Hamas Invades America: Media’s Nightmare
Engaging Media Check-In: Campus Tensions and Biased Reporting
Happy Sunday! Let’s dive into the media’s highlights from this past week.
What happened to safe spaces?
In a shocking incident at Cooper Union college in New York City, Jewish students found themselves hiding in the library as pro-Palestinian protesters chanted, “Globalize the intifada,” banged on windows, and tried to force open locked doors. The tense situation was captured in a video that went viral.
Jewish students at Cooper Union are in the library as protestors pound on the door.
Listen with sound on. pic.twitter.com/pwYRo5KA9X
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) October 25, 2023
However, major news outlets downplayed the incident, referring to it as mere “campus tensions.”
The New York Times, Oct. 26: “Israel-Hamas War Protest Leads to Tense Scene at Cooper Union Library”:
The tensions inflamed by the Israel-Hamas war that have roiled university campuses in the United States spilled into the Cooper Union in New York on Wednesday, with pro-Palestinian protesters pounding on one side of locked library doors and Jewish students on the other.
The episode, captured in a six-second video snippet that was widely shared on social media, was among the latest examples of how sharply the Middle East conflict has divided student bodies at a number of top liberal arts colleges. …
Chief Chell said at no point did the police or private security at the campus perceive any danger from any of the protesters.
CBS News, Oct. 26: “Pro-Palestinian Rally at Cooper Union Leads to Tense Moments at School Library”:
A representative for Cooper Union says the library was closed for approximately 20 minutes in the late afternoon and that students chose to stay in the library until the protest was over. …
Off camera, several pro-Palestinian students told CBS New York they planned to protest throughout the entire school and did not target or threaten the Jewish students in the library. …
A spokesperson says about 20 students demonstrated outside the president’s office, who said she did not feel in danger, before they made their way towards the library.
The Daily Beast, Oct. 26: “Cooper Union Pro-Israel Students Locked in Library During Tense Protest”:
Representatives from the pro-Palestine protest said in a statement that the protest was against Cooper Union itself over the school’s “one-sided stance and participation in the occupation of Palestine” and that they do not condone anti-Semitism. At a news conference on Thursday morning, John Chell, chief of patrol for the New York Police Department, stated police officers had attended the protest in plainclothes, as requested by the college. “There was no direct threat. There was no damage, and there was no danger to any students in that school.” he said.
This incident raises questions about the media’s selective reporting, especially when compared to the extensive coverage given to the safety concerns of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ students on campuses.
‘All I Did Was Be Black’: Police Are Called on College Student Eating Lunch https://t.co/nySMbqgsxB
— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) August 3, 2018
Probe finds Smith College student was not victim of racism for ‘eating while black’ https://t.co/WP7kVzmque pic.twitter.com/ITtj7fDQbT
— New York Post (@nypost) February 26, 2021
Truth to power
The New York Times faced backlash when it forced out its COVID-19 reporter in 2021 for using a racial slur to condemn racism, yet defended employing a journalist who praised Hitler to cover the Israel-Hamas war.
The New York Times’s Israel reporter loves Adolf Hitler
The New York Times knows this…and simply does not care
???? pic.twitter.com/rJYQSKBBR7
— Matthew Foldi (@MatthewFoldi) October 24, 2023
Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident, as there are other open anti-Semites still working in prominent positions within American journalism.
With the unparalleled barbarity of Hamas’s October 7 attack against Israeli civilians, journalists who normally cover unrelated beats are suddenly finding themselves covering international affairs and terrorism. But that’s no excuse for getting the facts wrong.
A @latimes…
— CAMERAorg (@CAMERAorg) October 16, 2023
It’s truly shocking to see ppl like @KarenAttiah of @washingtonpost -who regularly posts pics of her cat & her workouts- reveal themselves as rabid antisemites who think decapitating Israeli babies is A-ok in the name of ‘decolonization” & that you are a ‘loser” if you disagree pic.twitter.com/8wWpA79iZL
— Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) October 10, 2023
BBC journalist Tala Halawa’s antisemitic tweets were unearthed recently.
In one of the tweets from July 2014, Halawa wrote “Hitler was right”.
In what world can someone like this work for a professional news outlet? pic.twitter.com/y4MvAtzTtG— יוסף חדאד - Yoseph Haddad (@YosephHaddad) May 24, 2021
Biden’s border crisis
A leaked internal intelligence memo from Customs and Border Patrol warned about the potential entry of Hamas or Hezbollah terrorists through the southern border of the United States. However, instead of reporting this news, media outlets dismissed it as fear-mongering.
Vice, Oct. 25: ”No, Hamas and Hezbollah Are Not Sending Fighters Across the Southern Border”:
For weeks, right-wing influencers, lawmakers, and political candidates have been using the Israel-Hamas conflict to fear-monger about immigration in the U.S., invoking well-worn conspiracy theories about asylum seekers acting as Trojan horses for terrorists.
The “memo” has acted as jet fuel on those conspiracies in recent days.
Voice of America, Oct. 25: ”US Denies Hamas Eyeing US Southern Border”:
CBP officials maintain that ”encounters of known and suspected terrorists at our borders are very uncommon.”
ABC News, Oct. 23: “Hamas Militants ‘May Potentially’ Try Crossing Southern Border, US Officials Warn”:
A CBP spokesperson said in a statement that the agency has no indication Hamas has directed foreign militants to make entry into the U.S. …
CBP intelligence offices regularly generate reports on potential threats to border security. Naming particular groups may indicate that officials have specific intelligence based on the severity of potential threats outside the U.S.
In other news that went largely unreported, a record number of individuals on the FBI’s terror watch list were apprehended at the border in the last fiscal year, and over 1,000 illegal immigrants per day were observed entering the country this month without being caught. It seems journalists are often the last to acknowledge a crisis at the border.
🧵Thread🧵
The media have worked overtime to cover for Biden’s failing border policies.
After giving Biden credit for a temporary lull in crossings in June, the ongoing disaster at the border is somehow out of his hands. Me for @FreeBeacon, start here ⤵️ https://t.co/7sgl0aZzZx
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) September 25, 2023
Media bubble
The media’s unquestioning regurgitation of false Hamas propaganda accusing Israel of bombing a Gaza hospital was so egregious that even the media had to acknowledge their failure after being called out.
NYT admits error in Gaza hospital report https://t.co/VqvYuecCi1
— POLITICO (@politico) October 23, 2023
New: A series of Slack messages shows there was immediate concern inside the New York Times over the paper’s framing of the Gaza hospital blasthttps://t.co/o6wdmpV2Ko
— Charlotte Klein (@charlottetklein) October 24, 2023
Thanks for the mention, NPR.
But to be clear, my point wasn’t that outlets ‘appeared to rely on Hamas’s claims as authoritative” so much as ‘the mainstream media carried water for terrorists and reported a lie as a fact.” But close. https://t.co/tqE2ADxc0P pic.twitter.com/Z5NVlcyg4c
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) October 24, 2023
CNN, Oct. 26: “The New York Times Walks Back Flawed Gaza Hospital Coverage, But Other Media Outlets Remain Silent”:
But if there was even a morsel of contrition from news organizations that breathed considerable life into Hamas’ very different version of events, it hasn’t been shown. A spokesperson for The WSJ declined comment. Meanwhile, spokespeople for the AP and Al Jazeera ignored my inquiries.
Reuters, which initially reported that Israel had struck the hospital, citing a “civil defense official,” stood by how it covered the unfolding story, conceding no blunders in the process. …
CNN went even further. Not only did the outlet amplify Hamas’ claims on its platforms at the outset of the story, but its initial rolling online article definitively stated—with no attribution to any party—that Israel was responsible for the lethal explosion. The story was later edited, but the error was never acknowledged in a correction or editors’ note. While it is common for news outlets to update online stories as new information becomes available, when errors are made, standard practice is to acknowledge them in formal corrections. A CNN spokesperson declined to comment specifically on the online story when reached Monday.
Reliable sources
Despite the retractions regarding the Gaza hospital incident, media outlets continued to rely on Hamas’s statistics on Palestinian deaths, even though the terrorist group has a history of misrepresenting these numbers.
The Israeli military said on Tuesday it escalated airstrikes in Gaza overnight. Over 700 people were killed, the highest single-day death toll of the war, the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry said. It was not possible to independently verify the toll. https://t.co/YKelkQh6XF pic.twitter.com/eXSNCNUWlC
— The New York Times (@nytimes) October 24, 2023
Some outlets even defended the reliability of the Hamas-run Gazan health ministry.
Associated Press, Oct. 26: “What Is Gaza’s Ministry of Health and How Does It Calculate the War’s Death Toll?”:
Gaza’s most widely quoted source on casualties is Health Ministry spokesperson Ashraf al-Qidra. From an office at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, al-Qidra receives a constant flow of data from every hospital in the strip.
Hospital administrators say they keep records of every wounded person occupying a bed and every dead body arriving at a morgue. They enter this data into a computerized system shared with al-Qidra and colleagues. According to screenshots hospital directors sent to AP, the system looks like a color-coded spreadsheet divided into categories: name, ID number, date of hospital entry, type of injury, condition.
Names aren’t always available, al-Qidra said. He and colleagues face disruptions because of spotty connectivity but say they call to double-check the numbers.
TIME, Oct. 26: “Biden Cast Doubt on Gaza’s Death Toll. Palestinian Officials Responded With 6,747 Names”:
Although Gaza has been under Hamas’ rule since 2007, this is the first time that the reliability of the enclave’s health ministry has been so prominently called into question. News outlets and international organizations and agencies have long relied on Israeli and Palestinian government sources for casualty figures. While they do so partly because they are unable to independently verify these figures themselves, it’s also because these statistics have proven accurate in the past. …
While keeping track of the numbers of dead and wounded may seem like a particularly arduous task amid the latest bombardment, which has seen thousands of buildings destroyed and more than 1 million of Gaza’s 2.2 million people displaced, there is a process by which Palestinians track their casualties.
Washington Post, Oct. 26: “Why News Outlets and the UN Rely on Gaza’s Health Ministry for Death Tolls”:
Many experts consider figures provided by the ministry reliable, given its access, sources, and accuracy in past statements.
“Everyone uses the figures from the Gaza Health Ministry because those are generally proven to be reliable,” said Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch. “In the times in which we have done our own verification of numbers for particular strikes, I’m not aware of any time which there’s been some major discrepancy.” …
Hamas received support in the 2006 elections in part by promising better social services, and some analysts say the group has improved certain areas of access.
It’s crucial to question the reliance on biased sources and ensure accurate reporting.
That’s all for this week’s media check-in. Stay informed and stay safe!
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