The Media is Still Failing to Accurately Cover the Gaza Hospital Blast
Late Wednesday night, long after its own credulous reporting citing the word of Hamas on an explosion at a hospital in Gaza on Tuesday had been called into question, the Washington Post shared a curious tweet.
“The strike on a Gaza City hospital was the single deadliest incident of civilians in Gaza since the war began after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. Israel has carried out retaliatory airstrikes in Gaza that local authorities say have killed at least 3,400 people,” reported the Post.
The strike on a Gaza City hospital was the single deadliest incident of civilians in Gaza since the war began after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. Israel has carried out retaliatory airstrikes in Gaza that local authorities say have killed at least 3,400 people. https://t.co/MFsrpbSG19
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) October 19, 2023
The plain language of the tweet is unambiguous. No reader lacking the context of the 36 hours that preceded the tweet could possibly come to the conclusion that anyone other than Israel was responsible for the casualties incurred at the hospital.
Its author even used the same language — “the strike on a Gaza City hospital” vs “retaliatory airstrikes in Gaza” — to help readers along in categorizing the former as one of the latter.
This was well over 24 hours after the Post and its peer institutions first reported that Israel was responsible for the strike, credulously citing “Palestinian authorities” and the “Palestinian Health Ministry” to cover for their amplification of Hamas’ propaganda.
It was a little over 24 hours after Israeli authorities had provided actual evidence for their claim that the explosion had actually been the handiwork of a terror group called Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which they said misfired a rocket intended for Israel.
And it was hours after both President Joe Biden and other American officials had announced that their independent findings led them to agree with Israel’s assessment.
But by the time the truth had come out, the damage was already done.
Across the Middle East, protesters took to the streets to denounce Israel and the United States. In Washington, D.C., a rowdy crowd doing the same invaded the Capitol complex. A scheduled conference between Biden and relatively moderate Arab leaders, meanwhile, was canceled.
And yet after all that: A massive, systemic failure of Western journalists, major geopolitical and social fallout resulting from that failure, and a near-definitive debunking of their claims, the Post was still laundering Hamas’ original lie, as well as their exaggerated casualty counts.
They even lend a little extra credibility to the figures by attributing them to ultra-euphemistic “local authorities.”
The Post isn’t the only repeat offender, though it might be the most flagrant.
By Wednesday morning, the New York Times‘ headline on the incident had been amended to declare “Hundreds Reported Killed in Blast at a Gaza Hospital,” but the subheading was markedly less neutral.
“With President Biden about to arrive in Israel, Palestinians and Israelis blamed each other for the explosion that devastated the hospital, where people had sought shelter from Israeli bombing,” it read.
During a Wednesday evening appearance on Dan Abrams Live, the Young Turks’ Cenk Uygur would only admit that it is “in doubt” whether Israel was responsible for the attack.
And a CBS Evening News segment on Wednesday failed to mention any of the evidence for Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s culpability.
By Wednesday, Tuesday’s gallingly irresponsible mistakes — both the spread of misinformation about this specific incident and the systemic error of valuing Hamas as a trusted source while concealing their identity from news consumers — were already being repeated.
Will the Post and its peers, having balked at their first opportunity to right their wrongs, do so now?
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
