Posted on 08/25/2025 2:18:29 PM PDT by Freeleesy
Journalists Against Journalism.
Our critics can call us any name they like. That doesn’t change the facts.
“Olivia Reingold and Tanya Lukyanova performed a public service by asking and answering a simple question,” write The Editors. (Illustration by The Free Press, images via screen grabs)
By The Editors
08.25.25 — Israel and Antisemitism
Last week, The Free Press ran an investigation into a dozen viral photos published by major international media outlets aimed at depicting starvation in Gaza. All 12 pictures featured distressed Gazans, mostly children. All were skin and bones. And all suffered from preexisting conditions, like cerebral palsy.
Crucially, that last piece of information was absent from the captions or news stories they accompanied. In leaving out that context, the outlets presented an incomplete story. Rather than typifying the situation in Gaza, right now, these are exceptional cases.
Read
They Became Symbols for Gazan Starvation. But All 12 Suffer from Other Health Problems.
We are proud of the report and the reporters who tracked it down. In doing so, Olivia Reingold and Tanya Lukyanova performed a public service by asking and answering a simple question: In a moment of widespread charges by international institutions and news outlets about hunger in Gaza, are these photographs representative? More: How is it that journalists failed to scrutinize information coming out of a war zone with an active terrorist group conducting kinetic and information warfare?
Journalistic outlets love to boast about “impact,” and this story has had more than its share. CNN updated its piece after our reporting, noting at the top that the story had been “updated to reflect new information regarding the condition of some of the subjects.” So did The Washington Post, issuing a correction to say that it had “incorrectly” used a year-old photo in its current coverage of “mass starvation” in Gaza. The Guardian issued no correction but stealthily added one important detail to its coverage: that a previously featured child had cerebral palsy.
In a normal time, this is the kind of work that would be praised by our peers for getting to ground truth. But we don’t live in normal times. And that is not how some of our colleagues in the news media saw things.
To Krystal Ball, host of Breaking Points, our journalism was “just so disgusting.” Ball’s co-host, Saagar Enjeti, chimed in to compare our reporters to Holocaust deniers, saying that a “key tenet of holocaust denial is trying to claim that many of the initial victims or purported victims had other preconditions and that’s part of the reason why they died.”
Those who care about the truth will note that these children were not presented as the initial victims of anything; they were deceptively promoted to reflect the average Gazan. To suggest otherwise betrays a fleeting relationship with reality.
Ball and Enjeti are not alone. Glenn Greenwald, a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist”, argued not just for our censorship, but for our “trial at the Hague”.
Barack Obama’s former deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes (whose nickname, incidentally, in that administration was “Hamas”), says we are “sociopathic.” Ryan Grim, co-founder of Drop Site News, predicts reporter Olivia Reingold’s “name will become notorious for a generation.”
We are confident our reporters’ names will be known, but not for the reasons Grim and his ilk suggest. They will be remembered for sober, meticulous work in the face of journalists who oppose actual journalism.
You’ll notice one important aspect about the uproar: No one is disputing the facts in our piece. Instead, they take issue with the facts we have exposed. They take issue with curiosity that points in the wrong political direction.
This story—like all of our reporting—does not deny that there is hunger in Gaza. We cite the most recent data from the World Health Organization, which reported 63 deaths from malnutrition last month alone, including 25 children.
Their situations—and those of the people in these 12 images—are tragic enough, as is the horror of the war itself.
But the panic over our investigation is not sincere—it is strategic. They think if they can make an example out of our reporters, no one will dare ask uncomfortable questions. Questions like: If there is a deliberate campaign of starvation, why did our reporters find that many of these children are receiving medical care, and some of them have already been airlifted out of Gaza to seek treatment with Israel’s help? If these images are representative of the average Gazan, then why were our reporters able to find complicated backstories behind the first dozen images they investigated? And if these critics are such accuracy hawks, why do they take issue with adding basic context to news stories?
In a normal time, this is the kind of work that would be praised by our peers for getting to ground truth. But we don’t live in normal times.
More: Why have these reporters ignored credible reports of the United Nations and its allied organizations themselves blocking the distribution of aid in Gaza? And why are they twisting the truth about Hamas’s theft of aid? Similarly, why have they ignored the fact that the United Nations-associated body that attempts to assess whether there is a famine monkeyed with the metrics for its assessment in Gaza?
We’ve seen this movie before: In 2020, when the activist class declared there was a pandemic of police gunning down unarmed black men, anyone who pointed to statistics showing otherwise was branded a racist. Or during Covid, when reporters and politicians who questioned the wisdom of keeping schools closed were accused of trying to abet mass death. Or more recently, when the question of transgender youth medicine was treated as settled science—until it wasn’t. Our point is simple: Shouting down inconvenient facts doesn’t resolve a debate.
Read
Mistakes at ‘The New York Times’ Only Go in One Direction
For the Gaza information warriors, it’s not enough to acknowledge that there is hunger in Gaza. No. It must be premeditated genocide. Introducing facts into the discourse that complicate that judgment is condemned as genocide denial. Whatever one wants to call this kind of discourse, it’s certainly not the work of journalists.
Ball gives the game away in her segment on Breaking Points. She asks at one point, after quoting our piece: “Is that supposed to be a propaganda win for Israel?”
No. It’s just reporting the context that the mainstream, and the serially online YouTubers, leave out lest their narratives disintegrate and their audiences evaporate along with them. In other words, it is journalism.
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