How is the Journal doing?

The Wall Street Journal is the daily newspaper to which I subscribe. I subscribe for the opinion pages and the weekend Review section, but it has published some excellent stories documenting Iran’s direct connection to Hamas’s genocidal assault on Israel. See, for example, the Journal’s “Iran Helped Plot Attack on Israel Over Several Weeks” (October 8, subhead “The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps gave the final go-ahead last Monday in Beirut”) and “Hamas Fighters Trained in Iran Before Oct. 7 Attacks” (October 25, subhead “Roughly 500 Palestinian militants got specialized combat instruction at Iranian facilities as recently as September”).

These stories belie the Biden administration’s continued refusal to draw a direct link between Iran and the October 7 attack. Either the Journal has better sources than the CIA or Team Biden is lying to keep up the Obama/Biden fantasies of Iran. The Journal itself cites unnamed “intelligence sources” in its October 25 story.

Let’s turn to the Journal’s big page-one story of October 18 on the hospital blast: “Blast at Gaza Hospital Kills More Than 500, Palestinian Officials Say.” Subhead: “As he traveled to Israel, Biden said he was ‘outraged and deeply saddened by the explosion.’”

Not to belabor the story’s shortcomings, I only want to review the opening paragraphs the Journal published on page one. (The published story departs slightly from the online version. I assume the revisions are due to the “update” at 9:45 p.m.)

First paragraph:

A strike rocked a hospital in Gaza Tuesday killing hundreds of people in one of the deadliest single incidents of violence in the strip–hours before President Biden was expected to visit Israel in a show of support.

In fact, we don’t know how many Palestinians died in the incident. The Journal is regurgitating what it was told by Hamas spokesmen. Now we know “the strike” actually “rocked” the parking lot of the hospital and that the strike was a terrorist misfire.

Who did what to whom? Second paragraph:

Hamas and Palestinian officials blamed Israel and said at least 500 people were killed. Israel’s Prime Minister’s Office said there were “clear indications” that the blast was a misfire by the militant Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which the group denied. The source of the explosion couldn’t be immediately verified.

Reference to “Hamas” and “Palestinian officials” is redundant. Again, the number appears to be off. The gist of the story imputes responsibility to Israel. Given the information available at the time, the story is agnostic. Insofar as Hamas was in fact the only source of the story’s dramatic claims, some acknowledgment of Hamas’s unreliability would have been helpful. The Journal’s implication that there is some distinction between “Hamas” and “Palestinian officials” obscures the point.

You know Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah — they are described as “militant” groups in this story and throughout the Journal’s news pages. Over on the Journal’s editorial pages they are frankly described as terrorist.

Third paragraph:

The decimation of Al-Ahli Arab Hospital—founded in the 1880s by Anglican missionaries—reverberated across the Arab world, causing street protests and upending delicate diplomatic efforts to free hostages and create safe passage out of Gaza for foreign nationals. In Saudi Arabia, where Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had been pursuing a normalization pact with Israel, a royal adviser said the idea was now dead.

Well, yeah, it’s important to get the facts straight.

Fourth paragraph:

The explosion, and the allegation that Israel was responsible, jeopardized years of efforts to build goodwill toward the Jewish state in the Arab and wider Muslim world. New diplomatic ties with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and elsewhere were established in 2020 and developed over three years when the low-simmering conflict in the West Bank was the biggest obstacle to peace—not hundreds of dead people in a hospital.

Again, we have “hundreds of dead people in a hospital” and the implication that Israel is at fault. As I say, it’s important to get the facts straight.

It’s difficult to cover breaking news, but this story is pitiful. The byline attributes it to three reporters: “Omar Abdel-Baqui, Rory Jones and Fatima AbdulKarim.” The Journal credits the contribution of six more reporters to the story: Summer Said, Dov Lieber, Stephen Kalin, Chao Deng, Menna Farouk, and Abu Bakr Bashir.

This is the information supplied by the Journal on the first two bylined reporters:

Omar Abdel-Baqui is a Dubai-based Middle East correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. His reporting focuses on the social transformations rippling across the region, among other issues. Omar previously covered breaking news for the Journal based in New York. He has also reported for NBC News Investigations and covered police for the Detroit Free Press. Omar served as a U.S. Fulbright Program fellow in the West Bank, where he taught English and journalism to Palestinian high school and university students. He is a graduate of Wayne State University, where he studied journalism and Arabic and was managing editor of the student newspaper, the South

Rory Jones is a Dubai-based reporter in The Wall Street Journal’s Middle East bureau. His stories seek to connect global business and financial markets with the region’s geopolitics.

He moved to the Middle East as a journalist in 2011 and joined the Journal in 2012 to cover the Persian Gulf. Rory later relocated to Tel Aviv for a few years to cover politics, security and culture in Israel and Palestinian territories, before returning to the Gulf in 2018 for his current role.

Rory is from the United Kingdom. He began his career as a business reporter in London with a magazine at the Financial Times Group and graduated with a mathematics degree from the University of Leeds.

The Journal supplies no information regarding Fatima AbdulKarim. On Twitter she describes herself as a “journalist” and “contributor @WSJ | @CSMonitor | @972Mag.” I take it that she is a stringer. I take it from her Twitter feed that her heart is with Hamas, or that she finds no fault with Hamas for the suffering of innocent Gazans that she decries.