Hamas Propaganda in the New York Times Should Come as No Surprise

Of all the global publications and broadcasters that botched their coverage of an explosion outside a hospital in Gaza this week, the New York Times is having the toughest time letting go of the narrative offered by the Hamas propaganda mill. It’s an affront to journalistic integrity in line with the Times tradition of running copy for history’s most tyrannical regimes. Shortly after the blast was first reported on Tuesday, the Times published verbatim the Hamas claims that the hospital itself had been hit, that hundreds had been killed, and that an Israeli strike was to blame. Within hours the Israel Defense Forces released overwhelming evidence that none of these claims was true. The trove of evidence included video and satellite footage and signals intelligence recordings. The hospital’s car park had been hit by an errant Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket. Perhaps a few dozen had been killed. The American defense community independently verified the IDF version of events. Photographs of the site were affirmative as well. Some publishers issued corrections. There were half-hearted apologies and retractions, but not from the Times. On Thursday, as The New York Sun and the New York Post decried Hamas’s attempt to blame Israel as a “blood libel,” the headline on the front page of the Times declared, “Cause of blast remains disputed.”You’d think that a paper with 1,700 journalists on staff would be able to distinguish fact from fiction in a case like this. Surely the Times has the editorial capacity to distinguish documentation issued by, in Israel and Washington, military authorities accountable to a Western democracy from the claims of an organization that, in Hamas, the British prime minister suggests has the credibility of the Kremlin.No such luck. To close observers of the Times’s record covering history’s most evil characters, its attachment to Hamas will come as no surprise. This is documented in the 2021 book “The Gray Lady Winked,” by journalist Ashley Rindsberg. At the outbreak of the Second World War, the Times delivered a propaganda win for Germany that the Nazi brass could have only dreamed of. It was in the edition of the Times with the main front-page headline, “German Army Attacks Poland.” The Times, in a page-three bulletin from Berlin, headlined “Border Clashes Increase,” quoted the Nazis. “At 8 P.M., according to the semi-official news agency,” Mr. Rindsberg quotes the Times as reporting, “a group of Polish insurrectionists forced an entrance into the Gleiwitz radio station [in Germany], overpowering the watchmen and beating and generally mishandling the attendants. The Gleiwitz station was relaying a Breslau station’s program, which was broken off by the Poles.” The “semi-official news agency,” the only source cited, was actually a Nazi propaganda organ. The import was that Poland had instigated the invasion by Germany — the opposite of the truth. Under the headline of “Hitler Gives Word,” the Times launched the Nazi propaganda campaign into the world. Prominent context provided was a full, verbatim reprint of Hitler’s speech to the Reichstag declaring war on Poland.The Times’ coverage of the early Soviet Union varied from robust defense of the regime to extreme enthusiasm for the new utopia: “They are giving birth to a new world, a new world outlook,” Times reporter Ella Winter wrote.“The excellent harvest about to be gathered shows that any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda,” Times correspondent Walter Duranty infamously reported in the middle of the famine in Ukraine between 1932 and 1933 that came to be known as the Holodomor. “The health of the people has improved and the birth rate has doubled.” When the Times introduced Fidel Castro to the world, it cast the future dictator as a democratic messiah who bore no communist sympathies. “Fidel Castro and his 26 of July movement are the flaming symbol of this opposition to the regime. The program is vague and couched in generalities, but it amounts to a new deal for Cuba, radical, democratic and therefore anti-Communist,” the Times’s Cuba correspondent, Herbert Matthews, wrote. Matthews reported admiringly that Castro and his guerillas “are giving their lives for an ideal and for their hopes of living in a clean, democratic Cuba.” Even when Castro suspended democracy, the Times stepped in to restore it on his behalf: “No one in Cuba has any doubts that in a fair election, he would win overwhelmingly.”The Times fancies itself the “paper of record.” It is, in fact, the “paper of record” for the the most credulous view of history’s most infamous malefactors. Well meaning Americans would do well to cancel their subscriptions and find another paper to read.

Hamas Propaganda in the New York Times Should Come as No Surprise

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