Liberal Media Outlets Distort the Truth About the Israel/Hamas Conflict
“a parade of news stories that invent, distort, or otherwise misuse statistics to unfavorably compare the Gaza war with others across the globe wars”
This has been happening since the Hamas attacks on October 7th. The media has chosen a side and it’s so obvious.
Camera reports:
How the AP (and WaPo and NY Times) Lie With Statistics
On Thursday, the Associated Press argued that Israel’s fight against Hamas “now sits among the deadliest and most destructive in history.”
Before sunrise the next morning, the language was quietly changed to instead cite wars in “recent” history. But the stealth edit did little to redress the many glaring problems in the piece, the latest in a parade of news stories that invent, distort, or otherwise misuse statistics to unfavorably compare the Gaza war with others across the globe wars.
The reason for this assembly line of manipulations, it seems, is precisely to support overblown charges like the one that opens the AP story: Israel’s response to Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre is the most destructive… the deadliest… the biggest… the worst….
Urban combat is a notoriously destructive endeavor. Add subterranean warfare — the need to deal with the combat tunnels that snake below Gaza’s neighborhoods and serve as a lifeline for Hamas militants and a death trap for Israelis — and there’s no shortage of ruin in Gaza that could be discussed on its own terms.
But apparently that wouldn’t suffice. So cue the embellishments — like the one at the very center of the AP piece:
Israel’s offensive has destroyed over two-thirds of all structures in northern Gaza and a quarter of buildings in the southern area of Khan Younis, according to an analysis of Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite data by Corey Scher of the CUNY Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University, experts in mapping damage during wartime.
Destroyed? The satellite data used by the study’s authors can suggest which buildings have been damaged, but not whether they have been destroyed. When we double-checked with the researchers, Van Den Hoek reiterated that they only count structures as “likely damaged or destroyed” because, he explained, “we don’t yet have means of distinguishing categories of damage severity.”
Which means the AP’s claim is egregiously false. And that’s hardly its only manipulation.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
Oh c’mon. If you can’t trust a long-established respected news service that employs people who accompanied (or worse) the Hamas terrorists during the October 7 atrocities, who CAN you trust?
Well, as the long-ago humorist Finley Peter Dunne, writing as Irish barkeep Mr. Dooley, said, “Thrust ivrybody—but cut th’ ca-ards..”