Look who else Raleigh's N &O blamed

On August 29 Raleigh's News & Observer ran this front page headline:

Off-duty officer blamed in death

The trouble with the headline was that no one except The N&O was blaming the officer.

To its credit, the next day the paper placed a correction in the same front page spot where the "officer blamed" headline ran. The N&O offered no explanation for its headline.

The August 29 headline brings to mind another recent N&O headline that assigned blame.

Airstrikes kill Mideast truce (July 16, Pg. 16A)

The headline ran above an AP story that began:

A Mideast truce was in tatters as Israel killed six Hamas militants in a series of airstrikes Friday and early today after Palestinian fighters unleashed a deadly barrage of rockets and mortars.

Further into the story, the AP reported the Israeli response followed not just the barrage but 2 terrorist attacks in the preceding 3 days which killed 6 Israelis and wounded 90 others.

The AP reported the attacks many paragraphs into its story; and that part of its report doesn't appear in the story The N&O ran. So perhaps N&O editors didn't read far enough into the AP story to learn about the terrorist attacks.

Nevertheless, the AP's first sentence makes clear that Israel was responding to Palestinian attacks.

Using news.google and yahoo searches, I couldn't find even one other American newspaper that ran a headline blaming the Israelis for killing the truce.

The Boston Globe's headline was typical of headlines in other papers reporting the story.

Mideast violence threatens truce; 8 dead

So how did The N&O decide on the headline:

Airstrikes kill Mideast truce

And why?

Readers are owed explanations.

I'm sending a link to The N&O's executive editor for news, Melanie Sill. I'll invite her to respond to this post and agree to publish her response in full.

Editor Sill often says she welcomes readers' comments. Her email: msill@newsobserver.com