MEDIA ON ROCKETS

Cheaper by the Dozen (Contentions)

Dan Murphy, a Christian Science Monitor reporter, files a piece from Gaza City improbably titled “Fertilizer, frustration fuel Gaza’s rockets.” One can’t come down too harshly on Murphy himself for the brazen stupidity of the title of his piece, as it was likely written by his (brazenly stupid) editor. But one can have a laugh at something Murphy writes in the piece itself, about the rocket fire from Gaza:

it has killed few Israelis but has traumatized communities near the border, particularly the town of Sderot, which has been hit dozens of times in recent years.

Actually, as anyone who even occasionally stumbles upon the news from Israel knows, Sderot has been hit thousands of times in recent years (by the New York Times‘ conservative estimate, 2,000 hits in the past four years; most tallies I’ve seen are much higher). It is impossible to believe that Murphy, who covers Gaza for the CSM, doesn’t know this. Sderot is sometimes the recipient of dozens of rockets on a single day–like today, for example. As I write this, at around 9:30 AM in Israel, Sderot and its environs have already been hit by close to 30 rockets.