Every time the media seems to have achieved a new high in media bias, it just turns around and climbs to ever greater heights. People are still talking about The New York Times and its outsized photo of an emaciated Gaza child that the paper assured its readers owed his condition to an Israel-instigated famine.
They squeezed this picture for all it was worth, and as noted by Elder of Ziyon, the size and placement of the New York Times picture of "Gaza starving child" was virtually unprecedented:
Only a few days later did The New York Times unapologetically point out the boy had "pre-existing health problems":
Editors’ Note: July 29, 2025
This article has been updated to include information about Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, a child in Gaza suffering from severe malnutrition. After publication of the article, The Times learned from his doctor that Mohammed also had pre-existing health problems.
This is all the more malicious considering that The Times chose a photo that omitted context:
Add to this the media's perpetual claim of impending famine, casualty figures so often quoted from Hamas terrorist sources that reports no longer even mention that fact, and accusations of genocide based on questionable premises.
The controversy over media impartiality and objectivity gets worse during a military conflict. The confusion we associate with the fog of war applies not only to military battles but also to journalistic battles.
In response to these journalistic battles, Ralph Pulitzer created the role of newspaper ombudsman in 1913. On the one hand, the competition to get the story first led to the muckraking that uncovered corruption in the establishment, such as Ida M. Tarbell's The History of The Standard Oil Company, which pioneered the idea of investigative reporting. On the other hand, it also produced the yellow journalism of the 19th century, specializing in scandal-mongering and sensationalist reporting. Less than 20 years later, the need for some kind of oversight became clear. One of these incentives was not fake stories about famine or misleading pictures of emaciated children.
The problem was fictional stories about cats:
According to a 1916 issue of American Magazine, Pulitzer had become concerned about the increasing blurriness between "that which is true and that which is false" in the paper. He had reason for concern. One of the questionable practices uncovered by the bureau's first director, Isaac D. White, was the routine embellishment of stories about shipwrecks with fictional reports about the rescue of a ship's cat. After asking the maritime reporter why a cat had been rescued in each of a half-dozen accounts of shipwrecks, White was told, "One of those wrecked ships had a cat, and the crew went back to save it. I made the cat the feature of my story, while the other reporters failed to mention the cat, and were called down by their city editors for being beaten. The next time there was a shipwreck there was no cat but the other ship news reporters did not wish to take chances, and put the cat in. I wrote the report, leaving out the cat, and then I was severely chided for being beaten. Now when there is a shipwreck all of us always put in a cat."
It is not always easy to distinguish between yellow journalism and muckraking, between sensationalism and investigative reporting. Back in the day, Superman's pal, Jimmy Olsen, was a cub reporter, not a journalist. Are reporters the same thing as journalists? That apparently depends. According to Dictionary.com, journalism can be synonymous with good old-fashioned reporting. But not necessarily:
Journalism can also be:
4. writing that reflects superficial thought and research, a popular slant, and hurried composition, conceived of as exemplifying topical newspaper or popular magazine writing as distinguished from scholarly writing.
The distinction between muckraking and yellow journalism is not always a purely theoretical question. Take Hurricane Katrina, for example.
In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck the US, causing catastrophic damage, especially in New Orleans. It was a powerful Category 5 storm that overpowered the levee system and flooded nearly 80% of the city. Over 1,300 people died, and hundreds of thousands were displaced. The storm’s destruction resulted in $125 billion in damages, making it one of the costliest natural disasters in US history. The storm exposed serious flaws in emergency preparedness, infrastructure, and government response, sparking national outrage and debate.
In addition to harsh criticism of the government's lack of preparation, discrepancies in the number of casualties, and inaccurate descriptions of the dire situation in New Orleans, the media coverage of Katrina was also open to debate.
The mayor at the time, Ray Nagin, said the death toll could reach as high as 10,000 casualties. Based on a simulation, FEMA estimated there would be more than 60,000 casualties and ordered 25,000 body bags. The National Hurricane Center finally adjusted Katrina's death toll downward to 1,392, from an earlier estimated 1,833 deaths.
The Guardian reported that media accounts of violence and looting were exaggerated and interfered with rescue attempts. It quoted Lieutenant General Russel Honoré, who coordinated around 300 National Guardsmen to keep order. He complained that he had to deal with “a constant reaction to misinformation...Some of the [media] were giving information that wasn’t correct...Much of it was uncorroborated information, probably given with the best of intentions.” The governor of Louisiana at the time, Kathleen Blanco, had similar complaints:
Blanco said the media amplified stories of widespread violence it could not verify, which impacted rescue operations. For example, she said school bus drivers refused to drive their vehicles into New Orleans to help in the evacuation because of the dangerous situation they heard about on television. Blanco enlisted the national guard to drive the buses instead.
Honore famously told journalists at the time:
Don't get stuck on stupid, reporters. We are moving forward. And don't confuse the people please. You are part of the public message. So help us get the message straight. And if you don't understand, maybe you'll confuse it to the people. That's why we like follow-up questions.
That didn't prevent journalists from patting themselves on the back for a job well done.
The PBS NewsHour had a special feature on Katrina Media Coverage a month later. Keith Woods, then dean at a school for journalists in Florida, gave his impression. It was favorable, and he explained why:
KEITH WOODS: Well, I did like the aggressiveness of the journalists throughout, I liked the fact that for a good part of this reporting the journalists brought themselves to the reporting a sense of passion, a sense of empathy, a sense of understanding that they were not telling an ordinary story any more than the Sept. 11 attacks were an ordinary story. So I like the fact that journalism understood the size of this story from the very beginning and brought to bear the kinds of resources and the kind of passion in the coverage that we saw.
Hugh Hewitt, a host of a nationally syndicated radio talk show and a blogger, confronted Woods on exactly those points -- aggressiveness and passion -- that Woods saw as the media's strong points. He attacked the media's inaccurate descriptions of the dire situation in New Orleans:
HUGH HEWITT: Well, Keith just said they did not report an ordinary story; in fact they were reporting lies. The central part of this story, what went on at the convention center and the Superdome was wrong. American media threw everything they had at this story, all the bureaus, all the networks, all the newspapers, everything went to New Orleans, and yet they could not get inside the convention center, they could not get inside the Superdome to dispel the lurid, the hysterical, the salaciousness of the reporting.
I have in mind especially the throat-slashed seven-year-old girl who had been gang-raped at the convention center — didn't happen. In fact, there were no rapes at the convention center or the Superdome that have yet been corroborated in any way.
There weren't stacks of bodies in the freezer. But America was riveted by this reporting, wholesale collapse of the media's own levees they let in all the rumors, and all the innuendo, all the first-person story because they were caught up in this own emotionalism. Exactly what Keith was praising I think led to one of the worst weeks of reporting in the history of American media, and it raises this question: If all of that amount of resources was given over to this story and they got it wrong, how can we trust American media in a place far away like Iraq where they don't speak the language, where there is an insurgency, and I think the question comes back we really can't. [emphasis added]
The response that Woods gives to Hewitt's critique of the media reporting of Katrina does not inspire confidence. For one thing, he does not push back on anything Hewitt said. Instead:
KEITH WOODS: Well, remember that we thought 5,000 people died in the twin towers in New York originally — more than 5,000. We thought the White House had been attacked in the early reporting of that story. The kind of reporting that journalists have to do during this time is revisionist. You have to keep telling the story until you get it right.[emphasis added]
It is unclear how many chances Woods felt the media was entitled to get its facts straight.
The media's misreporting of Hurricane Katrina impeded rescue efforts.
The media's misreporting on Gaza inflames antisemitism and attacks on Jews around the world.
The media coverage of disasters is difficult and taxes their resources, but that is no excuse for them to get stuck on stupid.
Wednesday, August 06, 2025
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