New York Times Forced to (Again) Admit to ‘Fake News’ About Gaza
Why can’t, or won’t the world’s leading newspaper do even basic fact checking when writing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
The
New York Times wants you to think Israel has "devastated" the Gaza
fishing industry. The fact is that local catches have increased in
recent years.
The New York Times has yet again failed to do even basic fact checking in a report on the Gaza Strip that conspicuously smeared Israel as a heartless villain.
As the “paper of record,” at least in the United States, you’d expect better.
Why the Times‘ editors missed this is debatable. Perhaps they harbor an anti-Israel bias, or perhaps it was just innocent negligence.
But when it comes to the reporter on the ground, especially in this case, the reason is clear: She’s got an agenda.
In her November 27 report from Gaza, Times correspondent Raja Abdulrahim suggested that Israel’s blockade of the coastal enclave had been “devastating for the Gaza Strip’s fishing industry.”
In other words, local fishermen, simple folks just trying to make a living from the sea, were unable to provide for their families because those mean Israelis were arbitrarily preventing them from doing so.
The only problem with Abdulrahim’s conclusion? It’s entirely false, and demonstrably so.
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics helpfully keeps data on fishing activity, and what do you know, local Gaza fishermen have seen an increase in their catches in recent years!
Why didn’t that fact make it into the report? It wasn’t hard to find out. The Palestinian Authority had made the information publicly available. Surely a top journalist like Abdulrahim checks official sources before informing us of what’s going on, right?
Apparently not.
It took the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) fetching that information and presenting it to the Times to compel the paper to publish a correction. And even then it didn’t retract Abdulrahim’s report, but simply added a line noting that the local catch is today higher than in years past.
“CAMERA staff are doing the basic research that Times staff should be doing themselves,” stated Andrea Levin, executive director and president of CAMERA. “Abdulrahim’s story claiming Gaza’s fishing industry is collapsing falls completely apart when you look at the facts. But the Times’ impulse to run with any storyline blaming Israel subverts ethical reporting norms and leads again and again to these blunders.”
The real question is whether the Times would even have provided the correction if not for the intervention of CAMERA.
Probably not. The original version of the story fit too neatly with their narrative regarding Israel. Which is no doubt why they hired Abdulrahim in the first place. She’s got a long history of blaming the entire conflict on Israel and justifying Palestinian terrorism.
For instance, back in 2001, immediately following the 9/11 terror attacks on the United States, Abdulrahim wrote a letter to a Florida newspaper insisting that it would be wrong to lump Hamas and Hezbollah together as terrorist movements with Al Qaeda. She insisted that the Palestinian murder of Israeli men, women and children was a legitimate form of “self defense.”
Less than a year later, Abdulrahim was a student at the University of Florida, and opined in the school newspaper that the sharp rise in deadly Palestinian suicide bombings at the time should be blamed on Israel alone.
That level of Israel-bashing has characterized Abdulrahim’s reporting throughout her career, and right on through the first year of her work for The New York Times, as documented by CAMERA.
It’s little wonder that the Times chose to install Abdulrahim as one of their Israel/Palestine correspondents, despite her demonstrably subjective outlook on the conflict. It’s also little wonder why the Times editors keep letting her faulty reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict pass their reviews.
What is a head-scratcher is why anyone still buys the lie that The New York Times and other mainstream media represent “objective reporting.”
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