CNN’s Jonah Goldberg Blows a Gasket Over Coverage of Gaza and Calls Out His Own Colleagues

Jonah Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and a CNN contributor, called out his own network over their coverage of the situation in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday.

After his co-panelists expressed their concerns over Israel’s handling of its war against Hamas and reports of the worsening humanitarian conditions in the region, Goldberg announced that he was “going to be a skunk at the garden party on all of this.”

“I’m deeply skeptical of pretty much every actor. Mainstream media — including some people at this network — the UN is a hotbed of deceit, and deception, and self-dealing. UNRWA and Hamas are deeply in bed with each other — it’s not entirely the fact that UNRWA is entirely run by Hamas, but it is deeply infiltrated by Hamas. Hamas is the government of Gaza, and if you read closely the coverage of this, if you read the UN statements about this, all of the responsibilities are on Israel to feed everybody. And I think Israel should do more, some of these images are legitimately terrible,” said Goldberg. “But we who spend our time in TV should have some more acknowledgment of how badly things can go awry when public policy and foreign policy are governed by images.”

After host Audie Cornish pressed him on whether Israel has some humanitarian responsibility and whether there’s “a tipping point where a famine becomes something to be addressed,” Goldberg responded like this:

I mean just on the question of famine, as you have in the setup piece, it says the worst case scenario for famine is proceeding. The same report said there’s not in fact famine right now. They came short of saying that. They’re saying that if this scenario continues to play out. We saw a news cycle where I had to comment on stuff about how if in 48 hours Israel didn’t do something, 14,000 babies would be killed, would die. Turned out that was a complete social media driven hoax. I think a lot of people in the media, a lot people like Donald Trump, are following these stories based upon the steady stream of images they get on social media and get on TV.

It doesn’t mean all the images are fake by any stretch of imagination. It doesn’t mean there isn’t profound suffering in Gaza that Israel should figure out a way to do more about. But it also puts much more of an onus than you hear from anybody on the fact that Hamas, the only thing the international community ever asks of Hamas is release the hostages. Not let food out of your own warehouses. Not stop working, and sometimes with UNRWA, to sort of undermine the aid delivery process. And so I just, I’ve never been in a situation in a story where I have such complete distrust for almost every actor, including Israel’s people, on this stuff. I just don’t trust anything and I don’t want to win the race to be wrong first on any of this stuff, and that’s terrible because there are definitely people suffering.

Watch above via CNN.

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