Under the guise of "contextualized truth," The Los Angeles Times falsely casts children suffering from serious medical conditions as famine victims. By depriving themselves of the essential ingredients which nourish healthy journalism — seek truth and report it, minimize harm and act independently — LA Times writers have devolved into ghoulish shadows of functioning journalists.
AFP captions accompanying a dozen portraits of Mariam Dawwas report without challenge the mother's claim that the 9-year-old "had no known illness." Independent journalist David Collier outperforms the "leading global news agency," revealing the malnourished girl suffers from intestinal malabsorption.
If the data shows that getting food into Gaza isn’t the problem, then what is? While its policies on aid delivery are open to fair criticism, attempts to portray Israel as solely at fault for hunger in Gaza conflict with reality and do little to actually remedy the situation.
For nearly two years, Haaretz has amplified the false claim that Israel is “starving” Gaza, relying on a long-time anti-Israel activist and misleading images of sick children whose conditions had nothing to do with hunger. UN data and multiple expert reviews have repeatedly shown no famine exists. Yet the campaign continues.
Are the “last reporters in Gaza” starving to death?
That’s what AFP declared in a dramatic press release on July 21 claiming its employees would die without immediate intervention.
But while the media echoed the story around the world, AFP’s own photographers were still out working.
The images of Evyatar David and Rom Braslavski, and the plight of the rest of the hostages cruelly held by their terrorist captors for 668 days, have not gone viral. Instead, much of the media have self-conscripted themselves to a disinformation campaign that serves the interests of a Palestinian movement that’s not only pathologically hostile to Jews, but to the West as well.
In the latest illustration of the BBC's self-conscripted PR campaign against the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), their journalists accepted the unevidenced claims of a GHF "whistleblower" at face value, while failing to do real journalism in response to the allegations.
Food insecurity in Gaza is real. So is the propaganda war waged from the territory, which seeks to mislead by concealing the preexisting health conditions of those suffering most.
On July 21, an AFP journalist society posted a press release about the "last journalists in Gaza" facing death by starvation. The Committee to Protect Journalists then declared that "Israel is starving Gazan journalists into silence.” But were the journalists really being starved into silence?
