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.
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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Biden’s pardoning of his son Hunter says an enormous amount about the president’s views of justice.
But it also says a lot about the willingness of the mainstream media—the nation’s noble fact checking corps—to repeat bogus claims that suit Democrats.
Remember? ⤵️
For starters, let’s revisit the coverage of how Biden wouldn’t do what he just did.
Biden said he wouldn’t pardon his son, no way. He would trust our legal system.
The media repeated it at every turn, without a shred of incredulity.
Here’s @washingtonpost
Seemingly every outlet did the same. @CNN had a couple of my favorites.
Look at the lede in on this first one.
The media’s job isn’t to simply repeat what politicians tell them. Whatever happened to “defenders of our democracy” and all that?
The news that MSNBC may soon have a new owner (and that it might be a certain X power user) compelled me to finally open my “MSNBC conspiracy theories” screenshot folder and, woo boy, there are a lot.
If you’d like to revisit them, buckle up, and follow along. ⤵️
There’s nowhere better to start than with Russiagate.
Do you remember the promotion from @chrislhayes, @MalcolmNance, @maddow and others at @MSNBC that perhaps Donald Trump was a Russian agent?
I, for one, will not be forgetting.
But there was plenty of other insanity from the gang at MSNBC about Russiagate.
Here are just a couple.
The first seems apropos with Trump again picking a cabinet.
Whatever happened to Harris and Biden’s “strongest economy ever” that the media spent so much time hyping up in the lead up to the election?
I revisit the claims, and explain why they were off the mark about the economy all along, in my latest @AmerCompass.
Quick🧵thread🧵⤵️
It can be easy, in the wake of an election, to forget just how dominant a media narrative was.
One that’s already fading from view was how “great” the economy was, and why it would benefit Harris on Election Day. americancompass.org/its-still-the-…
As a refresher, check out this headline from @axios about the data.
@YahooFinance upgraded Biden’s economic grade to an A. That captures the press sentiment at the time quite well.
In recent days, the mainstream media has taken nakedly ridiculous claims about the tattoos of @PeteHegseth, Trump’s SecDef nominee, to spin up a story alleging he’s an extremist.
It’s an egregious example of politically driven “journalism.” I unpack why. ⤵️
The story really started with @AP, who ran an article claiming that two tattoos that @PeteHegseth has have ties to extremism, citing an extremely thin (and downright suspect) report.
They used that to label him a potential “insider threat” in their headline.
It wasn’t until 3 paragraphs in that a reader was told what that claim rested on: a tattoo of a Latin phrase. They’d go on to mention “concerns” about a cross tattoo as well.
Would be great if Trump’s unconventional picks for his cabinet inspire the media to consider a nominee’s credentials.
They might want to look at the current HHS Secretary, Xavier Becerra, who brings to the table the medical experience of being in Congress for 12 terms.
Or perhaps Obama’s former HHS Secretary, Sylvia Matthews Burwell, who had just finished her stint lobbying for Walmart.
Or Donna Shalala, Clinton’s former head of HHS, whose credentials were as a university administrator and feminist.