Matti Friedman: As far as I know, I was the first staffer to erase information from a story because we were threatened by Hamas, which happened at the very end of 2008.
We had a great reporter in Gaza, a Palestinian who had always been really an excellent reporter. We had a detail in a story. The detail was a crucial one. It was that Hamas fighters were dressed as civilians and were being counted as civilians in the death toll. An important thing to know that went out in an AP [Associated Press] story.
The reporter called me a few hours later. It was clear that someone had spoken to him and he told me – I was on the desk in Jerusalem, so I was kind of writing the story from the main bureau in Jerusalem – and he said Matti, you have to take that detail out of the story. And it was clear that someone had threatened him.
I took the detail out of the story. I suggested to our editors that we note in an editor's note that we were now complying with Hamas censorship. I was overruled, and from that point in time, the AP like all of its sister organizations, collaborates with Hamas censorship in Gaza.
What does that mean? You'll see a lot of dead civilians and you won't see dead militants. You won't have a clear idea of what Hamas military strategy is, and this is the kicker, the center of the coverage will be a number, a casualty number that is provided to the press by something called the Gaza Health Ministry, which is Hamas. And we've been doing that since 2008, and it's a way of basically settling the story before you get into any other information.
Because when you put, you know, when you say 50 Palestinians were killed and one Israeli on a given day, you know, it doesn't matter what else you say. The numbers kind of tell their own story and then it's a way of, kind of, settling the story with something that sounds like a concrete statistic. And the statistic is being, you know, given to us by one of the combatant sides, but because the reporters sympathize with that side. They're happy to, they're happy to play along.
So, since 2008, certainly since 2014 when we had another serious war in Gaza, the press has not been covering in Gaza. The press has been essentially an amplifier for one of the most poisonous ideologies on Earth. Hamas has figured out how to make the press amplify its messaging rather than covering Hamas.
There are no western reporters in Gaza. All of the reporters in Gaza are Palestinians and those people fall into three categories. Some of them identify with Hamas. Some of them are intimidated by Hamas and won't cross Hamas, which makes a lot of sense, I wouldn't want to cross Hamas either. And the third category is people who actually belong to Hamas.
That's where the information from Gaza is coming from and if you're credulous then, of course, you're going to get a story that makes Israel look pretty bad.
After the Al-Ahli Hospital explosion, Batya Ungar-Sargon described the legacy media as "the stenographers of terrorists."
You don't hate the legacy media enough.
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