“The great masses of the people … will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one.” Adolf Hitler, 1925.
In May 2026, the New York Times published an opinion article by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Nicholas Kristof alleging widespread sexual violence by Israeli authorities against Palestinians. Kristof “exposes” a pattern of Israeli abuse that includes Palestinian prisoners and a Palestinian journalist being held down to allow a dog to rape them. Federal Judge Roy Altman, writing for the Free Press, and Melanie Phillips, writing for the Jewish News Syndicate, are two of the many credible naysayers who have factually debunked the inauthentic claims by Kristof. However, anyone from the general public reading this widely disseminated and discussed New York Times opinion piece would initially and logically form a negative opinion about Israel and its human rights policy.
Mainstream news media’s extensive traditional and social media coverage of Israel since Oct. 7, 2023, has been instrumental in shaping global public opinion about the only Jewish-majority nation in the world. Although many believe they are consuming factual news, it can be argued a significant portion of the public have been fed a steady diet of biased, incomplete, and often demonstrably false reporting. This “information laundering” has fueled, and continues to fuel, the global rise in radical anti-Israel sentiment and antisemitism since 2023.
During the post-Oct. 7 Israel-Hamas war, numerous mainstream news media reports — to include Al Jazeera, BBC, CNN, and others — vilified Israel for killing Gazan civilians. However, these media outlets shed little to no light on how Hamas (a designated terrorist organization) intentionally used Gazan civilians as human shields by firing rockets and mortars from heavily populated civilian areas such as schools, hospitals, and mosques. or locating military headquarters and weapons storage facilities within civilian areas throughout Gaza. Scores of reports cited the Gaza Health Ministry’s civilian death statistics during the war, but few reports explained the important nuance that the Gaza Health Ministry is run by Hamas, and the statistics cited by Hamas do not distinguish between civilian and terrorist casualties.
Ten days after Oct. 7, the New York Times published a front-page story saying hundreds of innocent civilians were killed and wounded when a hospital in Gaza was attacked. The article blamed Israel for the attack. Dozens of other media outlets around the world rapidly republished and amplified this breaking news, but the story was not accurate and incorrectly cast blame on Israel for this tragedy. Soon after the story was published, U.S. intelligence and multiple independent investigations confirmed the hospital was hit by an errant rocket launched by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (another designated terrorist organization). A barely visible New York Times editor’s note/retraction was published a week later, but the damage was already done. The article had ignited blood-boiling hatred against Israel for allegedly committing such a crime against humanity. University students around the world did not care about a retraction — true or false, the original story gave them more reasons to protest Israel and vilify Jews everywhere.
Prominent British author and journalist Douglas Murray argues that much of Western legacy media coverage since 2023 has shifted from documenting the Oct. 7 massacre to portraying Israel as the primary villain while simultaneously minimizing the atrocities and heinous murders committed by Hamas. Clearly, since October 2023, great masses of people have fallen victim to big lies when it comes to Israel.
To those who ask, “So what?” I say when legacy news media get it wrong, there are consequences — public opinion is shaped, reputations are impacted, and lives are put at risk. Post-Oct. 7 information laundering unquestionably contributed to a tremendous global rise in radical anti-Israel sentiment and antisemitism. There is no justification for any country at war, including Israel, to deliberately kill innocent civilians (even if fighting a designated terrorist organization such as Hamas), but if you know the designated terrorist enemy uses civilians as human shields, does this change how you view the situation? If you know a designated terrorist enemy is the originator of “official Gaza civilian death statistics,” does it change how believable those statistics are? If not, would you believe civilian death statistics from the al Qaeda Health Ministry or the ISIS Health Ministry? And if you know that a separate designated terrorist organization is responsible for causing innocent civilian casualties at a Gaza hospital, could you not then direct your justifiable anger to the appropriate responsible party?
Opposing viewpoints do exist. Two notable published studies conclude legacy media post-Oct. 7 is biased toward Israel, not against it. A September 2024 report by the Middle East Council on Global Affairs concludes that legacy news media coverage of the post-Oct. 7 Israel-Hamas war leans heavily in Israel’s favor and ignores the Palestinian perspective. A March 2025 report by the Al Jazeera Journalism Review comes to the same conclusion. However, both reports blatantly ignore Hamas’s role in the very Palestinian narrative they wish to highlight. AJR is a professional platform managed and published by the Al Jazeera Media Institute. AJMI is a key subsidiary and official training arm of the Al Jazeera Media Network, a network with a long, public history of anti-Israel, anti-American, and anti-West reporting. Additionally, the MECGA and AJR are both based in Qatar, a country known for hosting Hamas’s leadership and for its historical support of the Muslim Brotherhood. The 2026 U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy released by the White House on May 6 identifies the Muslim Brotherhood as “the root of all modern Islamist terrorism,” drawing a direct ideological line between the Muslim Brotherhood and terrorist organizations like al Qaeda, ISIS, and Hamas. Also, in January 2026, the U.S. designated three separate Muslim Brotherhood chapters as foreign terrorist organizations, and a fourth Muslim Brotherhood chapter was designated in March 2026.
Abraham Foxman, the late former National Director of the Anti-Defamation League, said in May 2025, “…(We) assumed that we could use truth and civility to fight the big lies that caused hate and antisemitism. Now, however, answering lies with truth doesn’t work anymore, because the lies are a tsunami spread everywhere over the internet. When the respect for truth is destroyed, education is no longer an effective tool to fight the lies.”
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Although I generally agree with Foxman, we cannot give up on trying to restore respect for the truth. The modern-day normalization of radical anti-Israel sentiment and antisemitism — which used to be fringe positions — is a result of this lack of respect for truth. Legacy media have contributed to this normalization.
Legacy news media have a major responsibility to educate the masses with unbiased, accurate, and true reporting. As Voltaire wrote in 1765, “Truly, whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” Ask any Israeli or Jew — Voltaire’s words ring very true today.
David Zimmermann retired from the FBI in 2024 after working 25+ years in the counterterrorism arena, both domestically and abroad. Zimmermann’s last tour was in Tel Aviv as a Supervisory Special Agent from 2020 to 2024. Zimmermann was on the ground in Israel during the horrific events of October 7th and, while working alongside U.S. and Israeli partners, led the FBI’s Israel-based wartime efforts to seek the release/return of 255 innocent hostages from Hamas captivity in Gaza. Zimmermann is currently a Fellow at two prominent universities and is co-founder of the counterterrorism consulting firm Exodus Partners.