Liberal media institutions have proven that they are incapable of shedding their bias on any number of hot-button issues, but their coverage of Israel and Gaza has been particularly egregious, with some of the most blatantly false stories being published in attempts to hurt Israel’s standing in the world.
The most recent example came when many outlets willfully accepted the framing of a story from the United Nations. The U.N. has proven itself to be an antisemitic sinkhole that peddles terrorist propaganda at every turn. Here is how NBC News framed the story: “Around 14,000 babies could die in the next 48 hours if many more aid trucks do not reach Gaza, the U.N.’s humanitarian chief says.” The image for the story was of a starving child, and this report included quotes from an Israeli “left-wing opposition voice” who peddled the same ludicrous Hamas talking points about Israel being a country that kills babies “as a pastime.”
The problem is that the core of this report was wrong. Here’s how NBC described liberal media getting this story wrong: “Tuesday, U.N. humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher told the BBC that 14,000 babies could die in Gaza in the next 48 hours if more aid didn’t reach them. The United Nations later clarified after being questioned by the BBC to say that 14,000 babies face severe malnutrition if a lot more aid trucks don’t reach the Palestinian enclave soon.” The corrected statement is that the children would face the “threat of starvation” over “the course of the next year,” according to PBS’s correction, which, coming from the U.N., means as little as every other story over the past two years about Gaza running out of food for the 50th time.
On top of trusting the antisemites at the U.N. to offer any sort of real analysis of Israel’s conduct, NBC topped off its false story with a false picture. The starving child used as the photo for the piece, meant to symbolize the children who were allegedly about to starve to death, was not starving to death in Gaza. The child in the photo was from Yemen. The crux of the piece was wrong. The photo meant to manipulate you into hating Israel was wrong. All that NBC really had to add to the discourse was a propagandist suggesting that Israel is hunting Palestinian babies in Gaza for sport.
That is not the only propaganda piece disguised as news this month that fits this example. Israel launched a strike against underground tunnels used by Hamas in an attempt to kill Hamas leader Mohammed Sinwar. Those tunnels were under a hospital that was constructed with European Union funding.
Here is how Sky News framed it: “Israel says it bombed the European Hospital because it was home to an underground Hamas base, but expert analysis casts doubt on its evidence.” A Sky News anchor then berated Israeli diplomat Danny Danon because “our experts” said Israel was wrong about there being tunnels underneath the hospital and its surrounding area. Hamas then confirmed that the tunnels did exist. In fact, Hamas had rebuilt them after Israel destroyed them in 2014.
The most notable of these stories is the hospital bombing story that the Associated Press and New York Times, among many others, infamously botched less than a month after the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks. The “Gaza Health Ministry,” which is the fancy way of saying “Hamas,” told liberal media outlets in the West that Israel had bombed a hospital and killed 500 Palestinians. Those outlets then uncritically published that terrorist propaganda.
As it turned out, none of it was true. For one, the strike did not kill 500 people, to the surprise of liberal media outlets, which believe Hamas can count casualties almost instantly after an attack. The missile also did not strike a hospital but a parking lot. The “disinformation” experts at the New York Times and other outlets were apparently on vacation at this time, because they all went 0-for-2 on those critical elements of the story.
The third strike may have been the worst one, though: The rocket was not fired by Israel. It was a Palestinian rocket. All of these outlets went 0-for-3, with the New York Times adding an embarrassing fourth strike after using an image of an unrelated destroyed building for its story, misleading viewers into thinking that Israel had, in fact, destroyed the hospital.
Palestinian terrorists can get liberal media to publish just about anything. Reuters wrote up a sob story about a “mother’s wait” for her terrorist son to be released from prison. In this story, Reuters published the claim that the person the Palestinian had murdered was a Mossad agent, an obvious attempt to justify the murder partially. Reuters later retracted the story and said there would be no substitute version of the story, claiming that the outlet had been “unable to verify” that the victim was a Mossad agent. That didn’t stop it from publishing it in the first place, though, with Reuters admitting that it just accepted the terrorist’s family’s story with no scrutiny.
Sometimes, liberal media will even go to bat for the claims of Palestinian terrorists. The Washington Post did exactly that when former President Joe Biden said he had “no confidence” in the death figures that came out of the Gaza Health Ministry. Glenn Kessler wrote a “fact check” saying that Biden’s comments were “remarkably uninformed by history and precedent.” This was in the immediate aftermath of the false hospital bombing story, in which Hamas instantaneously reported that death toll of about 500. Last month, Hamas removed over 3,000 casualties from the death toll tracker it uses for its propaganda press releases.
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You can continue to run down the list and find ways that liberal media try to downplay the actions of Hamas and its supporters while demonizing Israel. The New York Times hired a Palestinian who has praised Adolf Hitler to cover the war and said it was “unclear” if the Israeli hostages in videos recorded by Hamas were being forced to record those hostage videos by the terrorists. The BBC claimed it was an innocent “mix-up” when Hamas returned a random dead body and tried to pass it off as Shiri Bibas, a hostage it had murdered. When a pro-Palestinian professor killed a Jewish protester after striking him in the head with a bullhorn, the Associated Press described it as follows: “Man involved in confrontation with Jewish protester who died called 911 and cooperated with police.”
Throughout this, you would be hard-pressed to find an example of liberal media getting a story wrong in a way that made Israel look better or the Palestinians look worse. Not from NBC News, or the Associated Press, or the New York Times. As is the case with domestic politics between Republicans and Democrats, the liberal media coverage of this conflict only happens to cut in one direction. The result is the fomentation of antisemitic hatred that consumes college campuses and leads to domestic terrorists gunning down Israeli Embassy employees on American soil. Liberal media allow themselves to be used as Palestinian propaganda over and over again, no matter how many times they get burned on a bad story.