‘Deeply F*cked Up’: Ex-White House Staffers Condemn ‘Sociopathic’ Article Published by Bari Weiss’ Free Press
X/@CrookedMedia
Pod Save America co-hosts and former Obama White House staffers Tommy Vietor and Ben Rhodes decried a widely-condemned article downplaying the starvation of Palestinian children published by Bari Weiss’ The Free Press this week, calling the piece “f*cked up,” “sociopathic,” and “grotesque.”
“Bari Weiss’ publication, The Free Press, they decided to write an entire article attacking other news publications for running photos of kids in Gaza who are starving to death,” Vietor said on Wednesday’s show:
And The Free Press, the argument they make in this article is that the images don’t prove there’s a famine because the kids featured have other health problems. They have like twelve different examples they use and one is a photo of a 14-year-old boy named Mosab Al-Debs. He is described by CNN as suffering from malnourishment, but the big gotcha from The Free Press is that the story didn’t mention that the kid suffered a traumatic brain injury after he was hit in the head by shrapnel from an IDF airstrike. So they think that is making their point.
Rhodes responded, “If your reaction to looking at children literally starving to death, in a place where 20,000 children have already been killed, is to try to dunk on those kids or the New York Times for putting a picture of one of those kids on the front page by pointing out that there’s some other condition that the starving kid is suffering from, that’s sociopathic.”
He continued, “I actually feel some pity for you, right? Like, I mean this. There’s something wrong with you, deeply, deeply f*cked up with you, if you look at starving and then go try to launch investigations to prove that those starving children have other conditions, and then to think you’re somehow owning the Palestinians or the left or whomever you’re trying to own with it.”
Vietor pointed out, “Who do you think dies first in a famine, right? It’s people with pre-existing conditions. Not mentioned is the fact that the IDF has blown up all the medical facilities in Gaza so these kids can’t get treatment they might need to look less emaciated or be healthier.”
“Sanctimonious,” concluded Rhodes. “And again, you’re looking at people who are objectively starving. Your reaction how to cover that story is to try to poke holes in – I mean, it’s grotesque.”
The authors of the report, Olivia Reingold and Tanya Lukyanova, took to social media to defend their coverage, which was widely condemned for downplaying starvation in the Gaza, with many comparing the report to the kind of Holocaust denialism that festered during the Second World War.
