NPR invited former Biden Administration deputy national security adviser Jon Finer for a seven-minute interview on Morning Edition (Oct. 23). During the interview, in which Finer spoke almost exclusively negatively about Israel, host Leila Fadel assisted by effectively fabricating a false, anti-Israel statistic.
In the interview, Finer pronounced that not much would improve Israel’s “standing in the eyes of many Americans, who are turning rapidly against Israel” even if Netanyahu’s opposition won. It became apparent this was really just an opportunity for NPR to bash Israel under the guise of an interview.
Fadel willingly aided this endeavor by inventing statistics. After Finer said that a recent poll showed more than 60 percent of Americans view Israel unfavorably (his opinion piece in the Times, published on the same day as the NPR interview aired, links to a six-month old Pew poll from April 2026).), Fadel asked what would need to occur for there to be a significant shift in both America’s and the world’s perceptions of Israel, proceeding to editorialize with a false statistic:
I mean, like you said, more than 60% of U.S. voters, even in a recent survey, said they just want to stop military aid to Israel over what it’s doing in Gaza and in its wars.
That is not what Finer said. Not only did Fadel invent a statistic, but she simultaneously attributed, baselessly, a motive to a fictitious majority of U.S. voters.
In fact, recent polling from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs in October 2026 found that 35 percent wanted to stop military aid to Israel. Another Washington Post poll in the summer of 2026 found that 29 percent wanted to end military support to Israel.
An outdated Quinnipiac poll from August 2025 is the closest piece of evidence to support her claim, but it requires contextualization. First, the poll was conducted before Hamas and Israel agreed to a ceasefire, and asked, 22 months into the war, whether respondents “support[ed] or oppose[d] the United States sending more military aid to Israel for their efforts in the war with Hamas.” Plausibly, many respondents wanted to halt military assistance as a means to end the conflict, not as permanent policy. Second, it is more than a year old and not recent, as Fadel claimed. Third, 60 percent opposed sending more military aid to Israel at a specific time and for a specific purpose. Last, a Yale Youth Poll conducted several months after the Quinnipiac one found only 23 percent supported stopping all military aid to Israel.
NPR asked Finer if he agreed with his former colleague, Brett McGurk, who blamed Hamas “pretty exclusively” for the prolonged war and the inability to get a hostage deal done. Finer responded, “In my mind, both Hamas and the Netanyahu government were extremely reluctant to do a deal that would end the war and release the hostages.”
When Finer said he felt that each side at times was the more reluctant party, he added that some of the hostages died in captivity during the “extended period while the two sides continued to haggle.” Unhappy that Finer only mentioned hostages and simultaneously unable to point the figure solely at Hamas for being the ones who executed hostages point blank, Fadel instead added, “And thousands of Palestinians also died during that time.”
Fadel then presumed guilt on Israel’s part, asking Finer how much blame those who served in the Biden administration should bear “for Israel’s actions of the last few years” due to the “killing of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians – men, women and children – as well as Israel’s bombings of hospitals, of schools in Gaza, of entire buildings.”
With this question, NPR simply erased Hamas from the conflict it started. Not only could the Morning Edition host not admit that the terror group killed hostages, but also, in making her list of Israel’s “actions,” she acknowledged neither that tens of thousands of terrorists were killed, nor the extraordinarily low combatant to civilian fatality ratio during the war. Moreover, she failed to account for Hamas’ well-known human shield strategy, building tunnels underneath civilian infrastructure and using schools and hospitals for military operations.
Derelict in its commission of journalism, NPR’s erasing of Hamas and fabrication of an anti-Israel statistic during the interview of Jon Finer made clear NPR needs new writing implements. NPR Morning Edition listeners should demand real data and fair context rather than a coordinated messaging effort designed to craft a narrative.