After the worst massacre of the Jewish people since the Holocaust, whose voices did CNN’s Alaa Elassar choose to elevate? The fringe Jews dedicated to delegitimizing the Jewish state and justifying the acts of terrorism committed against it.
CNN can’t help itself. Last week, the network was caught uncritically spreading Hamas’s propaganda that Israel struck Al-Ahli hospital on October 17th. A week later, CNN is back at it, once again spreading Hamas claims, but this time deceiving its audience into thinking the terrorist organization's casualty figures came from a legitimate, independent source.
Contrary to CNN's depiction, it wasn’t that this was a “he said she said” issue, and the network just failed by not waiting for the “she said.” The issue was that they took Hamas’s claims at face value, and then they gave the terrorist organization’s claims equal weight to that of Israel’s, notwithstanding the IDF’s claims were backed up by audio and visual evidence.
What Israelis saw Saturday was innocent children and teenagers and the elderly being carted off as prisoners of war, and a dead body of a woman being paraded in the street as a trophy. Comparing this to any defensive action taken by the IDF is despicable.
Without being privy to CNN’s internal decision-making, one can only guess what factors drive its coverage of the region, and why the one Jewish state is placed under the microscope in a way that no other state is. But it seems fair to say that the content and makeup of its Middle East page isn’t being driven by genuine journalistic motivations.
CNN’s obsessive and slanted reporting continues to leave its audience without important information necessary to understand events. Notably, the omissions all work to downplay and omit the terrorism and violence being waged against Israel, instead highlighting only the decontextualized responses of the Israeli Defense Forces.
Of the 40 articles featured on CNN's "Middle East" section in July, 27 focused on Israel. Just five focused on Iran, and only two on Iraq. Put another way, CNN wrote more articles (15) just on Israel’s judicial reform debates than it did on the rest of the region combined (13).
CNN has a shaky relationship with polling data. Previously, Christiane Amanpour appears to have fabricated polling results. On July 14, however, CNN’s Abeer Salman took a slightly different track by using existing polling data, but only some of it.
According to many recent flawed news accounts, the “flare-up” in violence began only with the introduction of a new Israeli government and has been driven by extremist Israelis. The data, however, disagrees. Not only did the “flare-up” begin long before the current government took power in November 2022, but it has been overwhelmingly driven by Palestinian attacks.
