There are times when you read an article that is so jaw-dropping shocking that you do a double take.
Then you read it again. And again.
Then you start seeing the same story in other mainstream news outlets and sometimes the facts are there and sometimes they are not. Let's look at several, starting with the CNN report that really grabbed my attention.
I am talking about the CNN piece on the defenseless Christian refugees who drowned Tuesday or Wednesday when Muslims threw them overboard into the Mediterranean Sea.
Rome (CNN) Muslims who were among migrants trying to get from Libya to Italy in a boat this week threw 12 fellow passengers overboard -- killing them -- because the 12 were Christians, Italian police said Thursday.
Italian authorities have arrested 15 people on suspicion of murdering the Christians at sea, police in Palermo, Sicily, said.
The original group of 105 people left Libya on Tuesday in a rubber boat. Sometime during the trip north across the Mediterranean Sea, the alleged assailants -- Muslims from the Ivory Coast, Mali and Senegal -- threw the 12 overboard, police said.
Other people on the voyage told police that they themselves were spared "because they strongly opposed the drowning attempt and formed a human chain," Palermo police said.
Well. For once we’re getting a story that sets out the truth about Christians being the victims. Even when the researchers with the Pew Forum say over and over again that Christianity is the most persecuted religion on the planet, especially in regions where it clashes with radicalized forms of Islam, you get a lot of reporting that ignores this fact.
Results are still sketchy about how the murders happened although the guilty ones are in police custody in Palermo.
NPR did a story -- an interview with a Senegal-based reporter -- on what makes people desperate enough to get in these boats, which are infamous for being unsafe. There’s been hundreds of drownings of refugees as a result.
The Guardian’s take on the incident said such an intra-religious fight is unknown -- up until now – is unheard of on the refugee boats. And The Telegraph did a second-day story on the reaction by Italian politicians to the murders:
Unfortunately there are still some media organizations that just can’t bring themselves to admit there’s Muslim-on-Christian violence.
Check out this Reuters story that starts with the headline of "Migrants threw Christians overboard, Italian police say." Just ... migrants?
GENEVA/PALERMO, Italy (Reuters) -- Italian police arrested 15 African men suspected of throwing about a dozen Christians from a migrant boat in the Mediterranean on Thursday, as the crisis off southern Italy intensified.
Forty-one more deaths were reported in a separate incident.
Police in the Sicilian capital Palermo said they had arrested the men, from Ivory Coast, Mali and Senegal, after survivors reported they had thrown 12 people from Nigeria and Ghana to their deaths and threatened other Christians.
The 15 were arrested on charges of multiple homicide motivated by religious hatred.
"The motive for the resentment was traced to their faiths," police said. "Twelve people are said to have drowned in the waters of the Mediterranean, all of them Nigerian and Ghanaian."
Faiths? We get the faith of the victims but not the aggressors?
Get real, Reuters. Sometimes journalists have to include the actual facts in order for readers to understand the story.