Becket Adams writes for National Review about major problems at one of the nation’s leading media outlets.
The Washington Post is falling down on the job.
Its coverage of the war between Israel and Hamas has been so irresponsible, so sloppy, and so tilted in favor of the group that rules Gaza that it’s difficult to see it as anything but pro-Hamas.
If “democracy dies in darkness,” good journalism dies in the care of radical journalists and lousy editors.
Last weekend, for example, the Post published a report titled “Amid Gaza war, U.N. evacuates babies from besieged hospital,” which included a shocking claim: The Israeli army had deliberately targeted Doctors Without Borders convoys.
“Doctors Without Borders said Sunday that a staff member’s relative was killed and another wounded after Israeli forces fired ‘deliberately’ on a convoy carrying 140 of the organization’s employees and their family members the day before,” the Post reported. “The convoy was clearly marked, said the organization also known by its French acronym MSF, and both warring parties were notified of its passage.”
As if this weren’t bad enough, the total number of Palestinians killed in Gaza since October 7, when Hamas terrorists murdered an estimated 1,200 Israelis, most of them civilians, stands at about 11,000, the Post story added.
There are two problems with this supposedly shocking news report.
First, the Doctors Without Borders claim is an outright falsehood. The Post has since attached a correction to its report, which reads, “An earlier version of this article reported incorrectly that Doctors Without Borders accused Israeli forces of deliberately firing on a convoy carrying employees of the organization and their family members in Gaza on Saturday, killing one and wounding one. Doctors Without Borders described and condemned the attack but did not name Israeli forces or any entity as its perpetrator. The article also misstated the number of people in the convoy; there were 137, not 140” (emphasis added).
