Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat interviewed on CNN over a graphic claiming the attack was against a mosque. Image: Screenshot

CNN’s coverage of this morning’s terrorist atrocity at a Jerusalem synagogue included a live interview with Jerusalem’s agonized mayor, Nir Barkat, who forthrightly told the broadcaster: “Animals don’t behave like this. To get into a synagogue with a butcher’s knife and to slaughter innocent people while they pray?”

As Barkat was speaking, CNN ran a banner headline declaring, “Deadly Attack on Jerusalem Mosque” – whether a producer confused a Jewish house of worship with a Muslim one, or whether this howler went unnoticed for a different reason, remains unclear. As media watchdog Honest Reporting pointed out, CNN’s initial headline – “4 Israelis, 2 Palestinians killed in synagogue attack” – “also failed, leaving readers to wonder whether 2 Palestinians were also victims of the attack, giving moral equivalence to terrorists and their victims.”

Honest Reporting also published a screenshot of a CNN interview with PLO official Hanan Ashrawi which continued the same moral equivalence theme, carrying a on-screen banner that read “4 Israelis, 2 Palestinians Dead in Jerusalem.”

Other media outlets made similar, if slightly less egregious, errors. Canadian broadcaster CBC tweeted that Jerusalem police had “fatally shot 2” after what was described as an “apparent” synagogue attack. BBC coverage also carried the qualifier, “in what police say was a ‘terrorist attack.'” News agency Reuters also reported a “suspected Palestinian attack.”

Watch CNN’s claim of an attack on a “Jerusalem mosque” as Mayor Nir Barkat condemns the synagogue assault: