A Media Train Wreck: The Gaza Hospital Explosion

The press needs a better game plan than "Here's what the terrorists say happened."

Last Friday, I wrote A Dark Day for the Middle East—and Journalism for The Dispatch about the inexcusable journalistic malpractice committed by the New York Times in its coverage of the explosion at Gaza’s Al-Ahli Ar hospital. While the Times deserves the brightest spotlight due to its prestige amongst the legacy media and its influence on the rest of the press in this country and around the world, there is plenty of blame to go around. The following is an aggregation of posts I made over the last several days on Twitter (X), starting with the Times:

There was not space or time to fit everything into The Dispatch article, but as it turns out, the Times’ front page story on the Gaza explosion had one error even the Times considered worth correcting:

It took until Friday for the correction to make it to the print edition:

Moving on, the Associated Press got off on the wrong foot from the get-go with these evolving headlines. Note that the third iteration includes an unqualified “hundreds killed” Hamas-provided claim:

As seen above, the AP headline eventually morphed into “After blast kills hundreds at Gaza hospital, Hamas and Israel trade blame as rage spreads in region.” The “trade blame” wording was exercised freely by other media outlets as well:

Here’s a PBS story, which, based on the URL (web address,) originally included the words “health-ministry-says.” But in updating the headline, PBS simply left in as fact “500 killed in Gaza City hospital explosion,” a “fact” originally reported by the Hamas-controlled Gaza health ministry and widely disputed:

Not all media outlets left their egregious misstatements posted for posterity. The night of the explosion, ABC News not only reported that “hundreds” were dead and the explosion was a “strike,” but that it was “confirmed.” The link, however, is broken - the post was apparently simply deleted.

On the night of the explosion, the Washington Post with a (most likely unintentional) misleading use of “verified by the Washington Post”:

Then, well after evidence began to emerge that the explosion was not an airstrike, the Post continued to use “strike,” with “strike on a Gaza City hospital…”

And the Post continued to use Hamas-provided death “hundreds of people” figure as well, with no qualifier as to where the number came from.

And finally, New York Magazine's Eric Levitz with horrifying pedantism for the ages, suggesting that “beheaded” means different things to different people:

So will anything be learned from this debacle? Based on a recent Times article musing on “difficulties” of reporting such fast-moving stories, it’s not looking good:

And today’s New York Times confirms no lesson was learned. Despite a Monday morning editor’s note acknowledging “early versions of the coverage… relied too heavily on claims by Hamas,” Monday evening’s home page website proclaimed, context-free, “More Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank than at any point in the last 15 years.” The source in the article for the claim? You guessed it: the very same “Palestinian health authorities.”