The Gray Lady and Gaza
The New York Times Has Not Had a Good War
Late last year, Eytan Gilboa and Lilac Sigan, two academics at Bar Ilan University, published an article examining the mistakes and omissions in the coverage by The New York Times of the Israel-HAMAS war during its first eight months, and how the newspaper had handled corrections.1 It is fair to say they were not impressed.
The authors begin by noting:
Media framing of wars and military operations can significantly influence leaders, legislators, international organisations, and public opinion. … Coverage of war in general, and of casualties in particular, may determine the outcome of warfare almost as much as victories on the battlefield. [This is why] States and organisations invest considerable resources in information warfare designed to cultivate support among the media and public opinion.
This is undoubtedly true, and is a subject this newsletter has looked at previously with reference to the 1990s Bosnian war, a classic case where media and political warfare were more important than battlefield conditions in determining the outcome.
In choosing to assess the Times rather than another outlet over Gaza, the authors explain this was because of its status as “a newspaper of record”, with the attendant influence on policymakers and public opinion.
The study finds that the Times admitted seventy-two errors in its coverage of the war, forty-eight of them (fully two-thirds) directly against Israel. It is a point that authors do not stress, but should have: there is not a single case of false Times reporting that negatively affected the image of HAMAS. If incompetence was all that was going on here, the “mistakes” would not all be in the same direction. As telling on this point, the “errors were identified by external sources” and when corrections were issued they were often “late, vague, and sometimes evasive”.
The study is structured around some prominent case studies:
The Ahli Hospital explosion on 17 October 2023 was reported by the Times with a news alert and headline on its website, “Israeli airstrike killed 500 at a Gaza hospital, Palestinians say”. It soon became clear there had been no airstrike: a missile fired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), another of the Iranian groups in the Strip, had landed in the hospital car park, doing superficial damage to the building and killing less than fifty people.
Israel had quickly pointed out PIJ’s responsibility and made public a communications intercept as evidence. The Times updated the story with the Israeli statement, but as a “claim” and left the headline untouched. Three days later—once riots had swept the Middle East, a U.S. diplomatic summit had been derailed, and “long after other media outlets corrected their initial false reports”—the Times issued a pseudo-correction about the extent of the damage. Finally, after five days, on 22 October, the Times issued an Editor’s Note that corrected the record on who was responsible and the scale of the casualties, and conceded that the paper had “relied too heavily on claims by Hamas”.
Set aside the Times’ stubborn delay in issuing the correction and whether a serious newspaper should need a reminder not to report terrorist propaganda as news. This was a reminder, a disastrously costly one in terms of the Times’ reputation, and it happened just ten days after the Iran/HAMAS pogrom that began the war. So, an early warning that would induce caution going forward? Not quite.
Civilian casualties in Gaza have been the centre of the information war. The sole source for these statistics is HAMAS, issued in the name of its “health ministry”. On its own, this should have prevented media outlets using the figures; it should not have needed the repeated exposure of HAMAS’s lies. Similarly, the fact we do not know the death tolls for most historic wars should have insulated honest people from the illusion we can know the death toll in an ongoing war. That the only fatality figures on offer are from one of the combatants, and, again, that combatant is a terrorist organisation, should only have been confirmation that we do not know and anyone who claims otherwise is to be distrusted.
Needless to say, this is not the approach the media has taken. The Times has regularly printed HAMAS’s numbers, sometimes with an indication of the source and sometimes not. A month after the Ahli Hospital fiasco, the Times published an article by Lauren Leatherby claiming the rate of civilian fatalities in Gaza—which cannot actually be discerned in the HAMAS figures because they make no distinction between terrorists and non-combatants—was higher than in any other conflict this century. A blogger, David Lisovtsev, immediately pointed out this was belied by what the Russians had done in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol alone a year earlier. On 22 December 2023, the Times ran an article entitled, ‘Gaza Deaths Surpass Any Arab Loss in Wars in Past 40 Years’. Faced with critics who knew of the existence of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen, the Times retreated to the claim that it was “the heaviest loss on the Arab side in any war with Israel in 40 years” [italics added].
In the spring of 2024, HAMAS admitted “problems” in its own data. The Times initially omitted all mention of it, but let it pass. The paper then “addressed the issue a week later after the UN released a similar admission”, the authors write. Here was evidence of HAMAS’s duplicity on a major issue in the war—reflected in the Times publishing twenty-seven opinion pieces about the Gaza casualties in the examined period—and the scandal of the United Nations relaying these junk statistics with approval. Disinformation has obsessed the media for a decade and the Times is never happier than when documenting the corruption of powerful institutions: it is a story that writes itself. Except it was not. “The only criticism that questioned the numbers was short comments by Israeli officials, placed after an elaborate description of the Hamas data as credible”, note Gilboa and Sigan.
Misquoting Israeli leaders has been a persistent problem. The Times published an op-ed on 12 January 2024 by one of its columnists, Megan K. Stack, claiming that on 10 October 2023, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, speaking in Hebrew to the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) preparing for a defensive war while the body parts of their countrymen were still being collected in southern Israel, said: “Gaza will not return to what it was before. We will eliminate it all.” It took ten days for the Times to append an Editor’s Note admitting that what Gallant had said was: “Gaza will not return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate it all” [italics added].
A similar game was played in the same article with a speech from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, where he cited a Bible verse about a surprise attack on the innocent and Stack pretended it was a different verse about eradicating the Amalekites, despite an official English translation being readily available. This has never been corrected.
Another Times columnist, Michelle Goldberg, wrote on 5 January 2024 that Netanyahu had said the mission was the “surrender and deportation” of “residents of the Gaza Strip”. An Editor’s Note did—eventually, on 23 January—correct this one, noting that Netanyahu was “referring to the Hamas leadership”.
The purpose of these op-eds was undisguised: it was to support the political warfare of the African National Congress (ANC), the one-party rulers of South Africa, and their collaborators, who have accosted the U.N.’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) with ravings about Israel being engaged in “genocide”. Lacking anything approximating to material evidence, the ANC regime has built its “case” around wartime statements from Israeli officials that are argued to demonstrate genocidal intent, a premise so ludicrous that it was rejected even by “international law” practitioners until recently. As the authors note, it is instructive that the genuinely genocidal statements the leaders of Iran’s Islamic Revolution have been issuing against Israel since 1979 do not seem to concern either the ICJ or the ANC.2
Employing dubious local journalists has been a feature of the Times’ coverage. An obvious example is Soliman Hijjy. A Gazan photojournalist, Hijjy had been fired by the Times back in 2022 when his antisemitic incitement on social media became known, yet he was hired back after the Simchat Torah pogrom. One of Hijjy’s contributions was for the fabricated Al-Ahli Hospital story. When Hijjy’s rehiring was exposed by The New York Post, the Times publicly defended him, but “didn’t publish any more contributions from Hijjy, implicitly admitting the error of rehiring him”, write Gilboa and Sigan. There was also the strange case of Yousef Masoud, another photojournalist, who was taking pictures eleven minutes into the HAMAS attack on 7 October 2023. The Times said this showed his courage and commitment to the “free press”. Survivors of the pogrom brought a lawsuit alleging Masoud was a media operative for the terrorists. Whatever the truth in that case, a recurring issue has been IDF strikes killing HAMAS and PIJ officials posing as “journalists”, and the Times refusing to correct the record even when given unassailable proof.
The radicalisation of the Times newsroom is the final issue the authors highlight. Alison Cowan and James Bennet are among those Times veterans who had written in the early stages of the war about their despair in watching the old ideals of accuracy and fairness give way at the Gray Lady under internal pressure from a younger cadre who prized political activism and had found ways to bully their editors and superiors into submission. Internal deliberations from the Times became public shortly after the Ahli Hospital explosion showing that there were senior Times staffers fully aware in advance of the recklessness of how the paper handled that episode, but they had been overwhelmed by the radicals determined to push an anti-Israel narrative.3
The most gruesome example of this dynamic at the Times came after the paper published a detailed article on 28 December 2023 about HAMAS’s systematic use of sexual violence against Israeli women during the pogrom, including rape, gang rape, and the savage mutilation of sex organs. HAMAS’s supporters have not found themselves troubled in defending mass-murder, the abduction of Holocaust survivors, and the strangling of Jewish babies. Both the Islamists and the far-Left, however, have found it ideologically inconvenient to acknowledge HAMAS’s large-scale use of sexual violence on 7 October, so they have not. A vast campaign of denialism has been waged from the moment it became clear rape was an intrinsic component of HAMAS’s invasion of Israel. The Times found itself in the cross-fire of this campaign.4
The newsroom radicals at the Times first tried to block the publication of the article on HAMAS’s use of rape as a weapon of war. When that failed, they selectively leaked internal deliberations from the Times to a far-Left outlet claiming it showed problems with the evidence underlying the article. It quickly became an article of faith at pro-HAMAS publications that the Times article had been “debunked”. The Times did not help itself on this front.
An investigation was launched and the Times formally stood by its reporting, but the paper also “publicly fir[ed] and denounce[ed] the Israeli reporter … hired after 7 October specifically to investigate the Hamas sex crimes, for ‘liking’ a pro-Israeli social media post on the day of the 7 October massacre”, write Gilboa and Sigan, and then “publish[ed] a later article based on superficial evidence, which partially contradicted one of the testimonies in the original investigation, without literally stating that it was doing so.” Then, when the Times submitted Gaza coverage articles to the Pulitzer committee, it pointedly excluded the HAMAS sexual violence article, despite the view of Times Editor-in-Chief Joe Kahn that it was a “signature piece”.
Gilboa and Sigan conclude:
This article demonstrates serious errors, inadequate corrections, serious omissions, and poor editorial supervision in the Times’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. These were not just sporadic failures. They seem to represent an endemic malaise. The errors discussed above were identified by external sources, not by the newspaper itself. There may well have been many more distortions no one has found or bothered to challenge the paper with. The Times has also failed to learn from its errors.
As if to demonstrate this last point, last week the Times published an article with a picture of an emaciated Gazan baby, Muhammad al-Mutawaq, which went viral as a demonstration of the impact of Israeli-imposed starvation in the Strip, yet it was almost immediately apparent something was amiss. It turned out the photograph was cropped so as to deliberately exclude Muhammad’s brother, who was clearly not starving, nor was his mother. It did little to boost confidence that the photograph was taken by a freelancer for Anadolu Agency, a State media channel in Turkey, where the virulently antisemitic ruler, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, does not allow much press freedom of any kind and certainly not as it relates to Israel. Medical records in Gaza were subsequently found showing little Muhammad has hypoxemia (low oxygen in the blood) and cerebral palsy, which among other things affects his “movement, muscle tone, and posture”. It transpired Muhammad’s mother had confirmed his congenital illnesses to CNN, though the outlet chose to omit this in its written coverage.
Five days after the original article about Muhammad, an Editor’s Note was appended that, amid insisting the Times was right in general, grudgingly acknowledged an update had been made with “new information” to “add context” and give “greater understanding”. It was a textbook instance of what Gilboa and Sigan describe: the Times’ outsize impact on the public understanding of geopolitical events, and the “evasive” and “inadequate corrections” when the reporting proves to be flawed.
The Times shaping its reportage to benefit a political cause is not unique to Gaza. The Times was a specific offender in the Bosnia case. Throughout the long Cold War, the Times routinely gave an air of benignity to the instruments of Soviet imperialism, notably Fidel Castro in Cuba and Salvador Allende in Chile. The Times’ leading role in covering up the Holodomor terror-famine within the Soviet Union itself is infamous, and Communists of any stripe were never unduly burdened by the Times. The Times, it is true, did not so much actively combat the truth about the world-historical crimes committed in Cambodia after Red China effectively colonised it in the 1970s, as had happened in Soviet Ukraine forty years earlier. Instead, the Times just ignored the Khmer Rouge atrocities as far as possible.5 The ideological motivations for the Times downplaying the Holocaust and obscuring the Jewish identity of its victims did not include sympathy with the Nazi perpetrators, but it was egregious all the same.
The temptation to leap from the above to a wholesale denunciation of the Times, let alone the entire “mainstream media” or “corporate press”, should be resisted. The alternatives have generally been worse, and outlets like the Times have shown that they can course-correct towards an ethos that values honesty and fairness on certain issues. Better, then, to take a critical but selective approach, because while nihilistic rejection of the “mainstream media” might be a dead end, it nonetheless remains true that there are some subjects where there is considerable distance between what The New York Times considers “all the news that’s fit to print” and what is true.
NOTES
The title of the paper is: ‘The New York Times Coverage of the Israel-Hamas War: Errors, Omissions, and Poor Editorial Supervision’.
Without even getting into the grisly nature of the ANC, its approach to “international law” can be seen in it having welcomed Sudan’s tyrant, Umar al-Bashir, to South Africa when he was under an International Criminal Court (ICC) indictment for genocide, and merely six months before going to the ICJ the ANC had said publicly it would not enforce the ICC warrant against Russian ruler Vladimir Putin should he choose to visit South Africa.
Charlotte Klein at Vanity Fair reported on an exchange in a Times Slack channel called #israel-briefings:
[A] senior editor on the International desk wrote in the same Slack channel, “The [headline] on the [home page] goes way too far.”
A second senior news editor asked, “How is it different than the blog hed,” referring to a headline in the paper’s live-blog format. “They both say Israeli strike kills, per Palestinians.”
“I think we can’t just hang the attribution of something so big on one source without having tried to verify it,” the International editor said. “And then slap it across the top of the [home page]. Putting the attribution at the end doesn’t give us cover, if we’ve been burned and we’re wrong.”
It did no good. Even conferring with a “senior Standards editor” could not halt the clamour at the Times to blame Israel over the Ahli Hospital explosion on the say-so of HAMAS.
A number of the old-school journalists at the Times were quoted in a piece in March 2024 about the internal rebellion over the HAMAS sexual violence article, and they explained that the bottom line was “many of [the paper’s] own staffers do not want to investigate the sexual violence that occurred on October 7. They see it as a vulnerability to their own side in the information war about Gaza.” That there are Times journalists who conceive of themselves as having a “side” is the problem, of course.
In 1976, as an example, The New York Times published a grand total of four articles on the atrocities by the Khmer Rouge that had already killed tens if not hundreds of thousands of people. The Angkar regime would ultimately kill perhaps a million Cambodians out of a population of seven million in its four years in power. For comparison, that same year the Times published sixty-six articles on human rights abuses in Chile under Augusto Pinochet, whose regime lasted fifteen years and killed or “disappeared” 3,000 people, according to the State investigations conducted after the General fell.
The NYT is probably the single best example of the lack of diversity in newsrooms. There are almost zero veterans in journalism.