By Brittany Bernstein
Monday, August 03, 2026
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks. This week, we look
into upstart independent media outlet Drop Site News, and we cover more
media misses.
‘Why Does Drop Site Love Hamas and Iran and
Hezbollah So Much?’
A reporter from Drop Site News, an anti-Israel
news outlet that claims to offer “completely independent” journalism,
approached Senator John Fetterman on the Hill last week to ask questions about
the Pennsylvania Democrat’s support of Israel — but it was Fetterman who ended
up asking most of the questions.
“Oh, you’re Drop Site,” Fetterman said to the outlet’s Capitol Hill reporter, Julian
Andreone.
“It’s like a race between who’s the more pro-Hamas — Drop
Site or Zeteo,” Fetterman added, while continuing to walk away. Zeteo
is a media start-up founded by former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan.
“I want your viewers to see how much I love to watch
Israel eliminating the Hamas leadership,” he added. “I know that upsets a lot
of your viewers and a lot of your founders. But I think it’s a great thing.”
“So there’s no news coming out of me. I’m going to always
back Israel,” Fetterman concluded. “The question is, where does your trash
outlet come from and who’s funding it?”
Andreone replied that the outlet is reader-funded,
explaining that it pulls funding from “46,000 individual donors.”
Fetterman then told Andreone that the outlet’s founders,
Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim, “think it’s appropriate to attack and kill
Israeli civilians.”
“That’s really — that should be the news overall,”
Fetterman said. “Now you’re sticking a microphone in my face. . . . I think the
question is why does Drop Site love Hamas and Iran and Hezbollah so
much? I think that’s the news.”
“I mean, are you OK with taking your paycheck from these
kind of people?” the senator asked.
Finally, Andreone tried to get a question in, asking
Fetterman whether he is “OK” with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
being in the U.S.
“I’m OK,” he said. “I love killing Hamas leadership.”
Scahill and Grim, both veterans of The Intercept, launched
Drop Site in July 2024 with an 8,000-word “exclusive” interview with two
senior Hamas officials about their “motivations, political objectives, and the
human costs of their armed uprising against Israel.”
The interviews, conducted by Scahill, aimed to offer a
“deeper insight into [Hamas’s] decision to launch the October 7 attacks in
Israel.”
The two-year-old outlet calls itself “a non-aligned,
investigative news organization dedicated to exposing the crimes of the
powerful—particularly in overt and secret conflicts where the U.S. government
is playing a key role.” It also claims to be “reader-supported.”
But the Washington Free Beacon revealed last year that the
site actually received $250,000 from the Open Society Foundations, a
grant-making network founded by progressive billionaire George Soros. The money
was specifically intended to establish a Middle East desk at Drop Site,
which the foundation said would help “bridge a crucial information gap in
independent journalism” in the Middle East.
Drop Site collects donations through the Social
Security Works Education Fund, a nonprofit that aims to “educate the general
public, media, and policy-makers about the benefits of protecting social
security benefits.” According to the Washington Free Beacon, the
organization is the “fiscal sponsor” for the news site — despite the outlet
offering little to no coverage of Social Security benefits. It’s a workaround
that allows donors to make tax-deductible contributions to the outlet, which
does not have tax-exempt status from the IRS.
The site’s Middle East desk is now led by Sharif Abdel
Kouddous, who works out of Egypt and New York City. Kouddous’s work has
included a report from the funeral of Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah and a
piece lamenting the death of Anas al-Sharif, an Al-Jazeera employee who was allegedly
doubling as a Hamas fighter when he was killed by an Israeli air strike.
Grim, for his part, has “pushed several false narratives
about the war,” according to the Free Beacon:
He peddled the debunked claim
earlier this year that Israel Defense Forces massacred Palestinian civilians at
a food distribution site, and he reported the false claim that White House
National Security Council staffer Merav Ceren once worked for Israel’s Ministry
of Defense. The story touched off a wave of anti-Semitic attacks on Ceren, and
calls from pro-Hamas groups that she be fired. The Trump administration quickly shot down the story, stating that Ceren has never
worked for the ministry.
Drop Site has also tried, on several occasions, to
disprove claims that Hamas terrorists raped Israelis on October 7, despite
widely available evidence to the contrary.
And its founders chose to look the other way after one of
its contributing writers called for “wiping out” Israel.
Abubaker Abed, a Palestinian journalist whose work has
been published by Drop Site, posted on Instagram in March saying,
“Wiping out Israel off the planet is not enough revenge. Israelis mustn’t feel
safe anymore. Haunt them and go after them where they go. These terrorist
parasites must be removed from our planet.”
Grim said on X at the time that while the post doesn’t
represent the organization’s editorial position, “We also are never going to
police the language of anyone who survived a genocide.”
Nonetheless, Drop Site received favorable
treatment from the Associated Press last week in an article about how
independent media outlets are changing the political campaign coverage
landscape. In fact, the coverage was so positive that Drop Site shared
the report on its own social media account.
“The Associated Press identified Drop Site News as a
leading anti-establishment media platform in a new report highlighting how Drop
Site and others are reshaping political coverage by helping progressive
candidates bypass traditional media and reach audiences directly,” the outlet
wrote.
In response to the AP article, Middle East analyst Eitan
Fischberger offered reporter Ali Swenson a few
notes on her “strange puff piece” on X. He pointed out that Drop Site
has employed at least five Gazan journalists with ties to Hamas and Islamic
Jihad, including one who posted, “O Allah, unleash Your curse upon the Jews. O
Allah, cause the earth to swallow them, burn them, and shake the ground beneath
them.”
He also noted that the site has two reporters in Iran who
“feed the site regime-approved disinformation and propaganda.”
And finally, he called attention to Grim’s previous
comments saying, “The U.S. is a rogue terror state and a cancer on the world.”
But even more revealing than Grim’s own comments was an
interview Scahill did with Khaled Meshaal, who spent 20 years leading Hamas’
political bureau. Meshaal summed up how Hamas and its supporters see the
outlet: “I appreciate your keenness to conduct this interview and for providing
this space and platform for me and for all those who represent the Palestinian
cause.”
Headline Fail of the Week
Politico revealed last week that it doesn’t
understand much about Americans’ feelings on the Covid-19 pandemic — which
killed more than a million people in the U.S. — and the ensuing lockdown, which
decimated small businesses and caused significant learning loss for children.
“Covid rage had subsided. Then Congress called Fauci to
testify,” the outlet claimed in a headline last week, after Anthony Fauci appeared before the
U.S. Senate Homeland Security Committee but pleaded the Fifth to avoid
answering questions by Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) and others about his
obfuscation of facts surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Rather than an evaluation of what went wrong and right,
or how to do better next time, the rage stood out,” says the report, which
largely reads as a defense of Fauci.
“Republicans said it was about accountability; Democrats
a vendetta,” the article adds. “The nasty divide, which historians have said
tracks that of prior pandemics, underscores the challenge in hoping to do
better when the next pandemic hits.”
Media Misses• Former CBS News journalist Brittney
Hopper told News24 in Australia that she was reprimanded during her time at CBS
after she questioned Fauci during the pandemic.
“I have so much to say because this was during the time
when I was on CBS News. I was reporting extensively on COVID,” said Hopper, who
worked at CBS News Los Angeles until 2022. “I was out there on the front lines.
And I remember after a couple of years of dealing with hearing this man and
interviewing this man and having to wear masks and having our kids out of
school for years, I remember questioning what he was doing. And I got in
trouble and pulled off air for a couple of days because I started questioning
him.”
“You weren’t supposed to question the agenda and the
narrative at that point. And I apologized, and I went back on air covering what
I was supposed to do as I’ve mentioned before on here. I was their puppet on
mainstream media for so many years. Hopefully, more and more people are waking
up to, you know, really, the lack of journalistic integrity that we’re seeing,”
she said in response to Fauci’s congressional testimony — or lack thereof —
last week.
• Bravo host Andy Cohen did not have the same takeaway as
Hopper. He accused Senate Republicans of waging a “war on science.” During an
episode of Watch What Happens Live! he awarded Fauci his “Mazel of the
Day,” saying, “It goes to Dr. Anthony Fauci, who spent over three hours today
being grilled, berated and sworn at by Senate Republicans over the imaginary
crimes they want you to believe he committed during his management of the
COVID-19 pandemic.”
“Maybe our politicians are just jealous because doctors
and scientists do the one thing they can’t ever seem to do: fix something,” he
added.
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