Shoddy news coverage of Israel by mainstream media over the past month indicates they’ve learned nothing from their plummeting trust ratings. Rather, the media shamelessly continues to promote an anti-Israel agenda at the expense of truth.

Recent calumnies slandering Israel confirm a triumph of political bias over facts by legacy news outlets like NPR, NBC and CNN.

We shouldn’t be surprised, given statements justifying the media’s betrayal of truth from executives like former Wikipedia CEO Catherine Maher, now the CEO of NPR, who says, “our reverence for the truth might be a distraction” and that there can be many “different truths.”

Unfortunately, the nonfactual “truth” peddled by mainstream media promotes the false narrative that Israel is unjustly attacking poor, suffering Palestinians, mostly women and children, who’ve done nothing to provoke or deserve this injustice. Instigation of the war in Gaza by Hamas, and Hamas’s subsequent war crimes, are ignored.

Rather, these media report Hamas’s claims, such as bogus death counts, as fact, while casting doubt on Israel’s democratic information sources.

Those who wonder why major media consistently distort the truth need only reference neo-Marxist (woke) ideology that dominates college campuses and newsrooms.

Woke ideology holds that Israel and her Western allies are white colonial oppressors, and their enemies are oppressed people of color. Why don’t these media outlets ever disclose that the majority of Israel’s population are people of color? Because it doesn’t fit their narrative.

Rather than holding objective truth sacred, legacy media pursue a mission to achieve justice according to their ideological version of “truth.”

In just the last month or so, mainstream media committed any number of journalistic sins in the service of this nonobjective truth and its base ideology, including outright lies, half-truths, critical facts buried deep in articles, and many failures to report realities that contradict their goal of defaming Israel.

Here are seven of the most egregious attacks on Israel in recent weeks, whose underlying purpose was to promote the victory of Islamist terrorists over the Middle East’s only democracy.

Israel “burns” Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital. On Dec. 27, NBC issued the headline, “Israel burns northern Gaza’s last functioning hospital; patients and staff removed,” citing the Gaza Health Ministry. The media invariably cite this health ministry on factual matters, shamelessly validating a propaganda agency that is fully controlled by Hamas terrorists and notoriously dishonest.

In fact, the Israel Defense Forces didn’t burn the hospital. A small fire, not caused by the IDF, broke out in an empty building inside the hospital. Most importantly, the hospital served as a Hamas military base, and its director turned out to be a Hamas colonel, something not mentioned in most news reports.

Israel commits a “land grab” in Syria. After the fall of Bashar Assad in Syria, the IDF moved into the buffer zone separating Israel and Syria as set up following the 1973 Yom Kippur War—a temporary measure carried out due to the danger posed by Syria’s new Islamist rulers.

Yet the media portrayed Israel’s actions as a blatant land grab. CNN, for example, published the headline, “Watching with trepidation and glee, Netanyahu orders military to seize Syria buffer zone.” Netanyahu’s state of mind was a complete fabrication.

Amnesty International’s bogus “genocide report.” On Dec. 5, Amnesty released a report accusing Israel of genocide, inventing a new, only-for-Israel definition. Media such as NBC parroted this libel with headlines like, “Amnesty International accuses Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians.” (For more details, read FLAME’s exposé here.)

False Gaza casualty numbers. Major media constantly cite casualty figures from “local health officials” (who work for Hamas) under headlines like this one from PBS, “Palestinian officials say 44,000 have died in Gaza during Israel-Hamas war.” Yet it’s common knowledge that Hamas manipulates data on casualties, adding in natural deaths, combatant deaths, those killed by terrorists and even people who died before Oct. 7.

Furthermore, Hamas intentionally inflates the number of women and children killed, listing men as women, and adults as children. Yet, 98% of media persist in basing Gaza war stories on such fictional data, while just 5% cite Israeli or U.S. intelligence sources. Why?

Israel murders “journalists” in Gaza. Actually, no. Despite headlines claiming “Israeli strike kills 5 Palestinian journalists in Gaza,” from NPR, the truth was this: On Dec. 26, Israel killed five Islamic Jihad terrorists moonlighting as journalists for the terror-affiliated Al-Quds Today. Reuters embellished the hoax by featuring the photo of a burned-out van bearing the word “Press.”

Gazans will perish without Hamas-linked UNRWA. A New York Times headline laments, “Israeli Threat to Banish Aid Agency Looms Over Gaza” claiming the aid organization is a “critical lifeline” to “Gazans who have endured more than a year of war” and whom “experts” say “famine is threatening.” While the article admits that “to the Israeli government, [UNRWA] is a dangerous cover for Hamas,” nothing is mentioned about hundreds of Hamas operatives on UNRWA’s payroll or UNRWA employees who took part in the Oct. 7 massacre. The article’s overriding “narrative” is about suffering Palestinians.

Meanwhile, mainstream media have refused to cover a new report by UN Watch documenting the deep, long-term “partnership” between UNRWA officials and Hamas leaders.

Media fail to connect terrorism to “globalizing the intifada.” When the media report terrorist attacks, like the recent car-ramming in New Orleans, they usually characterize the crime initially as the work of angry individuals. Hence, we saw headlines like PBS’s “FBI says driver responsible for deadly New Orleans rampage acted alone in act of ‘terrorism.’” No mention that the killer was a radical Muslim whose truck flew an ISIS flag. Likewise, virtually no media covered the next day’s pro-Hamas rally in New York City and connected it to the New Orleans mass murder with demonstrators’ cries to “Globalize the Intifada!” 

Why do legacy media display such contempt for journalistic integrity when covering Israel and the global jihad? When facts contradict the media’s preferred narrative of “good guys” and “bad guys,” depicting Israel and her democratic allies as oppressors and their terrorist enemies as oppressed, they dismiss or twist those facts.

As long as mainstream media prioritize their false narrative about Israel over journalistic integrity, they cannot be treated as reliable sources by those who want fact-based journalism on matters pertaining to the Jewish state.

A note of hope, however: Given Facebook’s firing of all its internal fact-checkers (censors) for their over-the-top “political bias” perhaps there’s hope mainstream media will reach the same realization. The vibe in America has shifted. Fake news is out. Telling the truth is in.

Source: JNS, originally published by Facts and Logic About the Middle East (FLAME).