Disinformation Is the New WMD

Twenty years later, the intellectual rigor, organizational diversity and ethical basis for those Iraq War protests doesn’t have anything close to a match in the aftermath of the Hamas mass murders.

In May of 2004, the New York Times issued an extraordinary apology for mis-reporting the existence of weapons of mass destruction inside Saddam Hussein’s Iraq regime, and for a lack of skepticism about the Bush Administration’s claims that Iraq had WMDs and was prepared to use them against their neighbors and the United States.

The NYT’s own internal investigation, later buttressed by the work of its official ombudsman Dan Okrent (who was appointed in the wake of the scandal), found deep and significant flaws in the paper’s reporting, particularly a reliance on unverified sources.

It may be too much to suggest that the credulous mainstream “liberal” media in the west, led by the Times, was responsible for the disastrous Iraqi War. However, it’s not too big a leap to say it was responsible for the momentum leading up to that deadly and unnecessary conflict. The scandal ended the Times careers of Howell Raines, Gerald Boyd, Judith Miller and others - but surely that pales next to the hundreds of thousands of war dead, after an invasion and occupation predicated on those fictional WMDs.

I was in the street marching against that war in 2003, and the faction of the WMD fig leaf was everywhere among those who opposed Bush’s aggressive policy. But I must say, those protests and the eventual response by the Times now seem pretty quaint.

Twenty years later, the intellectual rigor, organizational diversity and ethical basis for those Iraq War protests doesn’t have anything close to a match in the aftermath of the Hamas mass murders in Israel. 

And no one can possibly imagine the sadly degraded New York Times apologizing for anything. 

The events of yesterday and today provide the stomach-churning example from the pits of hell - and they also show just how culpable “prestige” media coupled with unregulated social media channels are in spreading disinformation and stirring outrage that costs lives. The incident is an explosion at the Baptist hospital in Gaza, where the Israeli military is fighting against the Hamas militants who killed 1,400 Israelis the weekend before last in one of the most horrific mass murder events most of us have seen. 

The flash news last night: 500 Palestinians killed in an Israeli air strike that flattened a major hospital in Gaza. Here’s the NYT’s breaking news coverage.

Less than 24 hours later, we know that virtually nothing in that headline was correct.

Israel didn’t strike the hospital, according to U.S. intelligence, the Israeli military, the consensus of military experts and even the Hamas reps recorded discussing the event. It’s unclear how many people died, but it’s certainly not the instantaneous round figure of 500, put forward by Hamas officials minutes after the explosion. And perhaps the most gobsmacking revelation? The hospital itself wasn’t struck -  its parking lot was, with the resulting tragic loss of life of those outside and in parked cars. The hospital still stands intact! (There are many photos). And the consensus is that a rocket fired at targets in Israel by the terror group Islamic Jihad went off course and fell in the parking lot.

The unverified single source: Hamas.

Yet you can’t unfire the starting gun. Sadly, riots have broken out across the Middle East. And a planned emergency summit meeting in Jordan between President Biden and heads of state in Islamic countries was canceled by the King of Jordan, who also repeated the disinformation about the “Israeli strike.” That summit and the resulting diplomacy could have eased tensions and saved lives. Instead, we’re several footsteps closer to a wider war that threatens to bring Iran and the U.S. closer to direct confrontation. Here is how Wired’s David Gilbert described the media flailing:

Moments after the explosion was reported, Gaza’s health ministry claimed the blast was caused by an Israeli rocket attack and that hundreds of people had died, marking what would be among the deadliest attacks of the current conflict between Israel and Hamas, which controls the Palestinian territory of Gaza. News organizations such as The New York Times and Reuters ran with the claim, pushing notification alerts to people’s phones with the news that Israeli rockets had killed Palestinians sheltering in a hospital in Gaza. “Breaking news: Israeli strike on hospitals kill hundreds, Palestinian officials say,” The New York Times alert read.

The media companies, including the NYT, have gradually “evolved” their language and shifted their headlines to a neutral tone. That’s how it’s done now. Weasel words, the actions of cowards who will never issue a correction. Clerks posing as journalists. Expect the story to continue to “evolve.”

And today, during the ill-advised Capitol Hill rally by progressive Jewish peace groups to demand a ceasefire (apparently only on the part of Israel), Democratic Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan repeated the “big lie” that everyone now knows is untrue. Last night, she and her colleague Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota almost instantaneously condemned Israel for its phantom attack with angry tweets that, horrifically, still remain up today.

Twenty years ago I was 20 years younger and more sanguine about the role of protest movements to both reflect honest opposition and to effect change in the world. Now, I tend to see institutions as the major actors - and the weakening of these institutions as the central reason for so much of what is happening to weaken democracy, damage the hopes for peace, and empower two-bit charlatans and vicious authoritarians. The Times is a weakened institution. So is a Democratic Party that suffers the willful disinformation campaign of Reps. Tlaib and Omar (and their allies)  in the name of ideology and sectarian discord.

In some ways, that is the central theme of this…blog…newsletter…website. Book proposal. Whatever this is. We’d all be best served by keeping our eyes open, waiting a good hour or three or 24 to spout off. And not relying on the New York Times, which has abandoned liberal democracy like so many media companies.