Photo: AFP
Depending on which news source you saw or read, the hospital bombing in Gaza was either a tragedy that Israel caused by over-reacting, or a mistake caused by an errant Hamas rocket. According to Fox News contributor Joe Concha, the overwhelming majority of the world’s news outlets blatantly pushed the first version of the story. Concha appeared on 710 WOR’s Len Berman and Michael Riedel in the Morning program to vent his frustration with the misrepresentation of the war in the mass media.
“It was the insidious way… they couched it that is maddening,” Concha told Berman and Riedel. “The headlines mostly said something along these lines: ‘Israeli strike kills hundreds at hospital in Gaza, Palestinian officials say’. Oh, that sounds like the government of Palestine. I wonder who runs Gaza? Oh, right, it’s Hamas! The way you do that headline in the fog of war at first is, you say, ‘Hamas blames Israel for strike on hospital, source unclear’.”
Concha called out The New York Times as the most egregious example of a media outlet that erroneously pushed an agenda rather than report a story. “And then what does The New York Times do? They wrote a headline that describes exactly what I just said… and then underneath it, they have a photo of a building that is blown to bits. It’s not the hospital. It was some other building that Hamas used as a headquarters 25 miles away.”
Concha also vented at the reaction of Democrats on Capitol Hill, particularly Minnesota representative Rashida Tlaib, who doubled down on her tweet blaming Israel for the bombing. “After it was proven (untrue), you would think she would say, oh well at first that’s what we were led to believe, and I apologize and I’m taking the tweet down. The tweet is still up and it has something like more than ten million views on it and 50,000 likes, and there’s still people out there that will believe it’s true because hey, she’s a congresswoman, after all, that’s what she has to say.”
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