The Rebirth of ‘Both Sides’

By Becket Adams

Sunday, October 15, 2023

 

The free press in the West, which has spent the past seven years warning of the dangers of “both sides” news coverage, insists now that there are two sides to the story of Hamas’s slaughter of more than 1,300 people, most of whom were unarmed Israeli civilians.

 

On October 7, Israel suffered its worst terrorist attack in the post–World War II era, as Hamas militants attacked Israeli communities by air, land, and sea. As of this writing, the estimated death toll of 1,300, which includes infants, women, and the elderly, also includes 27 U.S. citizens. In addition, Hamas has taken an estimated 150 hostages.

 

It’s rare that a news event is as black-and-white as this, with no gray areas, involving clearly laid out villains and victims. Terrorists murdered civilians. That’s the news story. The way the murders were carried out, and the sheer death toll, are shocking. In terms of straightforward reporting, there is plenty to go around for journalists. Who survived the attacks and how? What did the survivors see and hear? Most important: What happened? Yet, instead of focusing exclusively on uncovering the “who,” “what,” “where,” “when,” and “why” of the horrors of October 7, the free media insist upon presenting their work through a “root causes” prism, balancing their coverage of the terrorist attack equally with coverage of Palestinians’ criticisms of Israel.

 

It’s as if Israelis are not even able to suffer death and misery without a newsroom in the West interjecting with a version of, “Yes, but what about Gaza?” or, “Yes, what Hamas did was bad, but Israel is no angel.”

 

On October 7, the day of the attacks, MSNBC published an opinion article calling a pox on both houses, claiming, “Israeli and Palestinian leaders failed miserably. Their people will pay the price.”

 

“The coordinated attack by Hamas caught Israel by surprise but comes after months of worsening tensions over violence at al-Aqsa Mosque — a sacred Muslim site in the heart of Jerusalem located on the same spot as the Temple Mount revered by Jews — as well as continuing resentment of the punishing blockade and occupation of Palestinian lands,” read a Washington Post report published on October 9.

 

It added, “The presence of once-fringe Jewish supremacists and settler leaders in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-right government has further inflamed tensions with the Palestinians and caused domestic strife inside Israel that has led to a perception of weakness.” The article also bears an editor’s note to correct its original assertion that Hamas’s aim is “the creation of a Palestinian state along the borders that existed before the 1967 war.” Hamas’s actual, stated goal is the complete eradication of Israel, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

 

At CNN on October 12, after airing images of murdered Israeli children, an anchor felt it was necessary to follow up with, “There are also children in images coming out of Gaza that are, for many people, just as horrific.”

 

This style of news coverage not only threatens to obscure and even undercut the facts of what happened on October 7, it is also laughable given everything the free press has told us these past seven years about the pitfalls of “bothsidesism.”

 

Indeed, since about 2016, Western journalists and commentators have lectured at length on the dangers of “false balance.” It’s a threat to our democracy, they said, for newsrooms to give, say, Covid-19-vaccine or climate-change skeptics a platform to articulate their positions. There’s no need to provide an alternative point of view, they said, when the matter is so black-and-white.

 

“Impartial journalism is laudable,” declared the headline of a 2016 Guardian article. “But false balance is dangerous.”

 

“Media outlets have an important role to play in conveying vital information and view-points,” it added, “pushing a standard for fact-checking and quality control that may be lacking in more fragmented modern media.” However, it continued, “engaging in false balance undermines this strength and risks giving debunked or dangerous fringe views an air of legitimacy and the oxygen of publicity — and ultimately, such sophism leaves us all more divided and less informed.”

 

Later, in 2019, the Nieman Journalism Lab, which is a project of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, published an article titled simply, “Death to bothsidesism.”

 

Two years later, former New York Times public editor and then–Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan published an article cheering think-tankers Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, who had called on newsrooms to stop covering Republicans and Democrats as equals.

 

“They probably couldn’t have imagined the chaos that followed November’s election, the horrors of Jan. 6, or what’s happened in the past few weeks,” she wrote. “The change they called for never happened. For the sake of American democracy, it’s now or never.”

 

These and similar views would be articulated further in 2022 when the Pew Research Center released data showing that a majority of U.S. journalists (55 percent) are more likely than the public (22 percent) to say that “all sides don’t always deserve equal coverage.”

 

After the mass slaughter in Israel last weekend, however, the free press in the West is singing a different tune. When it comes to the matter of Palestinian terrorists murdering an estimated 1,300 people, mostly civilians, in Israel, the terrorists’ viewpoint apparently deserves equal coverage. Indeed, following the slaughter, the Western press has staked out a position best described as “Gotta hear both sides.” Sadly, this sort of thing is par for the course. Indeed, historically speaking, the West’s coverage of the long-running conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians has been shoddy and, at times, unethical, resulting in news coverage that tends to be overly critical of Israel while being weirdly defensive of Palestinian terrorist organizations.

 

From the Associated Press, which was discovered sharing office space with Hamas military intelligence in 2021, criticizing U.S. lawmakers for “[falling] over each other to support Israel” to MSNBC airing outright anti-Israel propaganda to the Guardian omitting from a 2,200-plus-word essay on urban terrorism any mention of the terrorist attacks carried out against Israelis by Hamas, al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (the same article is careful, however, to note the moment in 1946, before the establishment of the state of Israel, when Jewish terrorists targeted British troops in Jerusalem, killing 91 people) to the New York Times launching what was derisively termed a “Jew Tracker” in 2015 to monitor which Jewish U.S. officials opposed President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, one gets the impression that Western newsrooms have a clear favorite in the conflict.

 

This could be defensible were it not for the fact that the preference so badly poisons the quality and accuracy of the news coverage, which, unlike offering Republican legislators an opportunity to speak, is actually dangerous. Indeed, the sloppy and lopsided news coverage Hamas enjoys is not unrelated to the eagerness with which Western academics and students have celebrated the largest slaughter of Jews since Adolf Hitler still drew breath.

 

If we want to have a serious discussion about the dangers of “both sides” news coverage, then forget the Trump nonsense. He’s a clown. Let’s talk about the free press’s legitimization of Gaza’s medieval death cult, and the audiences who eat it up.