Daily Mail Distributes a Million Maps Listing Tel Aviv as Israel’s Capital
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by Adam Levick
Cars drive on a highway as a train enters a station in Tel Aviv, Israel, Nov. 25, 2018. Photo: Reuters / Corinna Kern.
The 975,000 thousand or so British news consumers who purchased the Sunday, Sept. 1st print edition of the Daily Mail (The Mail on Sunday) gotta nice freebie: a “giant, glossy” map of the world featuring “essential geographical facts.”
Here’s a promotion of their special offer on Twitter, noting that the map is “just in time for going back to school.”
This weekend we’re giving Mail readers a giant, glossy map of the world absolutely FREE! Don’t miss out on your chance to get this fantastic poster, just in time for going back to school, FREE inside tomorrow’s The Mail on Sunday. pic.twitter.com/qWhKN6i0dF
— MyMail (@MyMail_) August 31, 2019
However, they got one “essential geographical fact” wrong, as you can see here in this close-up of the Middle East section of the map:
Elsewhere on the map, it makes clear that the square icons (which you see next to Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, and Amman) represent the capitals. So, the maps from the Daily Mail delivered “just in time for school” contain a blatant factual inaccuracy about Israel.
Despite the fact that we’ve posted countless times on this issue, and contacted editors to remind them that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital, usually resulting in corrections, this mistake continues to crop up periodically. Though we contacted Daily Mail editors to ask for a prominent editor’s note acknowledging the error, in light of the fact that the claim was made in an actual paper map that nearly one million Britons received (and not merely online), the damage can’t really be undone.
Adam Levick covers the British media for CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.
