|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
By Joseph Simonson, The Washington Free Beacon
The Washington Post is in turmoil—old editor out, new editor in, and a new publisher under siege from a hostile and beleaguered staff.
One of the criticisms the paper has weathered as it has bled money and subscribers is that, since Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel, its coverage of the war in the Middle East has been shoddy, inaccurate, and implacably hostile to Israel.
Days after the Israel Defense Forces rescued four hostages from a Palestinian refugee camp, for example, a Post headline blared: “More than 200 Palestinians killed in Israeli hostage raid in Gaza.”
The report, the work of 11 Post staffers, went on to describe “one of the bloodiest raids in the war” as a “brazen operation” that left “unimaginable devastation in its wake.”
“Residential blocks were destroyed, tanks menaced the streets and grievously wounded Palestinians, some without limbs, writhed in pain on the dusty roads of the camp’s central market, according to videos and images of the raid,” the report stated.
The first quote in the story comes from a Hamas spokesman, who accused Israel of committing “a massacre.” An Israeli official is quoted in the seventh paragraph.
What the piece did not mention is that the hostages were held by prominent Gazan civilians in crowded apartment buildings and that Hamas fighters opened fire on the hostages and Israeli soldiers during the operation, making civilian casualties virtually inevitable.
Hostility to Israel has been a thread throughout the paper’s reporting. But there’s another pattern among reporters on the Post’s foreign desk.
At least six members of the Post’s foreign desk previously wrote for Al Jazeera, the Doha-based news outlet bankrolled in part by the government of Qatar, which is now sheltering Hamas’s top leaders, a Washington Free Beacon review found.
They include the paper’s Middle East editor, Jesse Mesner-Hage, who spent more than a decade as an editor at the outlet’s English edition, London correspondent Louisa Loveluck, investigative reporter Evan Hill, visual enterprise editor Reem Akkad, WaPo Live host Libby Casey, and breaking news reporter Adela Suliman.
The Al Jazeera-Washington Post pipeline raises ethical questions for an American newspaper that prides itself as a bulwark against threats to “democracy.”
Founded in 1996, Al Jazeera has been described by an Israeli court as an “intelligence and propaganda arm” for Hamas, and the outlet is banned from broadcasting in Israel, where officials alleged in February that Al Jazeera “journalist” Muhammed Wishah served as a commander in Hamas’s guided missile units.
In the United States, the Justice Department ordered the network’s English language affiliate to register as a foreign agent of Qatar in 2020, though it has refused to do so.
The Post did not respond to a request for comment.
