AKEED, Anwar Ziadat

On 16 April, two local news sites reported on a story, using the same headline "Teacher Suspects Conduct of Three Female Students in High School, Makes Shocking Discovery," without referring to the place and date of the incident, thus suggesting to readers that it had occurred in Jordan. However, it turned out that the story was old and that it took place in Yemen.

The story was published on several Yemeni websites during December 2016 under the headline "Happens in Yemen…Teacher Suspects Conduct of Three Students in High School…What Does She Discover Upon Observing Them?" The story says that a teacher at a high school notices that three students alternate in missing classes repeatedly throughout the semester. She eventually discovers that they came from very poor families and that their parents could not buy school uniform for them, so they started taking turns to attend school.

The published material on the Jordanian website included an illustrative picture, which is also confusing and does not provide any information about the place of the incident. The story was taken from Yemeni websites, but the words "happens in Yemen" were deleted from the headline. This is a deliberate attempt to mislead readers and aims at reaching a larger number of readers, especially since the same websites use such vague headlines on their social media pages to make readers curious so as to go to the websites.

Upon reading the material, we see that the name of the teacher is unknown, the school has no address, the place is not specified, and time is vague. The absence of the main elements of the story puzzles readers. Does it convey a real story or a fictitious story that arouses emotions and attracts the public, without having any truth whatsoever?

Besides the fact that the headline does not reflect the content of the story, the body of the story does not contain any sources and is not written in a journalistic style. Moreover, it does not observe any element of news material; it is reported in the form of a story adopted by the writer of the original material in Yemen.

The interesting thing about this material is that it crossed borders. It reached Lebanon and was published on the website of addiyar newspaper and saidaonline under the same vague headline and poor wording and also without referring to the time and place of the incident, thus suggesting that it was a Lebanese story.

It turned out that most of the websites that ran the story did "copy and paste" in the three countries (Yemen, Jordan, and Lebanon). What proves this is the same spelling mistake of an Arabic word, which is found in all published texts. Additionally, the body of the item was not edited and the same poor wording was left unchanged, with the same mistakes.

The Jordanian and Lebanese websites that published the old material and promoted it as a new incident violated professional standards by using a misleading headline. Thus, they violated the standard of clarity, which states that media content must be specific and clear in mentioning incidents, persons, and names and must contain all key elements, including time.

Besides, the story failed to meet one of the important conditions related to clarity and credibility. The Yemeni websites that started the headline with the words "happens in Yemen" did not specify in which governorate and school the incident took place. As for Jordanian sites, they made no reference at all to the place.