I recently got a comment from Jerash Festival Director Jeryes Samawi regarding a post written last summer where I gave my impressions about the very first issue of Al-Ghad daily. According to Mr. Samawi, one of the items I highlighted in that first al-Ghad issue, An Israeli musical band infiltrates Jerash Festival, was a completely baseless story. This would be another significant mistake at the paper prior to the ‘Iraqi martyr’s funeral’ story the paper ran some months later. In this case, Mr. Samawi indicated:

I, as the general director of Jerash Festival, want to tell you that there was no Israeli group in the festival. That piece of news was wrong and there was a big talk about it in town then. It turned out that the journalist who wrote it didn’t get the right picture and wanted to have a scoop.

Well, since it was Al-Ghad’s very first issue I will cut them some slack. But there is a somewhat disturbing pattern here in light of the latter story. I just hope that the people in charge of al-Ghad will learn from their mistakes and work to improve an image so tarnished after March’s major blunder.