NRO has posted a long article by Zach Kessel and Ari Blaff on mainstream media coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. They find that the Washington Post’s coverage ranks as the worst. According to Kessel and Blaff, “While other U.S. outlets have on occasion fallen into the trap of credulously parroting Hamas propaganda, none as prominent have done so with the frequency and brazenness of the Post…” They make an impressive case, but mostly without the comparative analysis that would make it definitive.
The Post vies for recognition as the worst along with the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the news agencies such as the Associated Press. Each in its own way plugs for Hamas. The most notable fact (as I think it is) is how bad they all have proved themselves to be in this conflict and other such cases. Their performance is regularly worse than pathetic.
To take just one example from the current conflict, I have saved the December 11 page-one Wall Street Journal story “Israel Faces Outcry as Photos Of Detainees in Gaza Emerge.” (Online the story runs as “Israel Detains Hundreds of Palestinian Men in Search for Hamas.”)
The story appeared under the byline of two reporters supported by five more who contributed to it. It is/was a ridiculous story. Plugging for Hamas appears to be its only rationale.
When it comes to the initial stories attributing a “strike” on the al-Ahi Hospital in Gaza to Israel, to take a more prominent example, the Post itself draws on the contrast between its performance with that of the competition. Kessel and Blaff report that a Post spokesman defended the Post’s initial reporting in these terms: “We handled the news differently than the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Our initial alert language did not attribute the hospital blast to an Israeli airstrike.”
However, Kessel and Blaff also document this proposition: “While other major news outlets, such as the New York Times, also got the story wrong in their initial reports and even promoted misleading push-alert language, the Post’s behavior after the facts became clear puts it in a league of its own.”
Kessel and Blaff make the case that the Post is the worst in “How the Washington Post Abandoned Basic Journalistic Standards Covering the Israel–Hamas War” (behind the NRO paywall). However, the difficult question implicit in their analysis is not necessarily why is the Post so bad? It is a difficult question because they are all so bad. After one differentiates among the gradations of error and deceit, the truly difficult question is why are they all so bad?
We’re talking about Hamas, an organization that has established itself as one of the most evil on the face of planet earth. One doesn’t need to be a deep thinker to understand that a fair assessment of Hamas versus Israel does not present a close question. Indeed, Hamas is the enemy of all these left-wing media types purport to hold dear. What is going on here?
Virtually every major institution in American life has become an enemy of the American people and Western civilization. Higher education and the mainstream media got there before the rest, but that is where we and they are, or so it seems to me.
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