ADAM WEISS: Corporate Media Breathlessly Echoed Pro-Hamas Messaging On Hospital Bombing

ADAM WEISS: Corporate Media Breathlessly Echoed Pro-Hamas Messaging On Hospital Bombing

Adam Weiss on October 30, 2023

Just days after Israelis suffered the worst mass slaughter since the Holocaust, the mainstream media (MSM) was quick to implicitly — and sickeningly — blame Israel for the death of some “five hundred women and children” at Gaza’s al-Ahli Arab Hospital.

Major news outlets, from The Associated Press and Reuters to The New York Times and PBS, breathlessly blasted the accusatory headline of their well-heeled evil Israel storyline with absolutely no proof.

Their source? The “Gaza Ministry of Health” — which is Hamas, a designated and perpetually-lying terrorist organization. The New York Times even ran the explosive, frontpage story alongside an image of a bombed-out and decimated structure. This was not the hospital, but undoubtedly misled many readers to believe so. 

Of course, it didn’t take long for Israel to not only deny targeting the facility but point out — with hard evidence, including video — the sordid truth that it was Palestinian terrorists and their misguided munitions that killed Gazans, and that the number of dead was much lower than five hundred. U.S. intelligence independently corroborated such findings.

However, the damage was already done. Scores of people across the world exploded into fits of rage amplified by an anti-Jew hatred that cannot be reversed, exemplifying the media’s chilling role in this war. At best, it is classic incompetence — running with a Hamas press statement without due diligence or effort to wait and fact-check, willfully ignoring Palestinian fighting outfits’ long history of failed rocket launches.

Israel was then blamed based on the word of a terrorist outfit that uses human shields and celebrates the death of Palestinian children not as an accident, but as an actual tactic in its overall public relations strategy.

At worst, it was an intentional, and almost gleeful and sensational driving of its pre-determined, anti-Israel bias that is bent on holding on to the narrative of the Jewish state as the villainous aggressor — conveniently forgetting that Hamas ignited the fighting with its vicious assault and hostage-taking on innocent Israelis earlier this month.

It was infuriating but hardly surprising that we didn’t see an apology from these big outlets. We didn’t see any responsibility and owning up to jumping the gun. In most professions, such a blatant screw up would see the perpetrators fired. But not in the mainstream media arena.

Instead, we saw the Times sheepishly switch out its headlines from “Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians Say” to “At Least 500 Dead in Strike on Gaza Hospital, Palestinians Say” to “Hundreds Reported Killed in Blast at a Gaza Hospital” to “What We Know About the Explosion at the Hospital in Gaza.”

And then we have the likes of MSNBC not only refusing to confess to their error but going so far as to double down on it, with its correspondent Raf Sanchez propelling skepticism with an on-air claim that “the death toll associated with this air strike against the hospital is not the kind of death toll you see with Hamas rockets.”

This isn’t the fog of war. This is unabashed activism masquerading as “journalism,” whereby the MSM seems to have forgotten its purpose is to dig down and unearth what’s true and what is not rather than hurriedly blast evocative images and terrorist claims.

And then there is the MSM’s obsession with “moral equivalence” and “proportionality.” Rather than illuminating Hamas’ crimes against humanity — both toward Israelis and its own people, including indiscriminate firing and keeping weapons in homes, hospitals, schools and mosques — while acknowledging Israeli exertions to avoid civilian deaths with advanced evacuation warnings and strategic targeting of Hamas operatives, the left-leaning press frames this all as an eye-for-an-eye conflict, of which Israel grossly fights with an unfair heavy hand.

This is nonsense. This is about a small democracy fighting for survival, surrounded by those intent on its complete destruction, those who are deemed terrorists, no different from ISIS or al-Qaeda.

Nonetheless, the media also wants to omit this reality. Rather than calling a terrorist a terrorist, U.S. outlets prefer the opaquer term “militant.” For one, the U.S. taxpayer-funded PBS explains, “Hamas is an Islamist militant movement and one of the Palestinian territories’ two major political parties.”

Give us a break. Hamas is not a mere militant group. It is a violent, barbaric, Iran-backed cohort with an official charter to “end the Jewish state.”

It is not only considered a terrorist organization by Israel and the U.S., but also by the U.K., the European Union, Japan, Australia and Canada. The media also likes to brandish the notion of Israeli “occupation” as the underlying cause of the persistent conflict.

Once again – false. It has been almost two years since Israel occupied Gaza.

Israel withdrew from the city in 2005. Yes, it maintains a stringent blockade. So, too, does neighboring Egypt.

Despite the ceaseless violence, Israel still facilitates the transfer of humanitarian goods and grants work permits to thousands of Gazans to come in and out to support their families. But you won’t hear about that.

And maybe — just maybe — at least a small segment of the American population has had enough of the putrid spin. While Fox News has seen a 42% ratings jump since the Hamas onslaught, MSNBC has fallen 33%.

But beyond what we see on our television screens, we also live in a time when Americans have access to independent channels, voices and citizen journalism. We no longer have to rely on the bubble of the mainstream media.

And while social media can be a double-edged sword, it also provides an invaluable platform to seek out information outside the tainted broadcast and cable channels and legacy print outlets.

It’s up to us to look past the absurdity and unearth the truth for ourselves. The MSM is lying to us all — and we no longer have it to give it our hard-earned time and money.

Adam Weiss is the CEO of AMW PR, a New York based political strategy and communications firm. His firm has worked with Jim Brown, Judge Jeanine Pirro, Congressman Lee Zeldin, Eboni Williams, Corey Lewandowski, David Bossie, Andrew Giuliani, Governor Haley Barbour, Steve Hilton. Anthony Scaramucci, and more.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.