In her Washington Post column Ruth Marcus is appalled at the New York Times’s reporting of Hamas press releases as factual and outright refusal to report the facts fully when they are revealed:
After the evidence was presented, did the media go back to the sources that misled them about terrorist activity? I have yet to see that. Cable and network news shows that featured critics claiming this was purely a hospital have not invited those guests back to explain their misstatements. The news organizations have not leveled with audiences that they were manipulated.
The New York Times, invited to tour the hospital with IDF, declared, “The controlled visit will not settle the question of whether Hamas, the armed Palestinian group that rules Gaza, has been using Al-Shifa Hospital to hide weapons and command centers, as Israel has said.†Really? I suppose if you believe all this evidence was cleverly manufactured it doesn’t “settle†the matter. Otherwise, it demolishes claims that this was purely a civilian facility.
Critics demand that Israel now show it was a “command center,†a generic term without definition and without legal significance. It was used as a military facility. Period. For some, no evidence will ever be enough to undermine the credibility of sources whose false claims about the hospital have too often been accepted at face value.
It’s already been established that the NYT along with other media outlets has published photos taken by stringers, er, embedded with Hamas. I’m open to other explanations but it seems to me the simplest is that the NYT is not on Israel’s side.
Let me be very clear. I believe the solution to Western media sites publishing propaganda is that they stop publishing propaganda. Stories should be corroborated by genuinely independent testimony. You know, a return to the old journalistic standards.
