(March 16, 2022 / JNS) History shows that it doesn’t take much for Gaza sources to override the essential journalistic dose of skepticism.
In 2015, Agence France Presse and Al Jazeera were compelled to correct, after relying on a Gaza resident’s fabrication, that Israel’s release of southern dams caused major flooding in the coastal Hamas-run territory. Journalists’ failure to check with Israeli authorities before publication opened up the proverbial floodgates and enabled the so-called “flood libel.” In reality, there are no dams in southern Israel.
In 2018, The New Yorker, an esteemed publication that takes pride in its purportedly high standards of fact-checking, parroted the falsehood that there are no MRI machines in the Gaza Strip. The most perfunctory Google scan would have exposed the Gaza cancer patient’s claim as unfounded.
Last week, false tales…