The anniversary of 10/7 offered a useful test case: Could journalists focus on Israeli suffering for one day? The answer, sadly, is ‘no.’
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we recap the media coverage of the anniversary of the October 7 Hamas terror attacks and we cover more media misses.
Media Spend October 7 Anniversary Focused on Palestinians
The anniversary of the 10/7 Hamas massacre offered a useful test case: Could prominent Western media outlets set aside a single day to highlight the suffering of Israelis without qualification? Surely, the anniversary of the single deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust offered an opportunity for journalists to set aside broader questions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and simply treat the day with the gravity it deserves.
Sadly, that proved too much to ask.
Instead of prioritizing the suffering of the Israelis who were killed and raped that day, 10/7 was treated as an arbitrary date on which the Jewish state decided — for some indecipherable reason — to unleash indiscriminate violence in Gaza.
Sky News marked the anniversary with a lengthy thread on X that barely referenced Hamas and instead focused on the suffering wrought by Israel’s war of self-defense, never mind why that war was necessary and who started it.
Vanity Fair published a story on “The Sorrow of Gaza, One Year After the October 7 Attacks” that bizarrely inverted the “never again” promise made by Jews and their allies in the wake of the Holocaust, coopting those hallowed words to condemn Israel’s efforts to eradicate a genocidal death cult.
“It is unfathomable to me that after the chants of ‘Never Again’ in the wake of the Nazi genocide, after the African and Balkan genocides of the 1990s, after the recent decimations of Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Ukraine, more than 40,000 people who were alive last year at this time in Gaza are now dead; thousands of Palestinian children orphaned; hundreds of Israelis killed, tortured, or held hostage; messianic heads of state empowered to such an extent that we stand, in my view, poised on the brink of World War III,” author Janine di Giovanni wrote, relying on the death toll supplied by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry.
Reuters confusingly boosted an image of a Palestinian woman holding a dead child’s body with the caption, “A picture of her grief gripped the world. A year on, Gaza woman haunted by memories.” Given the context, readers could be forgiven for thinking that the image captured the pain of an Israeli mother grieving the death of her child after the 10/7 massacre. But the image was actually taken on October 17 and shows a Palestinian mother whose child was killed in the fighting that Hamas kicked off.
Time similarly spotlighted the work of a Palestinian photographer one year on, though the magazine first spoke to the photographer last year weeks into the war, not on the date of the Hamas terrorist attacks.
The New York Times, meanwhile, couldn’t spare a single day to focus on the pain of 10/7 victims and their families, summarizing its anniversary coverage this way: “Around the world, people are remembering those killed and abducted in Israel last Oct. 7. For Palestinians in Gaza, there is no reprieve from a war that has killed tens of thousands.”
The Independent dedicated its front page to figures related to the “365 days of horror since October 7,” but only one of the statistics shared was related to the Israeli victims of Hamas.
The 10/7 news coverage was bad — but the op-eds were worse.
One day before October 7, The Guardian published an essay by Naomi Klein accusing Israel of weaponizing the trauma of October 7.
On October 8, Daoud Kuttab wrote in the Los Angeles Times that “The fierce Hamas attack was no more brutal than 75 years of denial of the right of return to Palestinian refugees, or 57 years of Israeli occupation, or the 17-year siege of the Gaza Strip.”
And in a sign that pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel protesters on college campuses have little intention of slowing down, several universities hosted anti-Israel events on the October 7 anniversary, including Wake Forest University and the University of Maryland.
Headline Fail of the Week
Vogue dubs Kamala Harris “the candidate of our times” in a recent cover featuring a glamor shot of the vice president taken by Annie Leibovitz on October 7 — the one year anniversary of the Hamas terror attacks.
Aside from the VP receiving criticism over her decision to sit for the photo shoot on the emotionally weighted anniversary, the cover was also widely panned online for appearing to have been heavily airbrushed.
Media Misses
- CBS has been rocked by several concurrent scandals in recent days, which began with the network’s Tony Dokoupil interviewing Ta-Nehisi Coates. Dokoupil pressed Coates about his new anti-Israel book, The Message, and his decision not to merely lob softball questions at the liberal folk hero kicked off an internal brouhaha at the network. More than two dozen CBS employees complained to management about Dokoupil’s alleged pro-Israel bias, leading the CBS News CEO Wendy McMahon to call on the the Standards and Practices Unit and the Race and Culture Unit to investigate. Becket Adams offers a comprehensive breakdown on the situation for NR here.
- Media personalities including Joe Benigno and Emma Vigeland peddled the unfounded claim that New York Jets coach Robert Saleh was fired because he recently wore a Lebanese flag patch on his arm during a game. However, Saleh, who is Lebanese, had repped the flag for several seasons without incident.
- New York Times editorial board member Mara Gay offered this take on masculinity in America during a discussion about the supposed toxic masculinity plaguing the Trump campaign: “I think men are in crisis, actually, in this country. I think that plays out in different ways, and not all men are in crisis, of course, and not all men are just at home listening to Joe Rogan being angry or being recruited to fascism. Some just need therapy, like we all do. I go to therapy. That’s great. But I think we need to have a real conversation about that rather than allowing this kind of drift towards this kind of faux masculinity that we see Donald Trump advancing.”