One year ago (October 7, 2023), Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israeli communities and murdered nearly 1,200 individuals, the vast majority of whom were civilians, including babies. According to Human Rights Watch, Hamas and its partners committed “numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity,” including the “willful killing of people in custody; cruel and other inhumane treatment; crimes involving sexual and gender-based violence; hostage-taking; mutilation and despoiling bodies; use of human shields; and pillage and looting.”
Despite the savagery of the attack, some in the American media found ways to defend the indefensible. “Hamas is saying, well, if nobody is able to defend, what is happening for Palestinians in the West Bank or East Jerusalem — with the home demolitions, the arrests, the children being killed, the desecration of holy sites — if they’re unable to do that, then we only have the ability to do it with military might and crude weapons and military,” MSNBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin rationalized on his network’s Velshi that morning.
“American politicians and other politicians think they can just ignore the context in which all of this is happening: the fact that Israel is an occupying power, the fact that Israel has violated international law as well as Palestinian rights,” a Palestinian political analyst, Nour Odeh, charged on the same program. “I really want to caution your viewers not to be dragged into the good guy vs. bad guy equation. We have to look at the bigger picture.”
CNN viewers heard pretty much the same thing: “While this attack was deplorable, and deeply unprecedented, it did not happen in a vacuum,” CNN International reporter Nada Bashir insisted on CNN Tonight October 9. “This has come after decades of what Hamas and other Palestinians view to be occupation of Palestinian territory. It comes after decades of violation of Palestinian rights and decades of which is where the rights groups and U.N. Human rights experts have characterized as policies and practices which amount to apartheid.”
Never mind that Gaza, where Hamas ruled, hadn’t been “occupied” by Israel since 2005. And Hamas wasn’t particularly respectful of “Palestinian rights,” either — a 2015 report from Amnesty International found the group guilty of “a brutal campaign of abductions, torture and unlawful killings against Palestinians accused of ‘collaborating’ with Israel and others” after the 2014 Israel-Hamas war.
It was breathtaking how quickly some in the American media pivoted to making Israel the villain of the story, recasting Hamas as plucky underdogs. “I’ve made frequent trips to Gaza and have spoken with several Hamas leaders,” CBS’s Imtiaz Tyab recounted on CBS Mornings October 10. “What they lack in fire power, they make up for in ideology and sheer determination.”
Journalists warned each other not to accept Israeli-supplied information. “The only source for ‘Hamas beheaded babies’ appears to be the Israeli military, which is widely known to spread lies and disinformation,” Los Angeles Times investigative reporter Adam Elmahrek tweeted on October 10. “Don’t amplify unverified, sensational info.”
“Last night, I asserted that this report indicated that babies were beheaded. This was an overstatement. I should have said that the report established that babies were found headless, a fact that lends plausibility to claims of beheading, but which does not prove them,” tweeted New York magazine Intelligencer feature writer Eric Levitz on October 22.
While refusing to accept Israeli claims, journalists showed themselves to be more gullible when it came to Hamas. On October 17, a Palestinian rocket pointed toward Israel malfunctioned, landing in the parking lot near the al-Ahli hospital in Gaza. Hamas falsely claimed Israel had bombed the hospital, and inflated the death toll to “hundreds.” In spite of the fact that the hospital building was quite intact, journalists quickly repeated the anti-Israeli propaganda.
“Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians Say,” screamed the New York Times. That night’s CBS Evening News pushed the same falsehood with the huge headline: “Hundreds Dead at Gaza Hospital.” “Hundreds Killed in Hospital Strike,” ABC’s World News Tonight echoed. Dozens of other news organizations followed suit, as NewsBusters’ Curtis Houck painstakingly documented the next day — all wrong.
During the 30 days following the October 7 massacre, NewsBusters’ Bill D’Agostino found fully two-thirds of ABC, CBS and NBC evening news broadcasts cited Hamas as a source for their Gaza reporting. D’Agostino compiled a video showing several instances of the inflammatory and wrong anti-Israeli charges that resulted:
The terror organization promoted an always-rising, impossible-to-confirm death toll that refused to acknowledge casualties among Hamas’s fighters. The networks ate it up. “In Gaza, it’s the youngest who are paying the ultimate price — tiny bodies covered in blood as exhausted doctors try to save their lives,” CBS’s Imtiaz Tyab recounted October 12. “The death toll in the besieged Palestinian territory has surged past 1,000 in just five days, and on nearly every street, scenes of anguish as rescue workers gathered the remains of the dead.”
“Night after night, the bombs rain down with the Israel defense forces saying they have now surrounded Gaza City,” CBS’s Debora Patta mourned on November 6. “But around the world, people are recoiling in horror at the staggering civilian death toll, with calls for a ceasefire growing louder.”
NewsBusters Executive Editor Tim Graham noted how the Associated Press instructed their correspondents not to call Hamas “terrorists.” In an October 2023 explainer, the AP offered this guidance: “The terms terrorism and terrorist have become politicized, and often are applied inconsistently. Because they can be used to label such a wide range of actions and events, and because the debate around them is so intense, detailing what happened is more precise and better serves audiences.”
Yet as journalists pushed to soften their description of Hamas, hundreds of journalists advanced a petition insisting upon harsher language for Israel: “To use precise terms that are well-defined by international human rights organizations, including ‘apartheid,’ ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘genocide.’ To recognize that contorting our words to hide evidence of war crimes or Israel’s oppression of Palestinians is journalistic malpractice and an abdication of moral clarity.”
As if on cue, PBS host Christiane Amanpour trotted out the “G-word” on her November 16 show, asking one guest: “What do you make of the killings in Gaza, which so many people are now beginning to talk about it as a genocide against Palestinians.”
“Would you describe Israel’s campaign in Gaza as a genocide?” CNN’s Abby Phillip queried left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore on her February 23 program. Three days later, she pounded the same drum with another left-wing figure, California’s Democratic Representative Barbara Lee: “Do you consider what Israel is doing in Gaza to be genocide, and do you consider the President, as a result of that, to be complicit in a genocide?”
Less than six months after the October 7 attacks, the transformation of an unconscionable war crime against the Jewish people into a viciously anti-Israeli media narrative was complete. Hosts now compared Israel’s Prime Minister with some of the worst butchers in history. “It is increasingly looking like Benjamin Netanyahu had a plan to force famine on the Palestinian people, on the Gazan people,” MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough seethed on April 5. He claimed: “You’re starving women and children in Gaza....They’re now having to grind up dog food and cat food and....drink salt water....It’s savage conditions, and it’s calculated....It’s calculated just like Stalin’s starvation of Ukrainians was calculated.”
The war in Gaza continues only because Hamas, beaten by all conventional measures, refuses to surrender and end the suffering of civilians caught in the crossfire. And Israel, having seen the moral depravity of their enemy on October 7, understands that it is impossible to live side-by-side with a merciless terror group bent on their destruction.
Worst of all, the media probably know that their one-sided hammering of Israel only rewards the cynical strategy Hamas set in motion with their bloody attack one year ago.
For more examples from our flashback series, which we call the NewsBusters Time Machine, go here.
