

When CNN was approached by HonestReporting regarding that story, it made no efforts to apologize for the error, merely pulling the map and replacing it with a more appropriate graphic for its story about the Syrian Civil War – an event that Israel had not yet played any part in anyway.

The complete lack of journalistic integrity at CNN was starkly displayed –  they never spoke to the obvious outrage of thousands of their readers at the visual erasure of Israel, nor did we ever find out who intentionally deleted Israel from the Middle East or why.  Their site itself states that up to 9 pairs of eyes reviews everything before it goes up – that being the case, one has to suppose that CNN did this on purpose.

In this current incident with NPR, however, the broadcaster has taken responsibility in an Editor’s Note, at the beginning of the article:

Editor’s note: The original version of this post contained a map illustration intended to represent the countries of the Middle East and North Africa, which poll respondents identified as the region presenting the greatest risk to travelers and expatriates in 2016. The map had a number of errors. The countries of Cyprus, Israel and Turkey were either not shown or not labeled; the label for “Palestine” should have read “Palestinian Territories”; and Afghanistan and Pakistan were mistakenly included. NPR apologizes for these errors.

We are satisfied with the NPR response, and thank them for being so quick to remove the offensive map.  While we could question why some in the news media don’t seem to know Israel exists today, for now we can assume that the unending media war against the State of Israel has no correlation with this story.