NPR Ran Multiple Stories on the Michigan Synagogue Attack — but Couldn’t Be Bothered to Interview One Victim

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks. This week, we look at the NPR public editor’s appraisal of the outlet’s reporting on the Michigan synagogue attack, and we cover more media misses.

NPR Missed One Glaring Detail in Its Michigan Synagogue Attack Reporting

NPR ran multiple stories about the Michigan synagogue attack by a Hezbollah-inspired terrorist last month, but failed to speak to even one congregant.

The outlet did, however, air a soft feature radio segment in which NPR reporter Hadeel al-Shalchi traveled to the small village in Lebanon where the attacker, Ayman Ghazali, was born.

Ghazali drove his truck into a Jewish preschool at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township, Mich., days before the segment aired. He died by suicide after engaging in a firefight with a security guard outside the temple. The IDF later revealed that Ghazali’s brother was a Hezbollah commander.

Three questions into her newsletter, NPR public editor Kelly McBride responded to a listener’s question and other concerns about the March 14 All Things Considered segment, “In a small Lebanese town, grief and fear follow the Michigan synagogue attack.”

“NPR found the real victim of an attack on 140 Jewish American babies — and it’s the Hezbollah-infested town in Lebanon that raised a family of terrorists,” wrote Batya Ungar-Sargon in a Substack post about the outlet’s reporting.

Listener Richard Wilkins also scrutinized the public radio station’s reporting. “NPR’s reaction? Sympathized understanding for the subsequent ‘grief and fear’ in his former hometown. Concealment of then public knowledge that those two brothers were Hezbollah terrorists, in a town full of Hezbollah sympathizers,” he wrote to NPR’s public editor.

McBride would go on to acknowledge that the outlet had erred in its reporting — sort of.

“The journalistic purpose of the story was to explore the connection between the terror attack on the Michigan synagogue and the family that was killed on the other side of the world,” she wrote.

“Simply documenting that relationship and humanizing the family does not imply that Ghazali’s attempt to kill more than a hundred children was justified.”

She further argued that the story about the Lebanese village “should not be judged as NPR’s complete coverage of the Michigan synagogue.”

“NPR ran multiple stories on the attack,” she added.

However, she acknowledges, “in all of that coverage, voices from Temple Israel are absent.”

“I couldn’t find any stories that quote rabbis, congregation members or the families of the children who had to flee the building,” she added.

McBride also wrote that, compared to local news outlets, NPR and Michigan Public Radio “pulled away from the story at Temple Israel too soon.”

“When important voices are missing from coverage, it distorts the audience’s perception of everything else,” she said.

NPR wasn’t alone in taking a sympathetic tone toward the Michigan synagogue attacker.

The New York Times published stories titled, “The Michigan Synagogue Attacker Was a Quiet Restaurant Worker” and “Family Members of Michigan Synagogue Attacker Died in Airstrike in Lebanon.”

The second story “included insistence from sources that members of the man’s family killed in an Israeli air strike there were not members of Hezbollah.”

As confirmation of the man’s Hezbollah links emerged, “that denial was quietly excised,” Newsbusters reported at the time.

Headline Fail of the Week

The New York Times also came under fire last week for an embarrassing error in a print headline: “A North American Treaty Organization Without America?”

Eagle-eyed readers were quick to point out that NATO in fact stands for the “North Atlantic Treaty Organization.”

“A headline with an article on Friday about President Trump’s threats to leave NATO misstated the full name of the body. It is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, not the North American Treaty Organization,” a correction from the paper reads.

Media Misses

• HuffPost claimed in a recent article that the Pentagon was excluding Catholics from a Good Friday service. Senior politics reporter Jennifer Bendery wrote that the Pentagon “invited more than 3,500 employees to attend a Good Friday service at its in-house chapel. Except it’s only for Protestants, not Catholics.” Her reporting centered on a memo sent to staff by Air Force leadership that said, “Just a friendly reminder: There will be a Protestant Service (No Catholic Mass) for Good Friday today at the Pentagon Chapel.”An anonymous Pentagon employee told the outlet, “I guess so the Catholics know their kind ain’t welcome.””Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a far-right evangelical Christian, has tried to infuse his religious views into Pentagon activities,” Bendery reported.But social media users were quick to think of an obvious reason Catholics wouldn’t be invited.”Yes. It says that there is no Catholic Mass on Good Friday because Catholics do not do Catholic Mass on Good Friday. Is there literally nobody you could have asked? Not one person? Not even Google?” National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke said, joining a chorus of others who couldn’t fathom how the article was published.
• During a segment on April 5, NBC’s Kristen Welker seemed to forget that Markwayne Mullin, formerly a U.S. senator from Oklahoma, was recently confirmed as DHS secretary on March 23. Welker asked Obama-era DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson to “weigh in on . . . the fact that there is no head of DHS right now at a time when DHS is shut down.” Johnson did not correct the record.
• Another Obama official, Nayyera Haq, made a recent appearance on CNN to claim that Iran has “shown its capabilities in two ways, where the United States is unfortunately catching up.” The two ways Iran is ahead? The use of cheap drones, and the “meme war and Internet propaganda.”“For all of our talk on our side of all the people killed in the regime, they have been pushing out through multiple channels around the world, images of the American army generals and military people who have also lost their jobs at this time,” she said. “So, again, the way this looks out in the public is not a United States that is locked and loaded and working in one direction.”CNN’s go-to conservative commentator, Scott Jennings, was quick to call out Haq’s laughable claim. “Do you think that the Iranians would rather have their entire navy back or their memes?”“I mean, come on. We have destroyed 13,000 military partners. And they have memes,” he added.