Washington Post journalist Evan Hill let his biases show in a dangerous way Thursday in a series of posts covering damages in Israel following Iranian bombing. While other reporters might show their bias through one-sided stories or fake news, Hill’s X posts could ultimately cost people their lives, all because he decided to share the precise coordinates of the Iranian missile strike.
Considering Israel requested that reporters not share the coordinates of missile strikes so as to not provide Iran with any extra data that could be used to improve missile targeting, these posts were already in bad form. But you could chalk this up to a careless mistake or just poor journalism if it was not for Hill’s historic support of Islamist regimes.
Early in his career, Hill spent multiple years writing for Al Jazeera, a Qatar-based news network. Al Jazeera has historically provided biased coverage of events in the Middle East, and Hill’s time there clearly reflected this. Focused primarily on the controversial events of Egypt’s 2012 election, Hill’s articles were noticeably favorable to the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, the same party that was labeled a terrorist organization and banned in the country just a few years later.
But even as Hill’s time with Al Jazeera came to an end, his biases stuck around.
After the October 7 attacks by Hamas and other Palestinian groups on Israel in 2023, Hill was quick to jump to the terrorist organization’s defense. Commenting on reports that Hamas had taken 40 Israeli babies from their families and had them beheaded, Hill ironically dismissed the story as fake news. This was “how misinformation spreads,” he said in a now-deleted post, following up by saying the act of terror was “being widely mischaracterized online.”
How something as heinous as the beheading of children could be mischaracterized is unclear.
Even more recently, Hill reposted an anti-Israeli post from the Turkish state-sponsored TRT World on Wednesday. The post shared an address from President Erdogan of Turkey, who accused Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu of having “surpassed cruel Hitler in terms of genocide.”
Hill’s anti-Israel bias was clear, but publishing the coordinates was a point too far regardless of who he supported. A journalist’s reporting should never put innocent people unnecessarily at risk, but sharing these coordinates served no other purpose than to give Iran an edge against Israel.
Many were quick to criticize Hill’s post on X, and rightfully so. Political commentator and attorney Marina Medvin called Hill out, saying, “The coordinates are not relevant news, so why is he doing this?” Hill’s reporting showed just how dangerous biases can become in reporting, not just because they can lead to the spread of misinformation, but because, when taken too far, they can cost people their lives.
