In the wake of last week’s widespread misreporting on a Gaza hospital blast initially blamed on the Israelis, National Review senior editor Charles C. W. Cooke argued on The Editors that some of those outlets simply wanted that explanation to be true.
“The most simplistic way to think about this,” Cooke said Tuesday, “is to acknowledge that there are certain words that hit the erogenous zones of the sort of people who work at the New York Times, and ‘Gaza,’ ‘health,’ and ‘ministry’ are among them. Put them all together, and you’ve got a source that would be instinctively trusted.”
These media outlets were quick to jump on unverified reports, Cooke said, “when it was alleged, that the Israelis had bombed a hospital killing 500 people. That gave the Times and the Post and CNN and Reuters and the Associated Press and the BBC and others the chance to turn this into football coverage with a score on each side of the screen. . . . The CNN chyron put the number of Israeli dead and then the number of dead in Gaza next to each other.”
Several outlets were slow to correct their initial statements, and Cooke said he thinks “that the New York Times and others wanted the hospital story to be true. Because I think that they want to cover this as a both-sides issue, and they feel more comfortable getting back into the ideological framework that they held without a great deal of pushback until three weeks ago.”
Cooke made clear he doesn’t think anyone at those outlets actually wants Israel to bomb hospitals: “I’m saying that they prefer this story to be one in which no one can really know.”
In America’s national political fights, “it’s the opposite,” Cooke said. “Usually, at least within domestic politics, the search is for a clear villain and a clear hero. . . . We have our own problems on the right. We’re watching them play out in the House of Representatives as we record, but for the first time in a long time, the assumptions and the alliances on the left side of the aisle are being questioned. And the herald of that army, the New York Times, is desperate to move back into its comfort zone.”
The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.