Former AP Reporter Accuses News Outlet of ‘Collaborating With Hamas’: ‘Hamas Is Shaping the Coverage’

(AP Photo/Khalil Hamra)

Former Associated Press reporter Matti Friedman, a frequent critic of the media’s coverage of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, accused his ex-employer of “collaborating” with Hamas during an interview with Jamie Weinstein on Monday’s episode of the Dispatch Podcast.

According to Friedman, the inappropriate relationship stretches back to the first conflict between Hamas and Israel a decade and a half ago:

In 2008, there’s a war. And now we understand that this is the first round of may wars that are gonna happen in Gaza once it’s under Hamas control. But the end of 2008 was the very first one and I was an editor on the desk in Jerusalem. We’re getting information coming in from Gaza, but the stories from Gaza are actually written from Jerusalem. So I’m in constant contact with a reporter in Gaza, Palestinian reporter, great reporter up until that point, really, really excellent journalist up until that point and he told me that amid the fighting, that Hamas fighters were dressed as civilians, and that they were being counted as civilians in the death toll. And that’s a very important piece of information, particularly since we were making the civilian death toll in Gaza the center of the story.

Again, I think that would sound familiar to anyone following the news over the past couple of weeks, so that’s a very important detail. We need to understand that the casualty statistics are being tallied by Hamas, and they are counting and are not counting certain things. But I put that in the story, and that went out in an AP story. And then a few hours later the same reporter called back and asked me to remove that detail. And it was quite clear that someone had spoken to him, and it was quite clear that there were now rules of coverage in Gaza, and that he had run afoul of these rules. And of course I erased that detail, I was not gonna endanger a reporter for any reason, and I think that was the right decision, but I suggested to the person in charge of the news desk that we write an editor’s note at the bottom of the story to inform our readers that we were now conforming with Hamas censorship. Anytime the Israeli military censor goes over an AP story, there’s a an editor’s note that warns readers that the copy has been vetted by the Israeli military censor even though the Israelis would rarely make a change to a story, it’s mainly topics related to Israel’s nuclear program.

I thought it made sense to tell readers that AP coverage in Gaza was now being shaped by Hamas, but I was overruled and the story went out without very relevant information. We were now collaborating with Hamas, the kind of collaboration that I think has only really deepened and become much, much more damaging and complicated in the years since.

Weinstein noted that Friedman had previously chronicled the working relationship between Hamas and the AP in a 2014 article for The Atlantic. In that piece, Friedman documented what he argued are several instances of coordination between Hamas and the AP, which was accused of concealing the fact that Hamas would burst into its Gaza bureau to threaten its staff and refrain from mentioning rocket launches from civilian areas.

Friedman went on to assert that “any honest reporter in the press corps here [Israel] understands that Hamas is shaping the coverage” through both “intimidation” and “ideology.”

“The upshot of it is that Western audiences depending on mainstream media — what we used to call the mainstream media, I’m not sure if that term makes sense anymore — but the large numbers of people in the West who trust these organizations are being given a picture of reality that’s false and are having a very hard time understanding reality,” argued Friedman.

“And I think that if the Western press organizations had done their job and reported what Hamas was doing in Gaza over the past 10-15 years, which is basically wiring Gaza like a suicide bomber — they’ve created a military landscape that is indistinguishable from the civilian landscape — and that means necessarily that when war breaks out, it’s going to be a civilian disaster,” he continued. “The big Western press organizations have permanent operations in Gaza and they’ve been largely happy to ignore it.”

In a statement, AP Vice President of Corporate Communications Lauren Easton told Mediaite that “The Associated Press does not collaborate with Hamas, nor has it ever. Matti Friedman has not worked for the AP in over a decade. His suggestion of AP bias against Israel is false.”