The Reporting on the Gaza War Is Fundamentally Broken

By Becket Adams

Sunday, June 08, 2025

 

‘Colonizer’ bad. ‘Colonized’ good. This worldview has warped coverage to an alarming degree.

 

If you believed the recent claims about starving babies in Gaza or Israeli troops opening fire on a crowd of Palestinian civilians at an aid depot, you’ve been misled, according to those who initially misled you.

 

Yes, corporate newsrooms are scrambling (again) to explain how they (again) mishandled their coverage of the war between Israel and Hamas.

 

On June 1, the Washington Post, CNN, and others reported that Israeli troops had “opened fire on [Palestinians] making their way to collect aid,” killing dozens. Earlier, on May 20, NBC News, The Guardian, and others reported that an estimated “14,000 babies could die in the next 48 hours if many more aid trucks do not reach Gaza.”

 

The Washington Post, CNN, and others have since revised the initial reports falsely accusing the IDF of shooting civilians, either stealth-editing their articles or retracting them completely. NBC News, The Guardian, and others have also significantly revised or withdrawn reports from May warning of the imminent starvation of 14,000 babies in Gaza.

 

They can offer half-hearted mea culpas all they want, while vowing to identify the underlying cause of their failure. Yet the simplest and most accurate explanation lies in major media’s current editorial preference, which can be summed up as a “willingness to believe the worst of its enemies and the best of its friends.” (Yes, I’m quoting myself.)

 

In the case of the war in Gaza, Western journalists tend to believe the absolute worst of the Israelis and the best of the Palestinians. This is because major media are overwhelmingly left-wing, meaning they adhere to the hierarchy of left-wing values. In this ordering, the West is profoundly immoral. It accounts for much of the world’s suffering and the creation of myriad evils, including colonization. Israel is, therefore, “evil” because it’s seen as a “colonizer.” Meanwhile, Gaza is inherently “good” because it represents the “colonized”; its people serve as a stand-in for the marginalized and minorities everywhere, who are not Western and are, therefore, “good.”

 

With this worldview baked into so many reporters’ brains, it’s not surprising that there’s a readiness to publish even the most outrageous claims about the war, regardless of how absurd or lacking in evidentiary support they are. So long as the claim confirms Israel’s malevolence and the Palestinians’ position as righteous victims, it will find a favorable audience in American and European newsrooms. It is precisely this warped ideological structure that has given us years of corrections and retractions.

 

In October 2023, at the outbreak of the war, the Associated Press, the New York Times, and others uncritically repeated Hamas’s claim that an Israeli airstrike had leveled Gaza’s al-Ahli Hospital, killing 500. Later analysis revealed that the airstrike was caused by an errant missile fired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist group. Additionally, the rocket didn’t strike the hospital; it detonated in a nearby parking lot.

 

The Washington Post alleged that Israeli policy forced Palestinian mothers to shuttle between Gaza and Israel without their newborns, all to satisfy onerous permits. But no such rule exists; a 230-word editor’s note now acknowledges that the story’s authors, who relied entirely on the claims of Palestinians and pro-Palestinian sympathizers, never contacted Israeli officials.

 

The Post published a separate report claiming that the IDF targeted a Doctors Without Borders convoy; a correction now states that those involved in the attack never blamed Israel.

 

In November 2023, just weeks after the war’s start, the Post also claimed, “More than twice as many women and children have already been reported killed in Gaza than in Ukraine after almost two years of Russian attacks.” What the report failed to mention was that the supposed death toll, which was already unbelievable on its face, was provided by Hamas.

 

In 2024, the BBC reported falsely that when the Israeli forces raided al-Shifa Hospital, which Hamas was using as a dual command center and a prison for Jewish hostages, IDF troops targeted “medical teams as well as Arab speakers.” The BBC later issued a written and on-air correction and apology.

 

In March, Reuters retracted a report that incorrectly referred to a victim of a Palestinian terrorist attack as a member of Mossad, Israel’s top intelligence agency. The victim was not and never had been a Mossad agent, which Reuters might have discovered if its reporting hadn’t relied solely on the family of the Palestinian killer.

 

The bias is so out of control that in February, the BBC discovered, much to its embarrassment, that it had aired a pro-Palestine documentary without realizing that its narrator is the son of a senior Hamas militant. The narrator expressed what the BBC already believed about the evils of Israel and the righteousness of the Palestinian cause. Consequently, BBC journalists didn’t bother to scrutinize the documentary.

 

(As a brief aside: Last February, the New York Times celebrated Gaza photographer Yousef Masoud for winning a George Polk Award, despite accusations of his collaboration with the October 7 attackers. This came after the Times rehired a Palestinian video journalist who had praised Adolf Hitler.)

 

As is the case with so much careless reporting, the failure goes beyond journalists simply failing to adhere to even the basic standards of their chosen profession. The danger lies in the perpetuation and dissemination of outright falsehoods, which risk enflaming further these ancient blood feuds.

 

Last weekend, in Boulder, Colo., a 45-year-old Egyptian national, who is in the United States illegally, attacked peaceful Jewish demonstrators with a “makeshift flamethrower,” severely injuring 15. When the attacker was arrested, he was heard shouting “Free Palestine!”

 

On May 22, a gunman murdered two Israeli Embassy staff members, an Israeli and an American, outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. At the time of his arrest, the alleged gunman shouted, “Free, free Palestine!”

 

The corrections and retractions of inflammatory anti-Israel stories from around the time of both heinous crimes are proper and all, but couldn’t these newsrooms have worked a bit harder to confirm the stories before publishing?

 

A little due diligence could spare media the embarrassment and Americans Jews from being murdered and maimed.