On February 5th 2009 in  Qabatiya on the West Bank., Israeli soldiers shot Ala a-din Abu Rop, a leading member of Islamic Jihad. The three news agencies Reuters, NTB (Norwegian News Agency) and TT (Swedish News Agency) reported on the event under the following headlines: “Israel kills Islamic Jihad militant in West Bank” (Reuters), “Palestinian activist killed” (NTB) and “Israel shoots Palestinian to death” (TT). These headlines do not neccessarily speak for themselves but they do make it easy to jump to conclusions about how different news agencies skew information to suit the political viewpoint of the agency in question.  We need to ask ourselves when, why and how often this sort of distortion occurs.