GPO slams CNN for description of Itamar 'terror attack'

"If this is not a terror attack, what is?" gov't press liaison asks network in letter demanding apology.

By HERB KEINON
Fogel family funeral crowd 311 (photo credit: Channel 10)
Fogel family funeral crowd 311
(photo credit: Channel 10)
The director of Israel's Government Press Office sent a letter to CNN's Jerusalem Bureau Chief Sunday demanding an apology for a story on CNN's website that put "terror attack" in quotations in the headline of its story on Friday night's atrocity in Itamar.
Responding to the story headlined "Israeli Family of 5 Killed in 'Terror Attack,' Military Says," Oren Helman wrote Kevin Flower that he was "dumbfounded and astonished" to read that the slaughter of the Fogel family is "what the Israeli army calls a 'terrorist attack'."
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"Your remarks sound as if we are talking about an IDF 'claim' that this was 'a terrorist attack' and that this is not necessarily the case," he wrote. "If this is not a terrorist attack, then what is?"
Helman, saying that "there is a limit to the extent of objectivity regarding such a horrific deed," wrote that an apology from CNN was in order.
CNN International, in response, said that it does not respond in public to private correspondence. The news organization did issue a statement saying, however, that it was "standard journalistic practice for news organizations to put quotation marks around remarks attributed to third parties."