The New York Times was among the first in the prestige press to report that Israel had struck the hospital in Gaza City and killed more than 500 Gazans. Say what about disinformation? All the fake news that’s fit to print. Let’s go to the tape one more time.
Perhaps the most egregious disinformation came from @nytimes. Not only did they rush to quote Hamas in their headline and tweet, as @HillelNeuer points out, they made it their website homepage. pic.twitter.com/DltewYUm86
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) October 18, 2023
Today the Times not only raises doubts about the veracity of its initial story, but attributes it to “the Hamas-run Gazan health ministry” (rather than “Gazan officials” or “the Gazan health ministry”). This just in (the link in the first quoted paragraph below is in the Times story today):
Within an hour of the blast on Tuesday night, the Hamas-run Gazan health ministry accused Israel of attacking the Ahli Arab hospital, a medical center in Gaza City where scores of families had been sheltering. The allegation was soon denied by Israel but quickly accepted and amplified by Arab leaders across the Middle East, setting off unrest throughout the region. The claim was widely cited by international news outlets, including The New York Times, before Israel issued its denial.
But in the days since, as new evidence contradicting the Hamas claim has emerged, the Gazan authorities have changed their story about the blast. Spokespeople have released death tolls varying from 500 to 833, before settling on 471.
The Hamas-run health ministry has also declined to release further details about those 471 victims, and all traces of the munition have seemingly vanished from the site of the blast, making it impossible to assess its provenance. Raising further questions about Hamas’s claims, the impact site turned out to be the hospital parking lot, and not the hospital itself.
On Sunday, Hamas turned down requests by The Times to view any available evidence of the munition it said had struck the hospital, claiming that it had disintegrated beyond recognition.
“The missile has dissolved like salt in the water,” said Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas official, in a phone interview. “It’s vaporized. Nothing is left.”
The Times comes to no definitive conclusion today. This is utterly abject: “Without examining the munition that hit the parking lot, it may be impossible to draw a definitive conclusion about who fired it.”
It’s like the fraudulent Rathergate documents whose authenticity was assessed in the appendix of the Thornburgh-Boccardi report commissioned by CBS: There might be a typewriter out there somewhere that incorporated the Times New Roman typeface even though it was never licensed to typewriters. It’s possible! (No, it’s not.)
The Times avoids stating the obvious facts that not a single piece of evidence supports the claims of “the Gazan health officials” that it blasted around the world on October 17 and that Hamas is concealing the evidence in its possession. The Times bends over backwards to avoid the obvious conclusion that is implicit in its story today while it silently corrects the source of its initial reporting (from “the Gazan health ministry” to “the Hamas-run health ministry” and “the Hamas-run Gazan health ministry”) last week.
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.