On a used car lot, a customer walked around a vehicle. In the time it took for him to peer through a window and rub a smudge, a salesman appeared, ready with his pitch: “This one will sell fast.”
The customer looked puzzled. “Your ad says this car has every safety feature imaginable. But….,” he said, waving his hand in the direction of the aging sedan.
“That’s right,” the salesman responded, summoning up the confidence to defend the indefensible. “Seatbelts. Every safety feature imaginable in 1983.”
The exchange speaks volumes about what is being sold (junk); how it’s being sold (dishonestly); and more broadly, the need for a truth-in-advertising agency. It is also, as you might have gathered, an analogy. It might not be flattering to compare media coverage of the Gaza war to a dishonest salesman. But it’s fair.
Judge for yourself. On October 12, about a week after the Hamas massacre, The Washington Post reported that Israel had already dropped 6,000 bombs on targets in Gaza – nearly the same number of munitions in a few days, readers were told, as the US had dropped on Afghanistan in the worst full year of airstrikes there. “The highest number of bombs and other munitions dropped in one year during the war in Afghanistan was just over 7,423,” the Post claimed, citing munitions expert Marc Garlasco.
The comparison rippled across social media, with journalists, J Street, and members of Congress sharing the numbers. But they were false. Although the 7,423 bombs dropped on Afghanistan in 2019 were, according to an Air Force document, the most since 2006, the war had begun years earlier, in 2001, when the US dropped 17,500 munitions in just 76 days.
One mistake might not justify a fanciful analogy. But it isn’t just one mistake. Since October 7, the media has churned out an endless stream of false advertising about Israel’s fight against Hamas. In the Lawfare blog, the same munitions expert claimed that Israel dropped over 29,000 bombs “during the first six weeks of war” in Gaza, compared to 29,199 dropped by the US “during the entire Iraq war in 2003.”
It looks as Garlasco intended it to look: proof of excesses by Israel compared to the United States. In fact, the opposite was true. His figures for the “entire” 2003 war covered just one month of US bombing – a shorter time period than what he described in Gaza.
Distorted comparisons to the brief 2003 invasion are a common media tactic. In late November, The New York Times stated that more women and children have been reported killed “in less than two months” in Gaza than the 7,700 civilians killed by US-led forces “in the entire first year” of the 2003 Iraq war. But again, nearly all the latter number were killed in just a few weeks, during the active combat phase of the Iraq war.
The same newspaper later claimed that “Gazan civilians are dying at a faster rate than civilians did during the most intense US attacks in Afghanistan or Iraq.” Not so. Putting aside questions about the reliability of the Hamas regime, its figures at the time suggested a rate of 194 women and children killed per day. (Because Hamas concealed the number of combatants killed, the New York Times used this figure as a stand-in for civilian casualties.) In the most intense phase of the 2003 Iraq war, 243 civilians were killed per day. Once again, what was claimed as proof that Israel is uniquely destructive in fact showed the contrary: Israel’s response to the Hamas massacres was consistent with the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Reporters didn’t only misrepresent 2003 Iraq. When more convenient, they simply pretended it didn’t exist. In December, to make a case of Israeli heavy-handedness, the Associated Press reported: “During the 2014-2017 campaign to defeat IS in Iraq, the coalition carried out nearly 15,000 strikes across the country…. By comparison, the Israeli military said last week it has conducted 22,000 strikes in Gaza.” And just like that, the 30,000 American bombs in one month disappear.
The AP story also insisted that Israel had “destroyed” a large percentage of structures in the Gaza Strip, citing research that actually counted “likely damaged or destroyed” structures. That same day, a New York Times headline announced, “Gaza Deaths Surpass Any Arab War Losses in 40 Years.” But the toll fell far short of the number of deaths from wars in Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, or Iraq in that period. A day later, The Washington Post claimed that the displacement in Gaza was “the largest displacement in the region” since 1948. Again, many times that number have had been displaced in Syria and Yemen.
And who can forget the most famously botched statistic, when so many in the media rushed to share Hamas’s claim that 500 people were killed in an Israeli strike on al-Ahli Arab Hospital? In actuality, the blast was caused by a misfired Palestinian rocket, which had killed a fraction of the claimed number.
While these false and distorted statistics are a useful stand-in for broader coverage, the manipulations extend well beyond raw numbers. In The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, for example, a US official’s statement about high casualties in Gaza was falsely sold as a comment about “civilian” casualties. Countless major news organizations peddled the charge that Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, spoke of wiping out the Gaza Strip. “Gaza won’t return to what it was before – we will eliminate everything.” The quote, though, was doctored, violating every precept of journalism and concealing that the minister was actually referring to Hamas: “Gaza will not return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate it all.”
The dishonest sales tactics are by now apparent. But what is it that’s being sold?
Those misquoting Gallant, at least, did so to sell the ugly charge of Israeli “genocide.” The false figures and misleading comparisons could be motivated by similar aims. Those who care about truth in advertising need to push back so that this and other false claims do not take hold.
That’s why the media watchdog CAMERA has tirelessly challenged editors to correct the record. Because of our outreach, The Washington Post corrected its false statistic about the number of bombs in Afghanistan. The AP admitted that research it cited on damage in Gaza also counted “likely damaged” structures. And The New York Times corrected is mischaracterization of the US official’s comments on casualties.
After an exposé in The Atlantic about the Gallant quote, The Telegraph responded to a complaint from CAMERA’s British department and amended the misquote. Even The Guardian, which is arguably the most institutionally anti-Israel mainstream outlet in the English-speaking world, added the relevant sentence about Hamas in an article that erroneously quoted the defense minister.
Most errors now deal with Gaza, but not all of them. CAMERA’s Arabic department tackled a recurring error in the Arabic press – the false description of Jewish communities inside Israel’s internationally recognized territory as “settlements” – leading to corrections in all four Arabic-language channels of Western public broadcasters. Throughout the war, BBC Arabic corrected this mislabeling 29 times; the US’s Alhurra did so 18 times; France 24 Arabic, five times; and Germany’s DW Arabic, four times. The department also exposed that several BBC Arabic employees had supported the massacre on social media, and that one of the outlet’s programs questioned whether or not there was a massacre in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, portraying it as a matter of “dual narratives.”
But countless errors remain stubbornly uncorrected, and readers are bombarded daily with more skewed coverage both dramatic and subtle. The facts that would stand as a bulwark against the anti-Israel propaganda onslaught, meanwhile, are often underreported or actively undermined.
The scope of the challenge means that news consumers who care about accuracy should appoint themselves as truth-in-advertising czars. It is a role that requires more than just recognizing the problem but, more importantly, being vocal about it.
To speak the truth isn’t to erase Palestinian suffering. Experts in urban warfare understand that wars fought among (never mind underneath) the civilian population are inherently devastating, and this one is no exception. Hamas knew the same, and nonetheless authored this fight. But the war and its hardships should be discussed on their own terms. There is no need for dishonest comparisons, inaccurate quotes, and polemical reporting.
October 7 was a critical moment in Jewish history, highlighting how vulnerable Israelis will be as long as a murderous terror group rules Gaza. It came at a sensitive moment in journalistic history, with reporters increasingly itching to abandon the pursuit of objective journalism in favor of activist journalism, which freely molds, slices, and twists news to ensure that readers don’t reach their own conclusions but rather those of the reporter. It’s a grim assessment, but the good news is that standing for the truth about Israel means standing for journalistic ethics; and standing for journalistic ethics means standing for Israel. Buy one, get one free? Now that’s a worthwhile bargain. ■
Gilead Ini is a senior research analyst at CAMERA, the Boston-headquartered Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.