NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {A} Voice of America video story about the aftermath of the Hamas music-festival massacre was edited before publication to remove the word “terrorist” as a label for the perpetrators of the attack, National Review has learned.
According to internal VOA emails reviewed by NR, editors instead swapped in the word “militant” — the term preferred by some international news services for its purported neutrality. Other parts of the three-minute-long segment remained untouched. But the last-minute correction forced the reporter, an Israeli woman, to redo part of the voice-over she had initially recorded.
The story, by Israel-based VOA freelance reporter Linda Gradstein, was about a therapy program for survivors of Hamas’s attack on the Nova Music Festival near Re’im, where terrorists methodically killed more than 250 people. Footage recently screened by the Israeli consulate in New York includes clips of Hamas members rampaging through the festival and of first responders later identifying victims’ bodies. In the video, Gradstein visited the farm in central Israel where survivors are dealing with the psychological trauma that resulted from witnessing and escaping the mass killings.
The script from the initial version of the package, which went out to a VOA-wide email list after 1 p.m. yesterday, talks about how one of the survivors “drove around the festival site for more than an hour, looking for ways to avoid the Hamas terrorists.”
A subsequent version of the script sent to the same email list just over two hours later notes that a new, corrected version “includes a one-word change in both the narration and the script, from Hamas ‘terrorist’ to Hamas ‘militant.’ No other changes.” The video was posted to VOA’s website six minutes after that email. Gradstein did not respond to NR’s email seeking comment about the change.
VOA defended the move to replace “terrorist” with “militant,” in an emailed response to questions from NR. “The specific story as edited conforms with VOA Best Practices guidance regarding consistency in how each story is to [refer to] terrorist groups,” VOA spokeswoman Emily Webb wrote. She added that the story does not mention that the U.S. and other governments have designated Hamas as a terrorist group and that VOA is now implementing a correction to mention the designation.
She added that because editing is a fluid process, VOA does not tally references that are changed before the publication of stories, when asked for the number of times that VOA has cut the word “terrorist” from stories in recent weeks.
While editorially independent, VOA is funded by the U.S. government, which has officially designated Hamas a terrorist group. The news service has come under scrutiny in recent weeks for its coverage of the October 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas. National Review reported last week that after the attacks, the outlet told its staff to “avoid calling Hamas and its members terrorists, except in quotes,” though they may refer to the attacks as terrorist attacks or acts of terror. VOA associate editor for news standards Carol Guensburg wrote in an email this month that that approach is consistent with standards used by other major news outlets and that language about terrorism “is often used to demonize individuals and groups with whom the speaker disagrees.” She also wrote that reporters “may report” on Hamas’s terrorist designations in their stories.
After NR’s report, Senator Bill Hagerty wrote on X: “U.S. taxpayer money should not go to @VOANews when it cannot acknowledge facts.”
Last Friday, acting VOA director John Lippman doubled down on the outlet’s approach, in his weekly email update to its staff. “VOA’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war this week has attracted interest from several media organizations that jumped to the wrong conclusion after reading standards guidance about our coverage,” he wrote in the message, which was also obtained by NR.
Lippman added: “We refer to ‘Hamas terrorist attacks’ because that is undeniably what they were. But we let analysts and world leaders be the ones to label Hamas as ‘terrorists’ while consistently reminding our audiences of the U.S. declaration that Hamas is a terrorist organization. It’s not a new standard and is in the Best Practices Guide. It’s also how other major media are reporting on the war. Please follow it.”
Webb, the VOA spokeswoman, defended Lippman’s memo when asked about the fact that most reasonable people would agree that the Hamas attacks were carried out by terrorists.
“That’s what’s in the memo: that the Hamas assault on the music festival was a ‘terrorist attack’ that was ‘undeniably’ perpetrated by terrorists. Hence the referral to ‘Hamas terrorist attacks’ in VOA stories,” she wrote.
In the October 27 email, Lippman also praised a few examples of VOA’s coverage of the war, including a story by the outlet’s China Branch on the Chinese government’s “nurturing” of antisemitic posts on the internet while censoring pro-Israel comments and references to movies about the Holocaust.