Would the NYT have published this yesterday?

Yesterday, Richard Behar at Forbes published a blistering attack on Western media coverage of the Gaza war, specifically the New York Times.

It seems more than coincidental that the first paragraphs of today's NYT piece are a 180-degree change in style from everything we've seen for the past six weeks:

Hamas is the party that keeps extending this summer’s bloody battle in the Gaza Strip, repeatedly breaking temporary truces and vowing to endlessly fire rockets into Israel until its demands are met. But the latest round of fighting appears to have given Israel the upper hand in a conflict that has already outlasted all expectations and is increasingly becoming a war of attrition.

Barrages of rockets from Gaza sailed into Israel nearly nonstop on Thursday, but they did little damage, and a Hamas threat against Ben-Gurion International Airport failed to materialize. Israel, meanwhile, killed three top commanders of Hamas’s armed wing in predawn airstrikes, and by afternoon had called up 10,000 reservists, perhaps in preparation for a further escalation but in any case a show of strength.

Israel’s advantage has never looked more lopsided. In contrast to the earlier phase of the war, Israel this week deployed its extensive intelligence capabilities and overwhelming firepower in targeted bombings with limited civilian casualties less likely to raise the world’s ire.

To flatly state that Hamas is the party that is at fault, without caveats, would have been unthinkable yesterday.

There has been no difference in the percentage of civilian casualties this week compared to any other week. The "world's ire" came from biased reporting of "civilian" casualties who weren't civilians and people killed while legitimate military targets were being hit, not in a small part because of the New York Times.

Behar's meticulously researched article seems to have struck a nerve.

Of course, the haters at Electronic Intifada and Mondoweiss will mobilize the tens of thousands of anti-Israel bigots at their disposal to complain to the NYT and the paper will back down from reporting the truth, claiming that  "are getting complaints from both sides."

I don't expect this to change the reporting at the NYT for more than a day or two, but this shows that when publicly shamed, the media will at least pretend to change.

(h/t EBoZ)