When news broke yesterday that Israel had bombed Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza, killing patients, children, and staff, every “anti-Zionist,” “critic of Israel,” and most big American journalism outfits ran with the horrible story. The tale incited worldwide condemnation and recrimination. But it wasn’t true. Israel did not hit the hospital. The Islamic Jihad did. Hundreds of people did not die. The missile landed in a parking lot. It was Hamas disinformation.
The media’s disastrous failure on the Gaza hospital bombing story is one of the most vivid and instructive examples of the structural and inherent problems plaguing contemporary journalism. It mirrors many other fiascos of the past decade.
It is clear at this point that journalism schools are producing closed-minded, credulous ideologues who will believe anything that comports with their worldview. It’s either that, or we have a bunch of closed-minded ideologues who are willing accomplices in spreading propaganda. Functionally speaking, it doesn’t really matter. In either case, their sympathies lie with Hamas.
When it comes to outlets like The New York Times, we clearly have propagandists at work. The Times was one of the first to embrace the Hamas lie. It has spent decades spreading similar disinformation. The paper’s editorial board and its op-ed pages are teeming with Hamas apologists — as are its news pages.
Even as Hamas’s propaganda was being exposed, the Times moved forward with the story without any genuine substantiation. Since the newspaper had done absolutely no work in verifying these serious claims, it
