Drew Holden Profile picture
Link to my Substack about the media, @Holden_Court, is below. Also seen in: @nytimes @NRO @federalist & more. Keeper of receipts. Maker of🧵threads🧵

Oct 18, 2023, 26 tweets

🧵THREAD🧵

A deadly blast hit Gaza yesterday. Hamas blamed Israel. The media rushed to parrot their claims. Evidence suggests they were lies. @FreeBeacon

Here are the outlets who carried water for a terrorist group to smear Israel ⤵️
freebeacon.com/media/here-are…

Few outlets have as great a reach as @Reuters, who rushed to parrot Hamas talking points to the world when the explosion happened.

The one outlet who rivals their reach is @AP — who did the same thing, repeating what they had been told by Hamas.

Perhaps the most egregious disinformation came from @nytimes. Not only did they rush to quote Hamas in their headline and tweet, as @HillelNeuer points out, they made it their website homepage.

More of the same from Washington’s paper of record, @washingtonpost.

Why would anyone take “Palestinian authorities” - which translates to Hamas, to be clear - at their word?

@MSNBC was on the ground to sow disinformation.

Naturally @CNN pushed the lie too.

I expected better from @politico. But at least they called the health authority “Hamas-run”

More of the same from @axios

@BBCNews was particularly bad. (h/t to @AdamBienkov)

@NewsHour telling the story the same way Hamas tried to.

I’m running out of room but more of the same from @Forbes
@FT
@thedailybeast
@thehill


Remember, the outlets who pushed this Hamas lie are the same ones who have spent years shouting that the greatest threat society faces is disinformation.

Apparently they’re happy to promote disinfo so long as it confirms their priors.

Then there were the individual journalists who pushed the lie. Here’s @michellenichols and @idreesali114 from @Reuters and @OmarJimenez from @CNN

And there was @KarenAttiah, who recently appeared to endorse the idea of violence against Israelis following Hamas’s initial attacks (found by @megynkelly), who suggested that Israel had to be behind the explosion. (H/t @ChuckRossDC)

Here’s how the lies from the press get repeated by other people in the media yniverae, like @keithboykin.

@KeithOlbermann presented without comment.

Some outlets have since very quietly changed their headlines to try to walk back their since disproven claims, like @nytimes.

@CNN was even worse, as @JordanSchachtel points out: covering their tracks on the initial lie but respinning the follow up to still blame Israel.

@AP did something similar, as @JerylBier points out.

This progression from @business really is something. Look at the time stamps.


Plenty of people who are always happy to hate on Israel ran with the misinformation.

Some of them, like @IlhanMN and @RashidaTlaib, are in Congress.

If you’re wondering whether the press will learn anything from all this, outlets like @nytimes are still parroting Hamas when it comes to the disputed death count, even a day later.

In your anger toward the media about this journalistic malpractice, please don’t forget that there are real people suffering as a result of this violence. There are plenty of charities at work on the ground — if you can, please donate to them.

I can’t get this side-by-side of @nytimes out of my head.

If you're wondering what the @nytimes has taken from their & their press peers' failure, it's that they did nothing wrong & were the victims of circumstance: "The fast-moving events highlighted the difficulty of covering the war between Israel and Hamas." nytimes.com/2023/10/18/bus…

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