Let's talk about the power of images — and what happens when "twisting" them, as one former New York Times director put it, becomes self-mutilation.
Yaakov Ort spent 35 years at the New York Times, including serving as director of its creative services division, and has never, until now, publicly criticized his old paper. But he took to Facebook recently to accuse the NYT of an "appalling twisting of the facts, and mindful, heartless concealment of the truth."
By now, you must have seen last week's dueling, gruesome images from Israel and Gaza.
The first one made the front page of the New York Times, despite being falsely labeled Hamas agitprop.
Did I say "despite?" I meant, "because of," naturally.
The second wasn't a single image, but a torture-porn video of an Israeli hostage — made and distributed by Hamas. Every single still taken from the video was gruesome and harrowing enough on its own.
The hostage was Evyatar David, a 24-year-old kidnapped from the Nova music festival during Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023, terror invasion of southern Israel. Hamas starved David for so long that the Hostages and Missing Families Forum estimated from pre-war photos and the Hamas video that he'd lost approximately 41% of his body weight.
Adding to the physical torture, David was forced to dig what Hamas told him was his own grave.
Did Hamas bury him alive in there? Are they letting him finish starving to death? Something else?
Nobody knows because Hamas won't say.
The difference is that only one of those images reflected genuine starvation, and it wasn't the one of the Arab child with cerebral palsy.
The other difference is that the New York Times ran the fake image as news — after cropping out the child's well-fed sibling for better effect on its readers — and did its best to present the newsworthy image in the worst possible light for the victims.
"Rather than running a photo of hostage Evyatan David being forced to dig his own grave by Hamas terrorists," Ort posted, "and writing about the actual reaction of millions of Israelis to seeing it, the foreign desk and photo desk ran a photo of a relative handful of protestors in Tel Aviv," which the NYT labeled "Hundreds Protest in Tel Aviv After Hostage Videos Surface From Gaza."
The fact is that the overwhelming majority of Israelis were enraged by Hamas, perhaps giving Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu the political cover for his decision this week to order the full occupation of the Gaza Strip. The Times found a small contingent of malcontents and presented them as the true face of Israeli public opinion.
Ort concluded: "The symbolism of the photo is so apt, since digging our own graves is exactly what the current Times news, editorial and op-ed page writers and editors, and those justifiably fearful of the Islamic street in the the West are arguing daily that we should do."
"Guess what? We won't."
Hamas, however, will and has.
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