The Associated Press’s multimedia feature published yesterday, a glossy human-interest story about casualties of Israel’s pager attack on Hezbollah, wastes little time before leading readers astray.
Just under a year ago, Israel simultaneously detonated pagers belonging to thousands of Hezbollah operatives, the climax of a years-long operation that seemed straight from the pages of a James Bond novel. In laying out the context of that attack, AP’s reporters claim that Hezbollah had been firing rockets into Israel for the past year “in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.”
How very thoughtful. But the authors fail to mention that Hezbollah began its attacks on Oct. 8, 2023, a day after Hamas’s brutal massacre of Israeli civilians, raising questions about the actual focus of the group’s solidarity. Worse, those questions had immediately been answered by the group’s own leaders: “The resistance sent greetings to the Palestinian resistance fighters this morning,” top Hezbollah official Hashem Safieddine said on Oct. 8 after his group opened its front with Israel.
Hezbollah’s Narrative, AP’s Byline
AP’s error of omission might seem surprising, as the wire service had managed to get it right in previous coverage. But it’s much less surprising when you zoom out and consider that the feature as a whole, by Bassem Mroue and Sarah el Deeb, was not just coordinated with Hezbollah, which handpicked the subjects, but effectively served as propaganda for the antisemitic terror group. (Not that the authors mentioned Hezbollah’s antisemitism or terror designation.)
Of the six handpicked subjects featured by the AP, for example, two were children and another two were women. Only one was acknowledged as a Hezbollah gunman. This is hardly a representative sample of the injured who, as AP at least acknowledges, were mostly Hezbollah personnel.
Similarly, the article twice cites groups or reports that called the pager attack “indiscriminate” and thus a violation of international law, while mentioning only Israel as rejecting that charge. In fact, plenty of independent experts have disagreed, raised doubts, or expressed uncertainty about that conclusion.
While the piece served to sour public opinion on the strike on Hezbollah operatives by focusing on the minority of innocent victims, even its profile of the terrorist, Mahdi Sheri, is designed to evoke sympathy.
Artfully staged photos of the militant and his injuries accompany a 26-second video of his testimony, where he describes the impact what he calls the Israeli “massacre.”
After detailed descriptions of his injuries and their progression, the Associated Press shared doleful news: “He can no longer play football.” And it gets worse. Sheri “realizes it’s impossible now to find a role alongside Hezbollah fighters.” On the other hand, readers do learn that he got married to his fiancée, who stood by his side. “Nothing stood in our way,” he says — the quote bursting across readers’ screens in large, animated font.
An Extraordinary Feature
How very touching. Sheri, though, isn’t the only one who can’t play soccer. The twelve children and teens killed by Hezbollah while playing on a soccer pitch in Majdal Shams, a Druze town in the Golan Heights, likewise will never play again. Although that attack occurred about two months before the pager attack, the Associated Press never revisited the victims — the dead, the injured, the families — with such a spectacular, multimedia feature.
They ran a breaking news report. In a follow-up piece a few days later, only a few paragraphs actually focused on the victims, while most dwelled on the history of the Druze, geopolitical nuances, and criticism of Israel. An AP Photos feature about Majdal Shams a few months later spared just four sentences for the attack, and not a single one of the photos.
Needless to say, Israeli Jews injured in Hezbollah’s endless rocket barrages have been undeserving of this level of attention, too.
A Pattern of Bias
In other words, it’s the very existence of this feature as much as its nature that gives away the game. And it’s part of a pattern of biased coverage of Hezbollah.
AP’s Bassem Mroue, one of the piece’s co-authors, previously co-wrote a story about Jawad Nassrallah. Jawad is the son of former Hezbollah chief Hassan Nassrallah. He is also a State Department-designated terrorist, a member of Hezbollah’s Unit 113 and, in the words of a Al Majalla headline, an “online assassin.”
But AP’s headline took a dramatically different tack: “Militant or poet? US sanctions Hezbollah leader’s son.” Judging by the piece, Mroue wanted people to conclude “poet.”
The Associated Press and Mroue were equally kind in their obituary of the father, Hassan Nasrallah. That piece ignored the worst of Nasrallah’s terror attacks while casting him as charismatic, shrewd, revered, pragmatic, and good-humored.
An AP story just after the pager attack absurdly claimed that anyone with any type of pager would have been a victim of the Israeli strike: “the widespread use of pagers in Lebanon meant the detonations cost an enormous number of civilian casualties. They exploded in a moment across the landscape of everyday life — including homes, cars, grocery stores and cafes.”
It meant nothing of the sort, as the only pagers affected were the ones purchased by, and distributed to, Hezbollah operatives. The Associated Press was informed of the brazen error but refused to correct. Then, as now, they preferred pushing a Hezbollah narrative.