In late July 2024, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy published an analysis of the Washington Post's coverage of the Gaza War, criticizing its heavy reliance on anonymous sources. Robert Satloff examined 436 articles critical of Israel from seven major media outlets, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, ABC, CBS News, and CNN. The Post produced 72% of unofficial anonymous sources reporting on Gaza, an astounding five times more than The New York Times and all the other U.S. media outlets. Furthermore, the use of anonymous sources goes against The Post’s own journalistic standards, which states "we should avoid blind quotations whose only purpose is to add colour to a story."
When using anonymous sources, the readers are not able to determine the frequency with which the same person is being cited, and a lack of new voices thwarts the reader's ability to gain a wide variety of perspectives. The use of anonymous sources is generally to provide factual information not available elsewhere. However, in the Post this was not the case, and the stories described only one side with shocking descriptions to evoke emotionality and offer an opinion. The report criticized not only the Post’s systemic abuse of anonymous sources, but also its refusal to contextualize Israel’s response to Hamas or Hezbollah provocations, or to seek countering comments from Israeli sources.
Given the Post’s prominence and credibility among policymakers, young liberals, and progressives nationally and worldwide, we cannot overestimate its influence in tilting the narrative against Israel. The Post may be the most egregious of the liberal media Satloff examined, but it is not alone in placing a negative picture of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict front and centre in the consciousness of Americans and Canadians, to the detriment of Israel.
Recently, Instagram creator Zach Sage Fox took to the streets of New York City to conduct a segment called "No Jews, No News." "What is the biggest news story you've heard about recently?" asks Fox.
Interviewees quickly responded with "Israel and Palestine," "Gaza," and "Palestine." None of them were aware of other humanitarian crises happening in the world, such as in Sudan, Syria, and Congo, where actual genocides have taken place in the past and in some instances are currently ongoing.
Why this obsessive focus on Israel? Some explanations, often masking an inherent antisemitism, have been suggested over the years. As Rabbi Moshe Goldman, from Waterloo Chabad, says, "It's the double standard and the special treatment that Israel gets that causes people to feel like there's an antisemitic crusade," and "If there's no Jews, there's no news."
Fourteen years ago, history and science writer Robert Fowke posited in his article, Why this obsession with Israel and the Palestinians? that Israel isn't foreign enough. "The trouble is that Israel promotes itself as the state for all Jews, including - despite themselves - my friends. And because some of my friends are Jews and it is, therefore, their country, it is in some subliminal sense my country too. It is foreign, of course. But not emotionally, unlike Thailand or Uzbekistan."
As Fowke puts it, Israel "is emotionally, almost an English country planted on the Mediterranean shores." Echoes of Western perceptions of colonialism, implicitly denying Jews’ indigeneity to the land are present here.
Lars Faaborg-Andersen, the then EU Ambassador to Israel agreed with Fowke and admitted in a 2015 exchange with American-Israeli writer and political commentator Caroline Glick at a Jerusalem Post conference, that the EU applied double standards to Israel, suggesting Israel should be grateful. He argued Israel should be judged by higher standards than Palestinians and countries like Syria, as it is more aligned with Western nations. Glick disagreed, claiming the EU imposes singular standards on Israel, not applied to Western countries, and accused the EU of antisemitism.
Based on their coverage of the Gaza conflict, most legacy media commentators have no problem applying Fowkes’ and Faaborg-Andersen’s double standards subliminally to Israel, if not outrightly.
According to National Public Radio (NPR) and CNN journalist Josh Lev, it is often as simple as headlines referencing Gaza and the West Bank as "the occupied territories." Never mind that other countries are being "occupied," such as Cyprus by Turkey, but as Lev explained, the word "the" implies that this "occupation" is what society should focus on.
Neither will they refer to Hamas as "terrorists," despite having no problem identifying other violent groups as such. Following the Oct. 7th massacre, then UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron challenged the BBC to finally acknowledge the obvious by calling Hamas terrorists.
A BBC spokesperson replied, "We've made our long-standing position on this matter very clear. We use the word 'terrorist' when attributed to others, such as the UK Government,"
meaning they only cite others’ use of the word when referencing Hamas. The BBC's refusal to refer to Hamas' slaughter of hundreds, beheadings, and burning of infants alive in ovens as terrorism sparked well-deserved derision from many quarters. As ideological leftists they don’t consider them "terrorists", but freedom-fighters.
On the other hand, NPR, given their frequent use of the word when referencing terrorism elsewhere, didn't bother responding to criticism directed at them. If one searches the words "terrorist group" at npr.org, Lev points out, "You'll see the term used freely but avoided like the proverbial plague when it comes to Israel."
This issue goes beyond language use and isn’t limited to NPR. Take Gaza-based CBS news producer Marwan al-Ghoul as an example. Recently, investigations exposed Al-Ghoul’s ties and loyalty to terror group officials, including sit-ins at their meetings and discussions with Gaza City mayor Yahya Sarraj on "issues of concern to citizens and ways of cooperating."
There were also Palestinian photojournalists working for AP and Reuters who were embedded with Hamas and showed up in the early hours of October 7th , ready to film Hamas' massacre of Israelis before Israel knew what was happening.
In what other democratic country would mainstream news outlets not only rely solely on the perspective of terrorist-affiliated photojournalists and producers, but present it as objective journalism?
Even today, the Paris Olympics demonstrate how the double standard against Israel continues. Athletes are not allowed to wear a yellow ribbon representing the welcoming home to freedom of Gaza hostages. Meanwhile, at the opening ceremony, Palestinian boxer Waseem Abu Sal proudly wore a shirt printed with missiles being dropped on children playing sports. Acknowledging that Jewish lives matter is now controversial, while attacks against them are acceptable. And not a murmur in protest from the legacy media and other Western democratic counties.
It also doesn’t help Israel’s cause that Hamas is a master strategist in public relations tactics backed by significant leftist support. Relying on groups like CAIR's SJP [Students for Justice in Palestine] to rationalize and defend its atrocities, and on protestors PM Bibi Netanyahu recently called "Hamas’ useful idiots" in his address to Congress; it is no wonder that many young people, falsely perceive Hamas not as terrorists but as resistance fighters.
A TikTok creator known as Atif. TV attended a Palestine protest and asked demonstrators if they condemned Hamas. Many responded by rationalizing the attacks, empathizing with the violence Hamas inflicted on October 7th, with statements like, "Resistance is necessary."
Media bias shapes how we view global conflicts and influences international relations and societal opinions. It's easy to take the news at face value, especially from trusted hosts and commentators who speak to us nightly through our screens. Well-meaning people often fall victim to a continuous assault of mis- and dis-information shoveled their way. Why accept well-founded facts that support Israel when they believe they already know the whole story, that Israel "is on the wrong side of legality, fairness, justice," as British journalist and writer Melanie Phillips told accused Eylon Levy of affirming on his broadcast "Israel: State of a Nation."
So, what to do? Phillips believes this narrative can be countered through education. What is obvious to the average Israeli is not obvious to the average Westerner - that Israel is fighting a just war. And why should it be so, given the propaganda they are bombarded with daily by their media?
Israel, she says, must aggressively and strategically counter the narratives by calling out media outlets like the BBC and Sky News by name and exposing the "demonic antisemitism" that permeates Palestinian society in the West Bank and Gaza. Based on the response she receives from British men and women who read her posts, she believes that most decent Westerners are open to hearing the truth, if only they were informed about what it is.
She acknowledges that the challenge to Israeli hasbara, or media truth-telling, is daunting, given the partnership between progressive media outlets and the UN’s "antisemitism industry", that puts its "moral" imprimatur onto everything anti-Israel. Still, most Americans support Israel. In a Harvard CAPS-Harris survey it was shown that 80 percent of registered voters in America support Israel, compared to the 20 percent in support of Hamas. Even in Britain, Phillips believes, people are starting to wake up to the fact that those supporting the Palestinian cause have often crossed red lines that most find reprehensible.
Antisemitism may permeate and explain much of the hate leveled against the Jewish state; still, the picture is complicated by the fact that many individuals are not antisemitic but simply ignorant. We have seen this narrative play out in American and Canadian University campuses with virtue-signalling students creating encampments and shouting "River to sea" genocide chants, without knowing to which river, or which sea, they are referring. When media outlets like the once-trusted Washington Post are now being challenged for producing biased reporting from an overreliance on anonymous sources, it is easy to see how leftist progressives latch onto these facts producing a cycle of students going onto careers in media, arts and education further driving an ill-informed narrative. Already today we see changes in education such as symbols like the Star of David being replaced by the menorah, a less "political" symbol. Israel and its supporters must go on the offensive, armed with facts and truths and ready to take on the difficult conversations necessary in today's progressive, ill-informed, and often malevolent political-cultural climate. It is not an easy challenge, but one that they, and we, must pursue.
