The Washington Post Turns Over Its Homepage to Hamas

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look into the media’s misplaced trust in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, clear up a Rolling Stone hit piece against the new House speaker, and cover more media misses.

Washington Post Editors Give Prominent Placement to Hamas Casualty Claim

When other news outlets issued a mea culpa for their overreliance on the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry in reporting on the al-Ahli Arab hospital blast, the Washington Post doubled down and defended its decision to uncritically parrot the agency’s false claims that an Israeli airstrike hit a hospital, killing 500 civilians.

On Monday, the Post led their site with the health ministry’s claim that the Gaza death toll in the Israel-Hamas war has surpassed 10,000.

“Gaza Health Ministry: Death toll in Gaza surpasses 10,000 after four weeks of war,” a headline at the top of the site read.

The headline and underlying report ignore the fact that the health ministry is run by Hamas, but the paper’s editors did include a cursory disclaimer alongside the article to explain “Where we get our data about the Israel-Gaza war.”

“When we’re reporting on issues such as the death toll in the Israel-Gaza war, we use information provided from the Gaza Health Ministry (an agency of the Hamas-controlled government), the Israeli government, the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the U.S. State Department and other international agencies,” the disclaimer reads in part.

NPR took a similar approach. The lede in its report failed to cite the health ministry at all: “The conflict between Israel and Hamas has reached a gruesome milestone: More than 10,000 people have died in Gaza in the four weeks since the conflict began.”

“On Monday, the Ministry of Health in Gaza reported more than 10,000 people killed — most of them women and children — in the besieged territory. In the West Bank, 155 people have been killed since Oct. 7, the health ministry says,” the report adds.

While it’s not unreasonable to cite the health ministry’s numbers in reporting on the conflict given that the Hamas-run agency is the only source of casualty numbers in Gaza, other outlets have at least taken to disclosing the fact that the numbers come from Hamas, a terrorist group whose leadership is open about the fact that it encourages civilian bloodshed to secure propaganda victories against Israel.

CNN sent a push alert with the new figure but cited the “Hamas-controlled health ministry.” A lede from Bloomberg read, “More than 10,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the Israel-Hamas war erupted just under a month ago, according to the Hamas-run health ministry in the besieged territory.”

In its defense of its reporting on the hospital blast last month, the Post reported: “Many experts consider figures provided by the ministry reliable, given its access, sources and accuracy in past statements.”

“The Gaza Health Ministry releases updates on death tolls, which The Post cites. The Post also cites official Israeli figures for Israel’s death toll in the conflict,” the outlet added.

President Biden has made clear that Israel was not to blame for the hospital blast, which U.S. officials say killed between 100 and 300 people. The Israel Defense Forces have said the explosion was caused by a rocket misfire launched by Islamic Jihad, a conclusion that’s since been confirmed by video analyses conducted by the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal, and CNN.

The New York Times published an editor’s note that its own editors “should have taken more care with the initial presentation” of the coverage of the explosion.

“The Times’s initial accounts attributed the claim of Israeli responsibility to Palestinian officials, and noted that the Israeli military said it was investigating the blast. However, the early versions of the coverage — and the prominence it received in a headline, news alert and social media channels — relied too heavily on claims by Hamas, and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified. The report left readers with an incorrect impression about what was known and how credible the account was,” the editor’s note said.

Meanwhile, Biden has said he has “no confidence” in death tolls that come from the agency. Late last month, a reporter asked Biden whether the ministry’s reports suggest that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is ignoring U.S. calls to minimize civilian casualties in Gaza. At the time, the agency had reported that 6,546 Palestinians had been killed and 17,439 wounded since October 7.

“What they say to me is that I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed,” Biden said. “I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s a price of waging a war.”

“I think we should be incredibly careful — not we — the Israelis should be incredibly careful to be sure that they’re focusing on going after the folks that are propagating this war against Israel. It’s against their interests when that doesn’t happen, but I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using,” he added.

The next day, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters:  “Well, we all know the Gaza Ministry of Health is just a front for Hamas, it’s run by Hamas, a terrorist organization. I’ve said it myself up here, we can’t take anything coming out of Hamas, including the so-called Ministry of Health, at face value.”

He went on to say the ministry’s stats are “just not reliable.”

“I don’t need to tell you how to do your jobs, but if you’re going to report casualty figures out of Gaza, I would frankly recommend you don’t choose numbers put out by an organization that’s run by a terrorist organization,” he said.

NR’s Noah Rothman wrote that the institution “is not to be trusted for many reasons,” including its “tendency to promote the narrative that Israel is responsible for all civilian deaths during periods of conflict in Gaza when many of those civilian deaths are attributable to rockets launched from inside Gaza that fall short of their targets.”

And Jim Geraghty said so many voices in the Western mainstream media “repeat the claims of Gaza Strip authorities intertwined with Hamas with so little scrutiny or skepticism is that they genuinely believe that the Hamas ‘political wing’ is different from the Hamas ‘militant (or more accurately, terrorist) wing.’”

A Vice opinion essay demonstrated Geraghty’s point this week: “Hamas as an organisation is often compared to ISIS. Israel, the US and multiple countries in Europe define it as a terrorist movement,” the outlet reported. “However, Hamas defines itself as an Islamic resistance movement with a political party and military wing, and is seen that way by Palestinians and other Arab states. After all, Hamas has been running Gaza for 17 years, providing many regular services like any governmental administration would.”

Headline Fail of the Week

Rolling Stone uncovered a new avenue for scrutinizing new House Speaker Mike Johnson: “Mike Johnson Admits He and His Son Monitor Each Other’s Porn Intake in Resurfaced Video.”

The headline twists what is a normal practice in many evangelical homes: the use of accountability software to prevent pornography use. Johnson and his son use Covenant Eyes on their devices, a software that ensures they avoid porn.

“It sends a report to your accountability partner,” Johnson said in a newly resurfaced video from 2022 of an interview that he gave during a conversation on technology at Cypress Baptist Church in Louisiana. “My accountability partner right now is Jack, my son. He’s 17. So he and I get a report about all the things that are on our phones, all of our devices, once a week. If anything objectionable comes up, your accountability partner gets an immediate notice. I’m proud to tell you, my son has got a clean slate.”

Media Misses

-DEI activists notched their latest win in an unlikely place: the birding world. The American Ornithological Society (AOS) announced it will get rid of human-related bird names after some activists complained about some birds being named after individuals connected to racism and slavery. “We could decide right now that the words we use matter, and that birds should carry their own history, not ours,” an op-ed in the Washington Post advocated back in August 2020.

-A Washington Post advice column by psychiatrist Emily Willow suggests “psychedelic medicine-assisted therapy” can help individuals with “exploring the enormous and complex feelings associated with eco-anxiety and climate grief.”

-The New York Times offered favorable coverage of protesters who have ripped down posters of individuals being held hostage by Hamas in Gaza. “But removing the posters has quickly emerged as its own form of protest — a release valve and also a provocation by those anguished by the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians in the years before Oct. 7 and since the bombing of Gaza began,” the outlet reported.