By Richard Landes, Lauri B. Regan

(JNS) Congress held hearings last year that shed a stark public light on the shocking attitudes and behaviors of the heads of social-media platforms and the presidents of elite universities. These sessions revealed just how far both American colleges and the social-media platforms had drifted from their public pretensions, revealing a secret that only insiders knew beforehand. The public can now make an informed choice on how much to rely on information provided by such platforms or which universities they will entrust with their children.

The time has come for Congress to subpoena the heads of the legacy media—publishers of The New York Times and The Washington Post, in addition to presidents of the Associated Press, CNN, NBC and other network news stations and agencies—and require them to testify about the way in which their organizations report the Israel-Hamas war. Studies indicate that their coverage aligns closely with the Hamas war propaganda narrative—not just what they report but also in what they do not report. In fact, one recent study “alleges that major U.S. and European news outlets served as uncritical megaphones for Hamas-linked narratives.”

Israel, on the front lines of the war against Western civilization, is not simply fighting for its own survival. It serves as the boots on the ground for U.S. national security as well. And yet, for some inexplicable reason, the media is ostensibly rooting for the terrorists, playing an active role in furthering Hamas’s war goals—the destruction of the Jewish homeland—and international jihad war strategy to “globalize the intifada.”

As Hamas and its “journalists” release blood libel after blood libel on seemingly a daily basis, Western news outlets relay these inflammatory tales of Israeli cruelty causing Palestinian suffering (the AP recently published a sympathetic report on injured Hezbollah terrorists who “can no longer play football”), fake casualty numbers, outlandish fantasies of mass starvation and faux war crimes that are often staged.

When they commit obvious and egregious errors (as they inevitably must with such a modus operandi), they refuse to admit or learn from them. When The New York Times leads a pack of lethal journalists in publishing staged and faked footage of “starving” children even as they pass over counterevidence, it becomes clear that traditional news organizations have dropped all pretense to professional standards, all scrutiny of sources they support and now act as propaganda arms of terrorist organizations. Photoshopped images and lies about the Israel Defense Forces and U.S. contractors shooting Gazans seeking food, make the absurd (Israel is committing genocide) not only believable but difficult to deny.

Frighteningly, with each reprint of Hamas propaganda, more and more Jew-haters are taking to the streets—no longer just to protest and disrupt civil society, but to actually kill Jews and their supporters. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Israel embassy staffers in Washington, D.C. Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, 82-year-old Karen Diamond in Boulder, Colo., and many other Americans who have fallen victim to antisemitic execution, arson, and verbal and physical assaults since the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, deserve (but will not get) a mea culpa from the press. Short of that, they deserve to understand how the lies that fanned the flames of violence became “facts” worthy of dissemination without investigation. Everyone may be entitled to his or her own opinion, but not to their own facts, a maxim that particularly applies with professional rigor to news organizations.

When the propaganda arm of a jihadi terrorist organization, the manifesto of a Jew-shooter, the unified messaging of human-rights NGOs and the coverage of news outlets all align substantially—and the legacy news media takes no notice—something is deeply awry. This collective demonization campaign places Israel in an existential crisis, but it also has a much wider impact. As Hamas itself admits, it is part of a larger movement that seeks to rule over “all 510 million square kilometers of planet earth.” As the Trojans demonstrated, no civilization—no matter how mighty—can survive having its own trusted sources of information feed them the enemy’s war propaganda as news.

The public has a right and a need to know that a dangerous fraud is being perpetrated upon it. Just as the government has required tobacco and alcohol companies to place warning labels regarding the potential harm their products may cause, the public should be informed about the dangers of misinformation from news sources that claim to be trustworthy but that have chosen to present jihadi propaganda as facts.

Consumers have a right to know what product they are purchasing, and when a product is misrepresented, consumers in a democracy have recourse through government entities like the Consumer Protection Agency or Better Business Bureau. They can also turn to the courts for redress. This, however, is no ordinary consumer matter. Issues of free speech play heavily against government intervention here. Who’s to say what’s propaganda and not just an alternative narrative? Who’s to prioritize “factual” over “narrative” journalism? Given the partisan ferocity currently prevalent, surely not the government.

On the other hand, this issue is unprecedented in the history of democracies and their foundational free press: the Fourth Estate. Our current “free press” consistently purveys the war propaganda of a movement profoundly hostile to any form of press freedom and joins them in their attack on the only participant in this regional conflict with a free press. Who could imagine that our news media would align their narrative with a jihadi propaganda campaign promoting a political culture that has eliminated any trace of a free press?

As we have painfully learned over the last 250 years of democracy, rights come with responsibilities. In order to claim the mantle of professional journalism, our “free” press needs to observe professional standards of scrutiny that their current approach systemically violates. At no time in the history of modern journalism has this happened on such a scale and for so long.

We have witnessed a devolution from professional war journalism to wildly unprofessional own-goal war journalism—from providing an honest check on the three branches of government to running enemy war propaganda as news, and from Fourth Estate to Fifth Column. How do we bring this startling inversion of the profession and the news it produces to the fore? How do we assess the danger to a free press that their advocacy constitutes? How do we counter so perverse a trend?

Congress not only has a role to play; it has a responsibility to bring this dangerous and shocking scandal to the attention of the American public. It is time to hold congressional hearings and hold the purveyors of this hateful propaganda to account. Let consumers see how often our journalists take staged footage, and edit and crop it to make it more believable. Let them see things the pack media won’t cover, like the shocking genocidal hate speech that pervades the Palestinian public sphere. And then let the heads of our news agencies explain why they consider these items unfit to print while simultaneously reporting Hamas lies.

We are calling for accountability—for light to be shed on a suicidal brand of journalism that any sane audience, exposed to their folly, can and will reject of their own volition. Let this suicidal, advocacy news media be exposed for their impersonation of journalism. And let the viewing public—the American consumer—choose whether they wish to ingest the poisonous and deeply unprofessional fare our current news media have to offer, or look for other, more honest and accurate sources to understand our current troubling times.