Well stone the dog...

Do you remember the BBC's story about the Jerusalem court ordered stoning of a dog? I blogged about it at the time and the BBC's apology was mealy-mouthed at best. So I was interested to read Stinky Journalism's piece on the affair, a great read and most illuminating about the way the BBC seem to actively look for anti-Israel stories.

'...it's obvious the BBC didn't approach this dog stoning story with skepticism. As the Christian Science Monitor summarized

"This story has it all. Religious zealots! Animal rights activists! Blood libel! Children! ... Best of all, it runs under 200 words and stars a dog."

The Baltimore Sun also published a blog post by Rabbi Yaakov Menken on the dog stoning story. Rabbi Menken founded and directs Jewish cyber-outreach organization Project Genesis.

In his blog post, Rabbi Menken criticized the media for failing to ask if this dog stoning story was even plausible. He noted that the media could have - but didn't - "fact check with an Orthodox Rabbi."

Rabbi Menken commented that "only a fool would call [the dog stoning story errors] an innocent mistake." He went on to state that "the underlying problem is not the simple publication of an obviously false story. It is that the reporters were so ignorant in matters religious, especially with regards to Orthodox Judaism, that they found the story even remotely believable."'