A Dark Day for the Middle East—and Journalism

How the New York Times misled its readers about the hospital bombing in Gaza.

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“Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians Say,” the New York Times banner headline screamed on Tuesday afternoon. The leadership of the Hamas terrorist organization could hardly have dreamed of better framing as news of the explosion and fire at Gaza’s Al-Ahli Ar hospital began to trickle out.

That framing included a photograph of devastating carnage that Times readers likely believed depicted damage to the hospital in question. But not only was the Times story topped with a headline framed entirely around the word of the Hamas-controlled Palestinian authorities in Gaza, the accompanying photo was not even of the hospital, but rather of a building in a city some 15 miles to the south. That, however, was only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the New York Times’ journalistic malpractice this week.

The Headlines

While the Times led with “Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians Say,” that initial headline—as is often the case with online media—didn’t last long. “Israeli” was dropped from the next version—“At Least 500 Dead in Strike on Gaza Hospital, Palestinians Say”—perhaps due to the Israeli Defense Forces’ cautious but firm pushback on the accusations. That “500” figure was changed to “hundreds” in subsequent headlines, and while yet unconfirmed, a report on Thursday citing a European Union official suggested the true number of fatalities is between 10 and 50.

“Strike” was the next word to get the ax, as visitors to the Times’ website were greeted with “Hundreds Dead in Blast at Gaza Hospital, Palestinians Say.” Eventually, the banner headline received the passive-voice treatment: “Biden Heads to Israel as Hospital Explosion Convulses Region.” Although the Times had run a separate story by that point conceding that “the cause of the blast and the precise death toll remained unclear,” a tweaked version of the original headline—“Hundreds Killed in Gaza Blast, Palestinians Say”—remained lower on the home page for several hours on Wednesday.

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  1. Khartig

    The Times misinformation caused material damages and was reason for increased spending on security.
    Is somebody trying to -at least- recover the financial damages caused by the sloppy/made up reporting?

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    A.Paolano

    The New York Times got people killed, that's what matters.

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  3. Tawynn

    From NYT editors note on 10/23.
    “ Given the sensitive nature of the news during a widening conflict, and the prominent promotion it received, Times editors should have taken more care with the initial presentation, and been more explicit about what information could be verified. Newsroom leaders continue to examine procedures around the biggest breaking news events — including for the use of the largest headlines in the digital report — to determine what additional safeguards may be warranted.”

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  4. Even Keel

    As someone who works in an industry where the truth was readily apparent, the news coverage was infuriating.

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    Retired Prosecutor

    Update: NR reports that the NYT has just rehired a pro-Hitler journalist located in Gaza. The media outlet had let go of freelance videographer Soliman Hijjy last year after a pro-Israel media watchdog uncovered a series of social-media posts showing Hijjy touting Adolf Hitler’s antisemitic views. The Times has now rehired him and is now standing by the journalist.

    No doubt he’ll supply the seriously needed “Nazi viewpoint” to the publication. BTW, there’s an article in today’s NR on the pro-Palestinian media bias with a great headline: “The Media Will Never Forgive Israel For Not Bombing That Hospital.”

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  6. Brett F.

    Inexcusable.

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    Marc Frischhertz

    The people spreading lies in support of their false narrative are no different than the Trump supporting nuts who do the same thing. These people are pathetic and should be exposed and confronted. Just like Trump supporters, they read something that supports their preconceived narrative and spread and amplify it.

    As for the journalists, pressure needs to be put on these organizations to fire them. They should know better.

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  8. BenP

    This article (to me) implies that the NYT are hiding the fact that they changed their headlines and reporting on this. But they've been forthcoming about it:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/18/business/media/hospital-blast-gaza-reports.html

    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/20/briefing/gaza-hospital.html

    They did screw up with the initial headline. They've updated as more information came in, and they've published articles about how they and other news outlets initially parroted the Palestinian claims and then changed their stories shortly after.

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      Marc Frischhertz

      The problem is their initial headline exposed their bias and it did real harm. I canceled my NYT subscription due to its coverage of this terrorist attack.

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    2. Betsybowditch

      I don’t think the NYT’s is the most egregious example of misleading headline information. On the October 8 front-page of the Washington Post, the print edition, readers were informed “Israel ‘at war’ after Hamas attack.” This left ambiguous who initiated hostilities when there was no ambiguity.

      The next day readers were greeted with the headline “Israel declares war against Hamas,” which suggested Israel was the aggressor setting its sights on Hamas, a passive actor.

      Headlines are tricky to write because they need to be condensed down to so many spaces while maintaining agency. But they clearly could have done so here.

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    Chris

    NYT does this on a regular basis now days. There are still people who believe officer Sicknick was beat to death with a fire extinguisher even though the medical examiner found no external or internal injuries. There's no money or fun in trying to correct the mistake with an equally bombastic headline.

    Sadly, they've become a propaganda tool.

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      HappyCow

      You know who else reported that Sicknick was beaten with a fire extinguisher? The Wall Sreet Journal. If you bother to look, you can see that all the major media reported the same information on about the same timeline. They reported what they were able to report, such as statements from the Capitol Police that Sicknick's death was related to injuries sustained during the riot. It wasn't until April that the autopsy results confirmed his actual cause of death. All the major media similarly reported the results of the autopsy, though only the NY Times appears to have been accused of "quietly retracting" their prior story (similar to other media, they didn't retract anything--they just updated their reporting with the additional context).

      So was the NY Times wrong to report what the Capitol Police released in a statement? Do you also consider the Wall Street Journal to be propaganda since they reported the same thing?

      It's easy for Bier--who doesn't report breaking news in real time--to use the luxury of hindsight to criticize other media outlets. People like Bier hold the media to standards that they themselves could never meet. There's an important role for responsible media criticism, but that's not what this is. This is just tribal rock throwing.

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        Michel van der Hoek

        While we have been decrying the extremism in right-wing media for several years now, left-wing bias in mainstream media existed well before Trump descended that escalator in 2015, and it hasn’t gone away. The Wallstreet Journal has an undeserved reputation as a conservative newspaper. In reality, only their editorial page is dominated by conservatives—their newsroom has been quite leftist for decades (see e.g. Tim Groseclose’s study of US media in the 2000s).

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          HappyCow

          "real conservative media has never been tried"

          I'm not disputing a general leftward bias in media. I'm disputing the gist of Bier's piece, and many comments here, that the NYTimes is beyond mere bias and is an active, pro-Palestinian propaganda outlet. And that when caught in the act, they resorted to "stealth edits" to walk back their earlier reporting. I'm acknowledging they made mistakes but the reactions and criticism are out of proportion to those mistakes. And the accusation of stealth editing is just dumb--they updated their reporting as new information became available. It's fair to criticize the Times for this reporting but apply your standards across the board, and spare me the conspiratorial histrionics.

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            Michel van der Hoek

            Hmm, I did not read this piece as alleging that the NYT is an active pro-Palestinian propaganda outlet. I do think it is totally fair to claim that most mainstream media outlets in the US (and Britain, for that matter) are reflexively sympathetic to Palestinian arguments. I think this article illustrates that kneejerk response by the NYT: when told something by Hamas mouthpieces about an event in Gaza, no editor thought to apply basic journalistic standards such as confirming sources and facts BEFORE running the piece or applying that headline. Of course, as the truth struggled to catch up with the propaganda from one side of an armed conflict, the NYT adjusted their reporting, but the original mistakes are exhibits in a long-standing indictment of newsroom bias that has not gone away just because Fox News, OAN, Breitbart and other far-right propaganda outlets have gained a new reputation as fake news media in the wake of Trump 45.

            The left-wing bias in mainstream media has been researched to death by credible academics over decades. Bias is not the same as conspiracy. It's not that "The Left-Wing Media" get together to propagandize left-wing talking points. Over a period of many decades, newsrooms have simply hired and bred reporters and editors that are so like-minded through a groupthink corporate culture that most reporters have become unaware of other intellectual paradigms.

            It is not conspiratorial histrionics by Bier to point out that this type of groupthink is causing mainstream media to pass on, thoughtlessly, mindlessly, the propaganda from terrorist groups. This ought not to be seen as the "normal" process of "progressive discovery" in journalism. This was journalistic malpractice and I think Bier has a really valid argument when he points out the huge lump under the carpet and asks whether we, as a civilized society, are interested in finding out what has been swept under there.

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  10. Betsybowditch

    Are any of those commenting here actually subscribers of the NYTs? I am and didn't even see the article in question. How many commenting actually saw it in real time?

    Once the Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza was struck, something everyone agrees happened, these questions arose: Did Israel accidentally bomb the hospital? Did Hamas, or the Islamic Jihad, bomb the hospital intentionally to make it look like Israel did it? Did a Palestinian rocket misfire and accidentally hit the hospital? Could it be something else? We don't know. It's a war.

    As David Leonardt wrote in a piece in the NYTs' on reporting in war the shifting headlines this story generated are not unusual because: 'it takes time to independently verify the claims from all sides. In the separate conflict between Russia and Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine initially blamed Russia for a deadly missile strike on Sept. 6 in eastern Ukraine. But a New York Times investigation, published 12 days later, found that an errant Ukrainian air defense missile was most likely the cause. The investigation relied on combing through satellite imagery, missile fragments, witness accounts and social media posts."

    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/18/business/media/hospital-blast-gaza-reports.html

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    1. On Fox River

      The problem is that the NYT and other publications IMMEDIATELY adopted a terrorist organization's framing of the blast story, and clung to elements of that framing as, step by step, they were forced to back away from other parts of it. What Hemingway called the journalist's necessary BS-detector was nowhere in evidence as they initially allowed Hamas to spoon-feed them every part of the account – the impact site, the number of casualties, the false claim that the hospital itself had been bombed, the very fact that a "strike" happened (a blast of propellant from an errant home-made rocket is not a air strike).

      I don't know what happened in that parking lot. I do know there are a lot of people at the NYT, BBC and elsewhere who gave automatic credibility to people whose associates had just massacred more than 1,000 Jews.

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      1. Betsybowditch

        I accepted the claim initially, though I changed my opinion as evidence emerged. Israel had made it clear that it did not feel bound by international law to minimize civilian casualties because "we are fighting human animals.” This was a view that seemed supported in part by some Dispatch posters. It seemed embodied in the “disproportionate response” being pushed. Translation: We gotta show ‘em who's boss.

        As one Israeli defense analyst explained during the 2014 Gaza war, “We want to break their bones without putting them in the hospital.” This is known as “mowing the grass.” But it didn’t work out so I figured they upped their game. What is the definition of insanity? Trying the same thing and expecting a different result.

        Beyond that, I know hospitals get bombed in war. In 8th grade I collected money for Bach Mai Hospital in Hanoi which had been bombed as part of the Nixon administration's campaign to get the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table where "peace with honor" could be hammered out.

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        1. Joseph Wein

          Betsy, your opinions about Israel's conduct regarding to the laws of war are simply wrong, and they suggest to me that you don't understand anything about the laws of war. I encourage you to educate yourself.

          A good start would be the Lieber institute of West Point, which has written extensively over the past 2 weeks about issues related to this conflict and the laws of war

          https://lieber.westpoint.edu/articles-of-war/topics/

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        2. Israel.D.Gale

          "Israel does not feel bound by international law to minimize civilian casualties." This is a straight-up lie. I follow Israel news closely on a daily basis from both Hebrew-language and English-language outlets. No such statement has ever been made by Israeli authorities, it would have been covered as a massive scandal in Israel's left-leaning mainstream media. You are entitled to your opinion, but not entitled to make up defamatory lies.

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        3. On Fox River

          An ordinary observer not schooled in the procedures of journalism can be forgiven for buying into a narrative that appears to fit the overall picture.

          When professionals do it, they are relaxing fundamental standards designed to prevent debacles like this. It often happens because they – reporters, editors and headline writers – are collectively duped by their own biases and jump to conclusions without verification. I find it dismaying that the particular biases in evidence here led to a reflexive anti-Israeli, pro-Hamas framing of the event.

          That could be excusable for a nonprofessional casually following the news and anticipating Israeli counterstrikes in Gaza; it was not OK for someone writing the news.

          Journalists see themselves as grand skeptics. They love to repeat the adage, "If your mother says she loves you, check it out." Yet all that supposed skepticism immediately went by the wayside here.

          I was a career newspaper journalist, by the way, who also taught college journalism.

          As a point of fact, the hospital was not bombed. There was a blast in the parking lot outside. The hospital would not be standing if it had been hit by an Israeli 1,000-pound or 2,000-pound warhead. The photos from the outset showed the building still intact, which should have led a skeptical journalist to at least question the Hamas claim of a bombed hospital.

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          1. Betsybowditch

            The "debacle" was quickly corrected. If only that was true for all such misinformation.

            I am going by what the Israeli government said. Netanyahu has spoken of the need to "restore Israel's honor" by eradicating Hamas once and for all. According to your post, had Israel done this they would "done it right" with a 1,000 or 2,000 warhead and the hospital would not be standing.

            So is the problem that Israel has been dishonored by being accused of a botched job?

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    2. Ian.Bonifield

      I subscribe to the Times and saw the Israeli airstrike headline. In my opinion it was premature and irresponsible of them to print that on their website.

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