The Media Didn't Get the Hospital Explosion Wrong
They're just on the other side
I haven't been writing much recently. Hamas' pogrom on the seventh of October provided a wealth of material, but to be honest I felt too overwhelmed by it all to set pen to paper. I'm now catching-up.
On the seventeenth, a rocket launched from within Gaza by Palestinian Islamic Jihad misfired & landed in a hospital parking lot. This happens fairly regularly, you just don't hear about it if you get your news from western media. Hamas immediately claimed that the Israeli Air Force had deliberately bombed the hospital causing five hundred deaths. Breathless push notifications went out from sites such as the New York Times, the BBC, The Washington Post, the Associated press, Reuters, MSNBC, CNN, Politico et cetera parroting Hamas' statement.
The Israeli Defense Forces immediately denied it– they had no planes operating in that area, they said. More interestingly, those on Martin Gurri's "periphery" began to push back, as well. "Open-source" intelligence accounts such as OSINTdefender began posting video sourced from Al Jazeera showing a misfired rocket at the salient time & place. The Israelis posted their own signals intercepts of Hamas members admitting it. Legacy media began walking back their headlines without ever quite admitting they were wrong. Meanwhile, riots erupted across the Middle East & at least one presidential-level meeting was cancelled as a result.
I will spare the reader the tedious blow-by-blow, since it's now familiar; rote, even. I'm more interested in the aftermath. Once our elite opinion-makers had not so much retracted their statements as moved on, a number of think pieces came out the week after analayzing How the Media Got the Hospital Explosion Wrong, why The New York Times Takes Another L, and lamenting how "easy it is to screw up on breaking news".
Some started looking beyond the "this is just a big mistake" point-of-view. Mark Penn (of Clintonworld) accused the media of spreading propaganda, but even still, at the end, could only lament "Perhaps this episode will finally cause more editors and publishers to look at how they could have been so disastrously wrong and start to reform their newsrooms."
Noah Rothman, at National Review, got closer: "This was no harmless mistake. It was not an accident. This calumny wasn’t attributable to the fog of war or a misstep by the citizen journalists on social media whom professional reporters look upon with contempt…This was a deliberate effort by members of the press — the commanding heights of international journalism — to establish the moral equivalency between Israel and Hamas they appear to need."
Batya Ungar-Sargon seemed to understand: "The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post, the BBC, and the AP all repeated Hamas' lie word for word. And why did they do this? Because they're educated elite institutions…because to them, Israel is the oppressor, and they spent ten days having to describe atrocities issues and they were just desperate to get Israel back into the oppressor position of the bad guy."
That, to me, is this sorry episode properly understood. A journalistic "screw up" is missing a fact check or getting burned by a source with an agenda. This was the unquestioning repeating of Hamas propaganda; that is to say, participation in that propaganda. The New York Times went a step further: they included a photo of a bombed-out building under the headline. It wasn't the hospital in question, of course; I can only surmise they wanted to give Hamas' claims more "punch".
No, there was no failure here, no mistake, no "breakdown" in journalistic standards. Legacy media simply support Hamas. They support Hamas because they're pseudo-intellectuals who see everything through the lens of victimhood. They are so besotted with their moral superiority that they've bought into the oldest of self-serving myths, that the ends justify the means, and therefore they are willing tools of Hamas' propaganda.
I'll leave you with a wonderful roll of shame of our media "institutions" that blindly parroted a pyschotic death cult's press release. We should all remember this the next time some would-be censor warns about the danger of "misinformation".
10/30/23 17:10