A taxi passes by in front of The New York Times head office, Feb. 7, 2013. Photo: Reuters / Carlo Allegri

The New York Times has published yet another correction to the work of the newspaper’s error-prone Jerusalem bureau chief, Patrick Kingsley.

Kingsley’s recent article about a deadly terrorist attack in Jerusalem, Israel, now carries two corrections, covering three facts:

Correction: Nov. 21, 2021

An earlier version of this article misstated what the Palestinian attacker was wearing. He was not disguised as an ultra-Orthodox Jew. It also misstated the number of Israelis killed so far this year in the West Bank. It is one, not at least 12.

Correction: Nov. 22, 2021

An earlier version of this article described incorrectly the Western Wall. It is one of the last remaining parts of an ancient Jewish temple compound, not the last remaining part of an ancient Jewish temple.

The Western Wall-related correction is particularly egregious, because the revolving-door cast of Times reporters in Jerusalem (Kingsley, when named to the job, became the fifth Times journalist to hold the position in six years) have consistently had accuracy problems on that topic.

A 2015 Times article about the Temple Mount generated both an editor’s note and a correction, as did another Times article on the topic later the same year. A 2017 Times article had similar problems but has gone uncorrected.

Even after the two corrections, the Times article is pretty rough at the edges. The first sentence says “A Palestinian teacher shot dead an Israeli tour guide with an automatic gun near the holiest site in Jerusalem on Sunday morning, Israeli officials said.” Who has the automatic gun? The teacher? Or the tour guide? The sentence is no help. The Times has gotten to the point where it’s hard sometimes to tell whether the problems stem from bias or just incompetence, in this case the failure of the journalists and the editors involved to place the modifying phrase “with an automatic gun” directly adjacent to the word it is supposed to modify. It affects the meaning; if the tour guide indeed had an automatic gun, maybe the teacher shot him in self-defense.

Lower down in the article, the Times claims “Political violence is common in the Old City of Jerusalem.” I guess it depends on your definition of “common.” Would the New York Times say that violence is “common” in New York City, where there were 1,868 shooting victims reported in 2020, far more than in Jerusalem’s Old City? Political violence is certainly common in Gaza, where the terrorist group Hamas, which is in control there, has reportedly sentenced eight Gazans to death this month alone for allegedly collaborating with Israel. Yet the Times has not reported on that, as it might mar the newspaper’s idyllic depiction of the Gaza Strip as a place full of literature professors teaching Yehuda Amichai poetry to Palestinian students or poor young husbands suffering to pay off wedding debt that is the fault of an Israeli “blockade.” It’s almost as if the paper is doing its best to hurt the Jerusalem tourism business, or as if error-prone Kingsley personally feels safer in Gaza than he does in the Old City of Jerusalem.

In fairness to the Times, initial facts are often unclear in the chaotic immediate aftermath of a violent crime, and the paper deserves some credit for correcting the article rather than allowing the inaccuracies to stand uncorrected. But the Washington Post managed to cover the same story without having to publish any corrections.

Ira Stoll was managing editor of the Forward and North American editor of the Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.