Richard Engel and Gabe Joselow’s June 26, 2026, video and article about the Temple Mount (which did not completely overlap), “Simmering tensions over ancient Jerusalem site nearing a boil,” purported to present the history of holy Jewish and Muslim sites in Jerusalem and the current tensions between the two groups. The report’s partisan nomenclature, omission of critical context, and unverified narrative-spinning served to create and exacerbate tensions rather than explain them.
In addition, NBC sprinkled the history of the Temple Mount in a non-linear fashion, obscuring the timeline. Readers were told in the third paragraph that Muslims had control over the Temple Mount for 1,300 years. By contrast, readers had to reach the 28th paragraph to learn that the first Jewish Temple was believed to have been built 3,000 years ago.
NBC’s language was decisive and narrative-focused, barely using the term Temple Mount and opting for the Arabic name, Al-Aqsa, instead. The nearly ten-minute video was captioned the bulk of the time with one of two headings: “MUSLIMS IN JERUSALEM WARN AL-AQSA UNDER SIEGE AS SOME GROUPS TRY TO BUILD TEMPLE IN ITS PLACE” or “INSIDE LOOK AT THE CHRISTIAN AND JEWISH GROUPS TRYING TO BUILD A TEMPLE AT AL-AQSA COMPOUND.”
The choice to label it the Al-Aqsa Compound and not the Temple Mount is a biased one. Moreover, NBC did not actually “look” at any groups trying to build a temple there, so the labeling was misleading and gratuitously provocative.
NBC’s aggressive, hyper-partisan linguistic choices – mimicking the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) propaganda – continued. In the video, Yehuda Glick, pictured below, told Engel that 70,000 Jews visited the Temple Mount last year. But the article labeled them “activists” and their presence “incursions” – suggesting, as the PA does when it uses that term, that any Jew visiting the holiest site in Judaism is making either a political or aggressive statement. To compound the offensive verbiage, in neither the video nor the article did NBC explain to its audience that millions of Muslims visit each year, making 70,000 a drop in the bucket of total visitors.
This dangerous framing of Jewish presence as provocation was further reinforced when NBC parroted more PA propaganda, the long-debunked narrative that Ariel Sharon’s 2000 visit to the site single-handedly “triggered” the five-year Second Intifada. In doing so, NBC completely ignored the well-documented historical consensus, including admissions from Palestinian leadership, that the deadly intifada was orchestrated well in advance of Sharon’s visit, following the collapse of the Camp David peace talks. NBC sacrificed historical nuance to establish a false timeline, suggesting that Jewish visibility was the sole catalyst for extreme, murderous violence.
If NBC wanted to report on a Jewish group seeking to build a temple, perhaps it picked the wrong group? Despite taking Glick’s tour, with camera people, there was no footage either during the tour, or when Engel interviewed Glick one-on-one, about the goal of building a temple. Glick said one of their major battles was to change things so that tourists are allowed to sing on the Temple Mount, as they are presently not allowed to.
While Glick featured throughout the video, only in the last minute did Engel reveal Glick had been shot four times by a “Palestinian gunman” in 2014 after speaking at a Temple Mount conference. The written article made no mention of the assassination attempt on Glick, which occurred because he advocated for Jews to have the same rights as Muslims to pray at the Temple Mount.
NBC wrongly conflated Glick’s desire for equal Jewish civil rights with a movement to build a third temple and then compounded the error by interviewing NGO Ir Amim researcher Aviv Tatarsky to provide counterbalance – to a group and ideology NBC never profiled. Tatarsky expanded the idea to claim this was all part of a larger campaign to expel Palestinians wherever possible. Of course, NBC did not acknowledge that Ir Amim has a political agenda (and is not geared to promote coexistence) or that it frequently accuses the Israeli government of trying to “Judaize” the ancient Jewish city of Jerusalem.
NBC’s hostile language did not abate. In the video, without defining what he meant by the word, Engel proclaimed the “encroachment” on the mosque was part of a larger pattern of Jewish occupation of Palestinian spaces. And without a shred of evidence, NBC declared that Palestinian families were being increasingly displaced in the Old City of Jerusalem, and that the Israeli flags NBC captured on video hung from homes “taken over by settlers.” This is a salacious, political narrative which both ignores historical Jewish ownership of property in Jerusalem prior to 1948 and legal purchases of properties.
Finally, NBC relied on a sensationalized trope rather than empirical data in its discussion of Christian Zionism and the Temple Mount. Engel said many evangelical Christians support Jewish extremist efforts to destroy Al Aqsa mosque and build a third Temple in its place out of an apocalyptic desire to fulfill a prophecy triggering the Second Coming and the End of Days. But scholars Motti Inbari and Kirill Bumin systematically dismantled this assumption in their study Christian Zionism in the Twenty-First Century: American Evangelical Public Opinion on Israel, published in 2023. The specific belief expecting a reconstructed Temple prior to Jesus’ return is not a statistically significant predictor of evangelical support for Israel – in fact, it ranks dead last.
Instead of providing a balanced overview and reporting responsibly on a geopolitical flashpoint like the Temple Mount, Engel and Joselow churned out a piece of propaganda that would make former PLO leader Yasir Arafat blush – demonizing and minimizing (as he did) Jewish ties to Jerusalem. Their reporting actively distorted reality through deliberate, hyper-partisan language and narratives at every turn, asymmetric chronology, pretenses and a mischaracterization of Christian Zionism. By weaponizing PA propagandist language like “incursion” and “activists” to define Jewish visitors, while omitting the context of millions of Muslim worshippers, NBC did not inform its audience about simmering tensions. Instead, through reckless reporting and a blatant disregard for data, it contributed to them while giving free PR to the PA.