The Mainstream Misinformation Merchants

In recent years, “mainstream” media organizations have focused on the dangerous spread of misinformation on social media. The problem has been described as so grave that efforts have been made to censor speech on the internet, even in collusion with the government. But last night’s rush by the world’s leading news organizations to spread terrorist propaganda during wartime, with severe real-world consequences, was an egregious failure of the legacy media that completely obliterates any claim they have to be trustworthy gatekeepers. 

To catch everybody up, on Tuesday night, there was an explosion at the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza. Hamas immediately claimed that it was hit in an Israeli air strike, and conflicting reports out of Gaza suggested that anywhere from dozens to 500 people were killed. 

There were many reasons for any journalist, particularly anybody covering this conflict, to be skeptical about the initial claim. Israel does not target hospitals, and is especially unlikely to do so on the eve of a visit from President Biden. Hamas, a terrorist group that just slaughtered 1,400 Israelis and kidnapped hundreds more, has a long record of lying to advance its propaganda aims — including lying about rockets aimed at Israel that misfire and end up landing within Gaza. Furthermore, the idea that, within an hour of the explosion, in the dark, Hamas was somehow able to identify 500 people dead (when Israel is still counting bodies a week and a half after the Hamas massacre of October 7) should have been another sign that maybe the story was not on the level.

And yet, news organizations just ran with it. 

The New York Times rushed out with a banner headline claiming that “Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians Say” — and then changed it multiple times:

Over 40 minutes after Israel released its statement attributing the attack to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, I still found this headline at the top of the liveblog, squarely blaming Israel:

It wasn’t just the New York Times — the same claims were spread uncritically by Reuters, CNN, the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal, among others:

In the early stages of the story, the appropriate way to handle it was to say, in the headline, that there was a blast at a hospital in Gaza. In the body of the story, it could report on the Hamas claim, while also noting, initially, that Israel was investigating the matter, and quickly reporting on its attribution to Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

While last night it might have been acceptable to report the story as one of both sides blaming each other, this morning news outlets including the New York Times are still treating it as a he said/she said story. This, even though Israel has now released video recordings suggesting that it was a misfire, as well as what it says is an audio intel intercept of Hamas members attributing the event to a misfired rocket. Furthermore, last night, Hamas’s biggest defenders were trying to argue that it couldn’t possibly have been a rocket, because that wouldn’t have caused so much damage. But now that it is daytime, we have footage showing the hospital building intact, and the bulk of the physical damage to parked cars. It does not look like the scene of a bombing that destroyed a hospital and killed 500 people. At this point, the story should be that Israel offered substantial evidence to back up its claim, and Hamas has offered none. 

As Noah noted earlier, the consequences of this are not minor: “Diplomatic facilities belonging to Israel and the United States alike were besieged by sometimes violent demonstrators. Jewish — not Israeli — sites were attacked. Meetings between Joe Biden and his counterparts in Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority were canceled in protest.” At a time when Jews and Jewish institutions throughout the world are under threat, this is beyond reckless. 

It’s easy for professional journalists to pluck out random Twitter and Facebook accounts or spurious news sites to warn about the spread of misinformation on the internet. But the tale that they like to tell themselves is that they are guided by a commitment to the truth and take accountability for their errors. But that is a lie. The media were so eager to produce a story about Jews behaving amorally that they dropped all skepticism in the face of a sensationalistic claim from a terrorist group with a known history of lying. 

Obviously, the spread of misinformation is bad, no matter where it is coming from. But lies are much more consequential when they are coming from the front page of the New York Times than some random social-media account with a name like @Chewbacca3811.