Gil Hoffman: Hoodwinked: How Hamas influenced int'l media to not cover emaciated hostages
THE PRO-ISRAEL media watchdog HonestReporting singled out three major media outlets for condemnation: the BBC, CNN, and The Guardian.BBC risks becoming ‘Hamas propaganda mouthpiece’
The BBC reported that there were “concerns over the appearance of hostages on both sides,” equating the innocent civilians kidnapped and starved by Hamas with Palestinian terrorists who can earn university degrees in Israeli prisons and are visited by the Red Cross, who ignored the hostages until they taxied them to Israel.
For hours, the BBC’s live news homepage featured a celebratory image of Palestinian prisoners embracing their families instead of showing the emaciated hostages, in what was, at the very least, a problematic editorial choice.
CNN balanced its headline, “Israel condemns frail appearance of captives,” with a sub-headline about the Palestinian prisoners, saying that “many of them appeared emaciated and in poor health.”
Never to be outdone, The Guardian announced its agenda with its headline, “Gaunt captives emerge from Gaza and Israel.”
These headlines could be dismissed or even mocked if they were not so immoral and dangerous. Media framing matters. When such comparisons mislead the public and distort reality, people around the world believe Israel is no better than the terrorist organization that attacked our civilians on Oct. 7, 2023.
The Wall Street Journal deserves credit for following up by interviewing neighbors of Sharabi but wrote that he “lost family members during the initial Hamas attack,” as if they merely went missing. The same article said that Levy’s wife “had died,” instead of telling the world that she was murdered in the bomb shelter of death where the late heroes Aner Shapira and Hersh Goldberg-Polin had saved lives.
Hamas has threatened to stop releasing hostages, but it should not surprise anyone if the next ones released are in even worse condition and are ignored even more by mainstream media and the so-called influencers who have become so dangerously powerful.
Influencers who support Hamas boasted on Instagram and TikTok about how healthy the released female hostages looked.
According to the latest Pew Research study, 20-24% of Americans, including 37% under 30, regularly get their news from influencers on social media, enhancing the impact of biased coverage. In the US presidential race, 24% of all Americans got their election news primarily from social media in 2024.
Major outlets like CNN and NBC are cutting a significant portion of their workforce while shifting their focus to digital media. These shifting news consumption patterns amplify the impact of biased coverage, as readers encounter skewed information on official news outlets’ social media pages.
It is no wonder that young people, who have been statistically proven to be more impressionable than their parents, could think that Israel perpetrated a genocide in Gaza and not believe that more Israelis were murdered on Oct. 7, 2023, than any one day since the Holocaust.
Media misinformation leads to indifference at best and hate at worst, and that is why the lessons of the coverage of Eli Sharabi, Or Levy, and Ohad Ben Ami must be learned immediately.
My grandmother’s picture on the wall at Yad Vashem proves what happens when the world does not take the suffering of the Jewish people seriously enough.
The former director of BBC Television has warned that the broadcaster risks becoming a propaganda mouthpiece for Hamas.
Danny Cohen said BBC coverage of the Gaza conflict had repeatedly drawn an “appalling false equivalence” between the release of Israeli hostages held in terrible conditions by Hamas and the freeing of Palestinian prisoners by Israel.
Mr Cohen said the BBC had also underplayed the suffering endured by the hostages freed as part of the ceasefire deal, while at the same time emphasising the privations it says were endured by the Palestinians prisoners.
He also accused the corporation of failing to mention that many of the Palestinian prisoners were guilty of terror crimes, including bombings and knife attacks.
The report coincided with the latest round of hostage releases on Saturday which came after fears the ceasefire deal could collapse.
In his report analysing the BBC’s coverage of the release of hostages taken by Hamas on October 7 2023, Mr Cohen stated: “In their rush to gloss over the undeniable torture, starvation and beatings that hostages have endured and their determination to highlight claims of poor conditions in Israel’s jails, the BBC is repeatedly drawing offensive false equivalence between victims of war crimes and hundreds of convicted violent offenders.
“The BBC is at risk of becoming a Hamas propaganda mouthpiece. They have repeatedly given a free pass to terrorists who have committed violent racist murder. It will be very hard for many in the Jewish community to ever forget it.”
In his analysis of the BBC’s coverage of the ceasefire deal’s arrangement for Israeli hostages to be released in exchange of prisoners, Mr Cohen claimed that the broadcaster’s reporters had failed to point out the crimes committed by jailed Palestinian fighters.
He said that instead, the BBC had gone out of its way to highlight the scenes of joy at the men being reunited with their families and their apparently emaciated appearance after years spent in Israeli jails.
During its coverage of the release of nearly 200 Palestinian prisoners on Feb 8 the BBC failed to describe any of them as terrorists, according to the report, even though half had been serving life sentences for murder.
Mr Cohen said a BBC News website story a few days earlier did not mention that a freed Hamas member it quoted expressing joy at his release had been held for his part in a 2018 gun attack which killed two civilians.
The report also accused the BBC of focusing on Palestinians freed from administrative detention without trial, while making only “passing reference” to the 733 convicted for violent offences who had been freed.
