Turning the Gaza Hospital Blast into Propaganda Instead of News – The Messenger

Blood is on the hands of some in American journalism for their complete failure to sort out fact from terrorist propaganda in the Gaza hospital explosion. It was a shocking collapse of journalistic process, and its impacts were devastating. A correction is not enough. It demands an apology.

Anyone reading or listening to virtually any media on Tuesday afternoon would have been immediately told that at least 500 Palestinians at a hospital in Gaza had been killed by an Israeli airstrike. It was featured with huge online headlines on CNN, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, among others.

The impact of this story, endorsed by much of the mainstream media as credible, was swift: A critical meeting between President Joe Biden and neighboring Arab leaders in Jordan was immediately canceled in protest; riots explodedin cities andcapitalsaround the world. The potential for peace took a backseat to protest over an alleged Israeli atrocity.

But there it finally was the moral equivalency which too many journalists had been seeking yet were unable to find ever since Hamas carried out the murder of more than 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, slaughtering families, beheading infants, and mowing down more than 200 people attending a peace concert.

See here, this story implied, Israel is no better: It murders people in hospital beds by the hundreds. And, once it was in print, people likeCongresswoman Rashida Tlaib(D-Mich.) and the entire global Hamas propaganda machine will cling to the original storyline and continue to spread it, no matter what the facts.

The true story, as we know it now, is Errant Islamic Jihad Rocket Explodes in Gaza Hospital Parking Lot. Search the internet and you will not find a single story with that headline. Instead, you see a slow hour-by-hour walking back of responsibility for the attack, from fingering Israel to making it about what each side says, culminating finally in the Wall Street Journals U.S., Experts Say Evidence Suggests Palestinian Militants Rocket Hit Gaza Hospital.

I love the use of the word suggest to soften the blow. Im not sure U.S. intelligence has a finding with that grading. Remember, they sent outthe president of the United States himself to saywhat they have found, which indicates a lot of confidence since you get fired for suggestions like that if they are wrong.

Anyone can now go through themountain of photographic, audio and intercepted phone call evidencethat this was not an airstrike, but a falling rocket fired within Gaza by terrorists with fuel to burn. And anyone can find a picture of the hospital that was supposedly destroyed but is still standing. The misfiring rocket actually appears to havelanded in a parking lot, destroying cars, according to Israeli military analyses. Seems odd that there would be 500 people standing in the parking lot at night. Seems strange that an Israeli airstrike wouldnt have leveled the building completely or left a huge crater in the ground.

In reality, the entire story appears to be dangerous propaganda engineered to inflame the region, to serve as a pretext for Iran and Hezbollah to increase their attacks, and to try to intimidate the U.S. from supporting Israel.

Lets examine a lot of the terminology used to shade the news. The source of the story was attributed to the Palestinian Heath Ministry. In fact, if you search for the ministry, up pop stories a day later, still in the lead position of many internet searches, with some version of this headline: Israeli airstrike hits Gaza hospital killing 500, says Palestinian Health Ministry.

Who exactly is this health ministry? Hamas. The organization that runs all government agencies in Gaza is Hamas. Not a single story says that the claim is without evidence as is routinely added for all stories about Donald Trumps 2020 election claims, or questions about Joe Biden and his sons laptop even though they had no evidence to support the Hamas claim and had no reporters on the ground to observe first-hand.

Then lets note how many in the media refer to Islamic Jihad as an armed Palestinian group. Since 1997, the U.S. State Department hasdesignated PIJ Palestinian Islamic Jihad as a foreign terrorist group. In fact, it has no purpose other than terrorism and isfamous for its suicide bombings. It seeks the destruction of Israel and its replacement with an Islamist state. PIJ is the very definition ofa terrorist group yet, because its targets are Jews in Israel, it appears to qualify in some media style books as just a plain old armed group. No wonder some college kids at Harvard cant tell the difference between Hamas and Israel, between terrorism and survivalism.

Almost everything that is wrong with and needs to be improved in todays journalism was on display with the coverage of the Gaza hospital incident. The media is more powerful than ever, as amplification on social media can create global riots overnight. Too many of its reporters and editors favor an anti-Israel narrative over facts. It is slow to acknowledge its mistakes. And it complains about misinformation when the media itself is often one of the primary sources of truly powerful and lasting misinformation.

Perhaps this episode will finally cause more editors and publishers to look at how they could have been so disastrously wrong and start to reform their newsrooms. A lot of lives depend on it.

Mark Penn is a former adviser and pollster to President Clinton and Hillary Clinton, the chairman of The Harris Poll, and CEO of Stagwell Inc., which is an investor in The Messenger. Penn is also a former CEO of Burson-Marsteller, one of theworldslargest communications companies.

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Turning the Gaza Hospital Blast into Propaganda Instead of News - The Messenger