The size and placement of NYT picture of "Gaza (fake) starving child" was virtually unprecedented.

EoZ ^ | Jul 30, 2025

[Freeleesy]

This was the (top part of) front page of the New York Times on July 25 featuring what appears to be a starving, emaciated Gaza child.

I just went through the front pages of the New York Times for the past 365 days. Not once has it positioned a photo in this extraordinary way.

Usually the NYT will feature a photo that is four columns wide, and that photo is always wider than it is tall (landscape). For example, here is the front page from yesterday, illustrating the mass shooting in Manhattan.

Once every couple of months it has a feature photo that is five columns wide, also in landscape orientation.

The largest photo of the past year was for Trump's inauguration, and this one was unusual in that it was in a portrait orientation, not landscape.

But I could not find a single example of a four column photo in portrait orientation on the right side of the page, where the top story headline normally is.

Also I could not find any other photos that featured a suffering child above the fold on the front page over the year. No starving children in Somalia or Sudan where hundreds die every day. 

The editors made a decision that this single picture was perhaps the most important photo of the year, placing it where even casual reader would subconsciously recognize that this is a huge story.

Yesterday, the NYT published an editor's note about the child in that picture at the bottom of the online article:

Editors’ Note: July 29, 2025

This article has been updated to include information about Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, a child in Gaza suffering from severe malnutrition. After publication of the article, The Times learned from his doctor that Mohammed also had pre-existing health problems. 

This photo, featured and highlighted in a way that is rarely seen in the newspaper, was misrepresented as if it is the way Gaza is.  And now they add an "oops!" - not an apology, not a retraction, but a small note saying, "You know that huge photo that we shoved in your faces? Well, it had a slight problem. But no worries - our anti-Israel propaganda was fully successful. Mission accomplished. This note that practically no one will see lets us claim that we are responsible journalists."

Here's the editor's note in context of the entire online article - the small red box on the bottom.

The New York Times checked all the boxes of published journalistic ethics. Yet when you look at the entire story, you see that the entire episode from photo placement, to photo size, to lack of awareness that nearly all similar photos over the past year were of previously sick children, to the note that is not a correction and non-apology, is a far cry from ethical. 

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TOPICS: Politics
KEYWORDS: curtissliwa; europeanunion; france; hamas; hezbollah; houthis; iran; israel; kathyhochul; newyork; newyorkcity; newyorkslimes; newyorktimes; pallyweid; spewbarfslimes; syria; theholodomor; unitedkingdom; walterdurantytimes; waronterror; yemen; zohranmamdani

[TheThirdRuffian]

I’m sure the retraction will be as big as their retraction of their praise of Hitler back in the 1930s.

Leftists never admit wrongdoing.

[Yogafist]

At what point, if there is one, does propaganda become criminal?

[linMcHlp]

From the NYT article:

Israel countered the images of starving children this week with images of pallets of supplies lying uncollected on the Gaza side of a border crossing and footage of what the military described as Hamas terrorists enjoying platters of food and fresh fruit in the group’s underground tunnels. The military declined to say when the video was recorded.

The leaders of Israel and Hamas are engaged in sluggish negotiations, through mediators, for another temporary cease-fire that could bring relief and have Hamas release hostages it is holding in the tunnels in exchange for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody.

[Menehune56]

NYT should feel deep shame. But they won’t.

[BenLurkin]

It’s a Tabloid, Jim.

[Freeleesy]

What NYT has long become

[Freeleesy]

I saw the pathetic note by NYT it’s as sad as one can expect

[9YearLurker]

So it looks like it’s not actually unprecedented at all.

But it is also probably a stronger Pulitzer option than the other pics getting similar real estate.

[fso301]

The size and placement of NYT picture of "Gaza (fake) starving child" was virtually unprecedented.

They haven't done it since the last time they did it, or the time before, or the time before that, all the way back to the days of Walter Duranty.

[DPMD]

Sam Kinison’s bit on footage of starving African child comes to mind: “Give him a fu**in’ sandwich!”

[rlmorel]

I thought people might appreciate this excerpt in the Prologue from one of the best books written about Senator Joseph McCarthy and the attacks on him back in the early to mid-Fifties.

The book is: Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joseph McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies

by M. Stanton Evans.

He is unusual because he tells the whole stories of the people McCarthy was trying to expose, and the efforts of Leftists and even the "Deep State" of that time (since it did exist even then) to destroy McCarthy, and salt the earth on which he walked so his name could never be spoken in polite company again.

These two anecdotes below discuss his efforts to get retractions from the New York Times on known and provably verifiable slanders and errors, and is illustrative in this context of this thread on Free Republic..

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"...One further instance in this vein is worth a bit of notice, as it illustrates not only the ignorance problem but the unwillingness or inability of some who write about such matters to get the simplest facts in order. In this case the offender was the New York Times, which in May 2000 published an obituary of a recently deceased New York professor with a domestic Cold War background. This ran on the Times obit page under a four-column headline reading, “Oscar Shaftel, Fired After Refusing McCarthy, Dies at 88.”

This article said Shaftel, once a teacher at New York’s Queens College, had lost his job back in the 1950s when he refused to answer “some questions” about alleged Red connections posed by the “investigations subcommittee of the Senate Internal Security subcommittee headed by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.” The obit then went on to offer a lengthy tribute to Shaftel, describe his lonely years of exile, and suggest that, despite this ill treatment, treatment, his gallant spirit had remained unbroken.

The errors in this story were stunning, starting with the bedrock fact that Joe McCarthy had nothing to do with the late professor, the committee that brought him to book, or his alleged hardships. Indeed, there was no such thing as “the investigations subcommittee of the Senate Internal Security subcommittee.” The security unit, as the name clearly says, was itself a subcommittee (of the Judiciary Committee), its chairman at the time of the Shaftel hearing Sen. William Jenner of Indiana. McCarthy wasn’t even a member of this panel, much less the chairman of it.

Almost as odd as the obit itself were the events ensuing when, in my self-appointed role as part-time ombudsman on such matters, I wrote the Times about it, giving the facts above related, plus some pertinent data on the case the Times account omitted.

Over the course of a month and a half, I sent the Times three different missives on the subject without having a letter printed or receiving an answer, made two references to it on C-SPAN talk shows, and enlisted the aid of the late media critic Reed Irvine, who wrote directly to Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger trying to get the thing corrected. This apparently did the trick, as the Times at last provided on September 1 (the Friday of the Labor Day weekend) an obscure retraction, tucked into a corrections box between two numbingly soporific items (confusion of Mexican local politicians in a photo, misidentification of birds in Brooklyn).

This confessed in bare-bones terms that the Times had erred as to the name and chairman of the committee that heard Shaftel. It thus took six weeks, half a dozen efforts, and the labors of two people to get a terse, nit-sized correction in no way comparable in scope or impact to the original mammoth error.

The point of this vignette isn’t merely the slapdash and remarkably ignorant reporting of the New York Times in its casual slurring of Joe McCarthy, but the extreme difficulty of getting the mistake corrected. The experience has been repeated in other attempts to set the record straight on media treatment of McCarthy and his cases.

Responses to these sporadic efforts have always been the same—reluctance to admit or fix the problem, or even to run a letter pointing out the miscue. The prevailing attitude seems to be: We will print any off-the-wall assertion assertion about McCarthy that comes along, without bothering to check any facts whatever, and if we get called on it won’t correct the record. Why such a mind-set should exist, and what it says about the state of journalistic ethics, are intriguing questions, but less important than the effects of such slovenly reportage on our understanding of the Cold War and Joe McCarthy’s involvement in it. Multiply such episodes many-fold, over a considerable span of years, and the cumulative impact in terms of spreading disinformation on McCarthy and his times is obviously enormous.

Finally, less glaring than these journalistic pratfalls, but more harmful, are misstatements that occur in standard biographies of McCarthy and political histories of the era. You might think scholarly looking, footnoted tomes by pipe-smoking academics with years of research to go on are more reliable than ephemeral stories banged out tonight only to be thrown away tomorrow. Such, however, is not the case. These studies, too, are often rife with error. To be sure, the authors know McCarthy wasn’t a member of the House or chairman of the Jenner subcommittee, but feature other less easily recognized distortions that are more serious and enduring.

A last anecdote from this unhappy genre may suggest the nature of the academic problem, the more consequential as it involves another record of the federal government pertaining to McCarthy.

In 2003, the U.S. Senate released for publication the long-secret transcripts of executive hearings conducted by McCarthy when he headed the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in the early 1950s. This was an historical milestone of sorts, as the executive sessions provide detail about a number of controverted cases, in many instances going beyond the public hearings run by McCarthy and his counsel, Roy Cohn. This major publishing event, however, would be badly marred by the invidious comments and introductory notes of associate Senate historian Donald Ritchie, who edited the hearings for publication.

In these notes and press statements of which he was prolific, Ritchie routinely stacked the deck against McCarthy, up to and including glosses that were demonstrably in error. One such episode I discussed with him was the above-noted case of Annie Lee Moss, called before the McCarthy panel in 1954 and portrayed in most histories of the era as a pathetic McCarthy victim.

Ritchie’s handling of the case, footnoted to three academic studies, reinforced the standard image of Moss as victim and McCarthy as browbeating tyrant. As will be discussed, this version of the Moss affair is quite false, a fact readily seen if one consults not the usual recycled histories but the voluminous official records on the case.

When I got Ritchie on the phone I asked if he by any chance had reviewed these original sources, rather than simply repeating what he had picked up from other academics. When I further indicated that these records showed McCarthy was right about the case and offered to sum up the relevant data, the historian grew irate, said “I am growing very tired of this conversation,” and abruptly ended our discussion.

The rebuff wasn’t all that different from the stonewalling responses of media outlets that have likewise distorted the Moss affair and other of McCarthy’s cases. To pursue other such items from a long syllabus of media/academic error would preempt the contents of this book, which is in large part an effort to redress the many misstatements that have been made in the usual write-ups of McCarthy.

Suffice it to say encounters of this kind have made me forever wary of secondhand news that can’t be traced to primary records. As an old newspaper adage has it, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” Unfortunately, many who say and write things about McCarthy simply repeat what they have read somewhere, without the necessary checking. The net effect of such compounded error is an almost complete inversion of the empirical record on McCarthy and his cases..."

[Bullish]

We don’t hate the NY times enough.

[Albion Wilde]

Great illustrated post — thanks!

[Bullish]

Leftists never admit wrongdoing.

You're right, they never admit to getting anything wrong, even when they're purposely lying and doing horrendous damage... Stalin was like that too.

[fso301]

Interesting. Thanks!

[Danie_2023]

“”But no worries - our anti-Israel propaganda was fully successful. Mission accomplished. This note that practically no one will see lets us claim that we are responsible journalists.”””

Hey, there’s a really good reason why they’re called the New York Slimes. They have evolved into nothing more than a lamestream version of the National Enquirer. Ethics be damned, if not totally MIA... for decades.

[TheThirdRuffian]

Yep. Does this look familiar?

Sociopaths are known for not admitting fault and often shift blame onto others or external circumstances. This behavior is a defining characteristic of their personality, as they rarely take responsibility for their actions. For example, a sociopath might say, “The dog ate my homework,” or blame men or women or a race for their failure.

This tendency to avoid responsibility is not just about lying; it is also about manipulating others to believe that they are the victims. Sociopaths may use various tactics, such as playing the victim, shifting blame, or gaining sympathy, to convince others that they are not at fault.

In everyday life, sociopaths may engage in mind games, such as lying, manipulation, and seduction, to get what they want. They are often skilled at coming off as sincere, even when they are not, which can make it difficult to recognize their true intentions.

It is important to note that sociopaths do not feel guilt or remorse for their actions. They may justify their behavior by believing that their actions are justified and that they are superior to others. This lack of empathy and remorse makes it even more challenging for them to admit fault or take responsibility for their mistakes.

[MayflowerMadam]

It’s all a Wag The Dog operation.

The best meme is ET as a starving Gaza child.

[Freeleesy]

Indeed