Time and again, major English-language news outlets have presented a deeply distorted view of the Gaza war, a fact that is perhaps in keeping with much of the history of reporting on the subject. Zach Kessel and Ari Blaff take a systematic look at how the Washington Post has handled the conflict and conclude that the paper, highly influential with the nation’s political class, has been particularly egregious. While other publications quickly backed down from the story that Israel struck the al-Ahli hospital when it was shown to be false, the Post was slow to come around to the truth. Later it invested much effort in denying that Hamas was using the al-Shifa hospital as a base.
What followed was even worse:
Two days after the al-Shifa report, on December 23, the Post ran an in-depth visual analysis of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, arguing that it was among the “most destructive wars” of this century and “has outpaced other recent conflicts.” The paper relied on a combination of satellite imagery, airstrike data, and UN damage assessments to reach its conclusion. Based on its review of the evidence, the Post concluded that the Gaza war far outpaced the destruction of Aleppo during the Syrian civil war and the U.S.-led anti-Islamic State coalition’s assault on Raqqa.
As a bevy of experts on military affairs observed, there was little basis for these claims, which included factual errors that were later retracted. “To compare Gaza to the deliberate, nationwide destruction of Ukraine is not just a stretch, it’s idiotic,” Chuck Pfarrer, a former squadron leader of Navy Seal Team Six, told Blaff and Kessel.
Once more, three days after the Post’s flawed military analysis, a team of the outlet’s senior reporters, including its Istanbul and London bureau chiefs, wrote about Israel returning dozens of Hamas bodies recovered in northern Gaza. . . . In its report on the body return, the Post cites a statement from the “Hamas-run government media office,” advancing the well-worn anti-Semitic conspiracy that the Jewish state had “stolen” the organs of slain Palestinians and “mutilated” their bodies.
“The claims could not be independently verified,” the Post wrote of the Hamas-ministry reports. . . . “It’s factually absurd. They’re harvesting organs from dead terrorists who’ve been lying around for days?” Reed Rubinstein, deputy associate attorney general for the Trump administration, said.
It’s unclear what explains such consistent failings, but Kessel and Blaff note that many of the journalists covering these stories have previously written for Qatar’s propaganda mouthpiece Al Jazeera.
Read more on National Review: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/how-the-washington-post-abandoned-basic-journalistic-standards-to-cover-the-israel-hamas-war/