Something Is Seriously Wrong at the Washington Post

T he Washington Post is falling down on the job.

Its coverage of the war between Israel and Hamas has been so irresponsible, so sloppy, and so tilted in favor of the group that rules Gaza that it’s difficult to see it as anything but pro-Hamas.

If “democracy dies in darkness,” good journalism dies in the care of radical journalists and lousy editors.

Last weekend, for example, the Post published a report titled “Amid Gaza war, U.N. evacuates babies from besieged hospital,” which included a shocking claim: The Israeli army had deliberately targeted Doctors Without Borders convoys.

“Doctors Without Borders said Sunday that a staff member’s relative was killed and another wounded after Israeli forces fired ‘deliberately’ on a convoy carrying 140 of the organization’s employees and their family members the day before,” the Post reported. “The convoy was clearly marked, said the organization also known by its French acronym MSF, and both warring parties were notified of its passage.”

As if this weren’t bad enough, the total number of Palestinians killed in Gaza since October 7, when Hamas terrorists murdered an estimated 1,200 Israelis, most of them civilians, stands at about 11,000, the Post story added.

There are two problems with this supposedly shocking news report.

First, the Doctors Without Borders claim is an outright falsehood. The Post has since attached a correction to its report, which reads, “An earlier version of this article reported incorrectly that Doctors Without Borders accused Israeli forces of deliberately firing on a convoy carrying employees of the organization and their family members in Gaza on Saturday, killing one and wounding one. Doctors Without Borders described and condemned the attack but did not name Israeli forces or any entity as its perpetrator. The article also misstated the number of people in the convoy; there were 137, not 140” (emphasis added).

Second, the death toll cited by the Post comes directly from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. No secondary source has verified or corroborated the figures provided by the terrorist group. And though the U.N. parrots Gaza’s numbers, it also concedes that it “has so far not been able to produce independent, comprehensive, and verified casualty figures,” and that the numbers it currently cites come directly from the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health.

(Apropos of nothing, but remember that weird media trend during the Trump administration where Trump-related news headlines included the passive-aggressive “without evidence” clarifier? One wonders why that habit disappeared.)

If it were just this botched report, that’d be one thing. But there’s a pattern now that suggests the Post’s coverage of the Israel–Hamas war is not merely sloppy and reflexively critical of Israel but actually sympathetic toward Hamas.

Recall that the Post editorial board recently urged U.S. universities and colleges to exercise more discretion when speaking out on current events. The board’s recommendation is a direct response to the conundrum many schools face now as they attempt to balance the concerns of their Jewish students with the bloodlust of their pro-Hamas faculty, staff, and classmates. It’s not a bad recommendation, actually, that institutions of higher learning focus more on education and less on injecting themselves into heated foreign-policy debates, viral news stories, and internecine political squabbles.

But the timing of the Post’s advice cannot be missed. For years, university presidents have been opining on world events and national policy — everything from immigration law to abortion access to gun violence to George Floyd to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But the Post offered its recommendation only after a historic slaughter of Jews prompted the spectacle of pro-Hamas students harassing and threatening Jewish students on American campuses. Imagine if there were a trend of white-supremacist students harassing black students at U.S. colleges, and the Post responded with a message amounting to, “Keep your heads down, school administrators. Don’t get involved. Focus on the true purpose of education!”

The editorial, by the way, came after the Post removed a political cartoon that accurately criticized Hamas for using its own civilians as human shields because staffers claimed it was “racist.” In defending the cartoon’s removal, the opinion-page editor claimed the section is about “understanding the bonds that hold us together.” It’s worth a mention that a 2014 Washington Post cartoon that is a rather ugly depiction of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu punching a Palestinian baby is still available for viewing.

Lastly, let’s not forget that the Post was one of the leading newsrooms that claimed, without evidence, that Israel had bombed al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza, leveling it and killing hundreds of civilians. The explosion, which happened in a nearby parking lot, wasn’t Israel’s doing, the hospital still stands, and the death toll was possibly as low as in the tens.

A more cynical man would notice a pattern in the Post’s coverage of the war between Israel and Hamas. A more cynical man would suspect that Post reporters have a soft spot for Hamas.

But who would be so cynical?