“A Sunday attack in Abbottabad resulted in a child requiring treatment for shrapnel wounds.” That is how CNN would describe the operation to kill Osama Bin Laden if it applied the same formula then as it did to describing the recent killing of Mohammed Deif, the second most wanted Hamas terrorist in Gaza until his recent demise.
In a July 18 article, “UN says Israeli evacuation orders are making it harder to reach those most in need in Gaza,” by CNN’s Tim Lister, Sharon Braithwaite, and Sana Noor Haq, the killing of Deif is described as “a Saturday attack in Al-Mawasi [which] resulted in children requiring treatment for shrapnel wounds.”
This absurd reduction of this enormously significant event helps to illustrate the failure of CNN’s reporting on the conflict, and how its audience is being left uninformed.
It shows the double standard at play. What possible explanation could the network give that would justify describing Deif’s killing that way, but not that of Bin Laden or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi?
It’s also yet another example of how CNN journalists are erasing crucial context to highlight a narrative at the expense of accurate coverage.
That narrative has focused on the tragic effects of the war on civilians and attributes blame, via implications and omissions, on Israel.
In this case, all CNN communicated to its audience is that some “Saturday attack” by the IDF harmed children.
Now consider the material details left out by the authors:
- The attack targeted, and (almost certainly) succeeded in killing, one of the most wanted terrorists in the world, Mohammed Deif, who was considered to be one of the chief architects of the October 7 massacre of Israeli civilians;
- The attack also killed another senior Hamas terrorist leader, Rafa’a Salameh, who was the commander of Hamas’s Khan Younis Brigade;
- Several dozen Hamas operatives were also present at the site of the strike;
- The senior terrorists were hiding inside a humanitarian zone created to give civilians a safe place, demonstrating yet again Hamas’s cynical exploitation of civilians; and
- After the strike, Hamas placed a close guard on the hospitals and funeral homes that received the casualties in order to control the information that got out about the attack.
An infographic from the IDF regarding the elimination of Rafa’a Salameh, Hamas’s Khan Younis Brigade commander.
This information dramatically changes the story. Readers may still come to different conclusions with this information, but at least now they can understand the motivation for and the context around the strike.
It would not take much to better reference the incident, either. A simple rewording would suffice: “…a Saturday strike, which targeted and likely killed Hamas’s terrorist leader Mohammed Deif, resulted in children requiring treatment for shrapnel wounds.”
The absence of just this minimal amount of additional information points to the continued decline in the quality of CNN’s journalism. Far too many of the network’s reporters are more interested in reporting a narrative of the conflict, rather than the reality.