(The Federalist) Tablet’s Armin Rosen, a really great reporter who’s no stranger to covering Israel and the Middle East, had this to say about the erroneous media coverage of a missile that supposedly hit a hospital in Gaza on Wednesday:
Last night was the worst media f-ckup I’ve ever seen. In terms of the range/seriousness of info gotten wrong, #/prestige/geographic diversity of outlets that f-cked up, overall credulousness, real-world impact, the lack of reflection/remorse etc. Scores a 10 in every category.
As a true connoisseur of media malpractice, I’m not sure it’s the worst ever, but it’s a definite contender. Because I’m old school, and I like to keep my kids offline, I have a hard copy of The Wall Street Journal delivered to my house every day. A WSJ subscription is not cheap. In fact, I pay hundreds of dollars a year for home delivery, and I do this in spite of the fact I have serious issues with the paper.
The news pages have never shared the conservative bent of the editorial pages — in fact, the internal political tensions between the two sections of the paper have been playing out rather publicly in recent years — and slide into hysterical and ideological coverage by the WSJ news team has been noticeable. Wednesday morning, I woke up to the headline you see above: “Blast at Gaza Hospital Kills Hundreds.” The second paragraph credulously cites Hamas officials blaming Israel for the attack and saying 500 were killed, before citing Israeli denials. Of course, by the time the paper landed in my yard that morning, people had been blowing holes in Hamas’ credulous claims about the attack for hours.
Indeed, according to American intelligence officials, the blast was caused by a Hamas rocket that Hafell short, validating Israeli claims about what happened. Further, the “decimation” of the hospital cited by the WSJ didn’t really happen either. The rocket appears to have hit a parking lot near the hospital, and the casualties are far fewer than Hamas officials claimed.
The only good thing I can say about the WSJ’s coverage is that it wasn’t as bad as The New York Times, where the credulous headlines were even worse. Initially, the Times went with “Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians Say.” As facts started emerging, the Times then backed off from specifically blaming Israel but then went out on another stupid limb by changing the headline to “At Least 500 Dead in Strike on Gaza Hospital, Palestinians Say.”
Of course, by the time you got to the eighth paragraph of the Times’ own story on the matter, you realized their own reporting couldn’t support the claims being made in their own headline: “[T]he Gazan health ministry put the toll at 500 or more dead, which the ministry later changed to ‘hundreds.’ No figure could be confirmed independently, but images from the hospital, which is run by the Anglican Church, and witness accounts made clear that it was high.” Bang up job, guys.
(For what it’s worth, I used to work with Rubenstein at The Weekly Standard, and after we worked together, Rubenstein went on to work on the editorial page of… The New York Times. That job didn’t last too long, at least not after Rubenstein found himself unfairly accused of publishing a perfectly rational op-ed that so offended the hard-left sensibilities of the rest of the paper’s staff they made the laughable claim that being exposed to a contrary opinion literally endangered their lives. At this point, I’m not sure someone like Rubenstein, who is not willing to surrender his rational faculties in order to spout left-wing talking points, is even allowed to work at the Times, no matter how much the paper could benefit from a sensible perspective.)
In any event, The New York Times, along with almost every other major corporate media organization, needs to be held accountable for what happened next:
Anger over the hospital blast in Gaza led to a spate of protests across the Middle East and North Africa on Tuesday night, fueling tensions in a region already rocked by war. We’re mapping developments: https://t.co/MiZwI0NipI pic.twitter.com/ozkez4GdNN
— The New York Times (@nytimes) October 18, 2023
