A big ballistic missile was fired straight at the mainstream media this past week, metaphorically speaking of course.
It was launched from a British foreign policy and national security think tank called the Henry Jackson Society. Its study exposed how key news organizations were utterly derelict in their journalistic duties reporting on the Gaza war death toll.
The society did an extensive and scientific analysis of the number of war fatalities as reported by the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health. It found that many of the major western media outlets swallowed its fake casualty figures wholly, completely, shamelessly.
Just to give you a little background on HJS, it is named for the late US Senator from the state of Washington, Henry “Scoop” Jackson. He was a hawkish Democrat who was very anti-Soviet Union and very pro-Israel.
Back in November of last year, in a column entitled Who Knew What When? I questioned the veracity of the fatality figures that were being parroted by the news media and even by President Joe Biden. I sarcastically said that Hamas, in the midst of a brutal war and hiding in tunnels, must have had incredible data gathering capabilities.
Well, now we have the authentic data, the true facts. The purported death toll ginned up by Hamas was absolute crap and the news media partnered with the terrorists in the crap spreading.
The author of the report is Andrew Fox, a research fellow at the society. According to his bio, he served for 16 years in the British Army, completing three tours of duty in Afghanistan, as well as tours in Bosnia, Northern Ireland and the Middle East. In the last year he’s been to Gaza twice.
Fox and his team of experts analyzed reports from the Hamas Ministry of Health from February 2024 through May 2024. “They examined 1,378 articles from major English-language newspapers and media outlets, specifically The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, CNN, the BBC, Reuters, The Associated Press and the Australian ABC.”
What they found is nothing short of a damning indictment of how they were complicit in disseminating Hamas’ lies that Israel has killed around 45,000 Gazans since the October 7th massacre.
Here are some of the shocking truths revealed in the study:
- Hamas repeatedly misclassified dead men as women and adults as children. For example, one 22-year old was listed as a four-year-old and a 31-year-old was listed as an infant. They found examples of men with first names like Mohammed, being recorded as women. This gave false credence to the lie that women and children bore the brunt of the conflict.
- Their analysis found that most of the fatalities were, in fact, men ages 15-45, generally the age of the Hamas soldiers, contradicting claims that innocent civilians were being disproportionately targeted.
- The ministry of health lumped into the war’s fatality count the Gazans who died of natural causes, thought to be about 5,000 each year. The study found instances of registered cancer patients included on war fatality lists.
- The reported death toll at the hands of the Israelis included Gazans who were killed by Hamas’ misfired rockets.
- Basically, any Arab who died in Gaza in that period, was listed as a casualty of Israeli aggression.
The analysts from HJS then examined the news stories from those eight organizations. They found that over the four months of their study, 84% of those media outlets “failed to make the critical distinction in total numbers between combatant deaths and civilian deaths.”
The study went on the report that “Only 5% of the surveyed media organizations cited numbers released by the Israeli authorities, while 98% cited fatality figures provided by the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health.”
The study also found that one out of every five news stories they examined “treated figures provided by Hamas-controlled organizations as established fact without attributing the figures to anyone.”
I’m just giving you the highlights. You should read the entire report and wade into the data. Your head will explode.
All these journalists that aided and abetted the Hamas lies committed professional malfeasance. They didn’t lift a finger to try to establish the credibility of the information coming from the terrorists.
They treated the Gaza Ministry of Health as if it was the US Department of Health.
Most of the time there was no attribution for the wildly distorted death toll number. Sometimes there was a feeble acknowledgment that the fatality count from Hamas didn’t differentiate combatants from non-combatants. But that was just a throwaway line to cover their irresponsible asses.
The HJS report revealed that the inaccuracies in the widely reported numbers, was far deeper, far more egregious, far more twisted and misleading than just confusion from the fog of war. And it was greedily and willingly sucked up by the biased news media.
But why? Why did the media choose to believe Hamas over Israel. Why were these lies reported as truth? News organizations with deep resources and extensive war time reporting experience have no excuses for accepting the terrorists’ claims as facts.
During the Israel-Hamas war, the international news media willingly closed their eyes to the truth and lapped up the terrorists’ narrative. They viewed the war, as they do many stories, through a woke lens.
Quickly after the horrors of October 7th wore off, the war became a conflict between oppressor and oppressed, between colonialists and indigenous people. On one side where the Israeli aggressors and on the other side were the Palestinian resistors. The media have a dangerous brew of built in biases in favor of insurgents and against nation states, especially Israel. It’s deep in their DNA, in their kishkas, if you will.
The Henry Jackson Society’s report said it best:
“Responsible reporting requires more than simply relaying numbers. It demands a critical assessment of the data, an understanding of the context and a commitment to accuracy.”
As the Jackson Society’s report concluded, “The international media plays a crucial role in shaping global perceptions of the conflict. Only by approaching these figures with a critical eye can the media help uncover the truth behind the war’s human cost, ensuring that the true nature of the conflict is represented in the international arena.”
So I thought, that maybe, after the study was published, maybe some of the guilty media organizations would, at the very least, report what the Henry Jackson Society documented.
My Google search didn’t show that any of the indicted organizations reported on the results of the study.
The more conservative media did. The New York Post did. Canada’s National Post did. The Israeli papers, of course, did.
We are now at the point where there’s one hard and clear truth. The collapse of the credibility of important segments of the news media due to their kinship with the terrorists and their demonization of Israel, have jeopardized all our freedoms, and have placed the future of western civilization in mortal danger.
They’ve ceased being honest brokers, of being sources of reliable information. They’re deep in the tank with the terrorists.
Shame on them and even more importantly, shame on us if we let them get away with it.