Two weeks ago, we devoted this space to a refutation of Nicholas Kristof's lengthy charge sheet in the New York Times against Israel for the "systematic" humiliating abuse of Palestinian security prisoners ("Kristof Breaks All His Own Rules"). The weakness of Kristof's case has only become more evident by virtue of his subsequent attempts to defend his allegations against numerous detailed rebuttals.
Those attempted defenses largely consist of knocking down straw men rather than dealing with what the critics actually said. (For that, see "Kristof and the self-sabotaging world of journalism" by David Litman of CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.)
Take a May 21 piece by Kristof and NYT's op-ed editor, Kathleen Kingsbury. The latter wrote, "The Times doesn't rule out interviewing people or considering them credible because they were in prison or detained." Of course not. Obviously, one cannot write about treatment of prisoners without interviewing any prisoners. And no critic suggested that Kristof should not have done so.
Rather, critics like federal judge Roy Altman criticized Kristof for relying almost exclusively on anonymous sources and thus rendering Israeli refutation of the charges impossible, and for failing to speak to any relevant Israeli officials or consult Israeli judicial records.
Kingsbury continued, "Times Opinion doesn't deem a person's account... to be credible or not based on his or her social media history." Why not? If a source has repeatedly made unsupported and easily refuted charges against Israel on social media, is that not relevant to an assessment of their credibility? And if a supposed think tank is headed by a Hamas operative who celebrated Hamas's October 7 barbarism, is that not relevant to the question of possible bias?
The New York Times obviously thinks that such associations are relevant — at least when it suits its purposes. In a recent story about a woman who accused Graham Platner, the presumptive Democratic nominee for the Senate from Maine, of having physically hurt her in the course of their relationship, the Times noted that she "had worked for right-leaning groups and Republican campaigns." (For good measure, the Times stated that no one could corroborate her accusations, even though she had supplied the Times with several such witnesses.)
Social media activity or background may not be dispositive of the truth or of falsity of claims, but it is surely relevant to any assessment of credibility. Hamas terrorists should not be identified with the nondescript title "journalist." To do so is to practice deception on one's readers. Finally, there is Kristof's response to numerous canine trainers who questioned whether dogs can even be trained to do the kinds of things he suggested. He provided links to three studies, none of which remotely supported his allegations.
MY EARLIER PIECE focused on only the most immediate and direct damage from Kristof's compendium of accusations: the injection of more venom directed at Jews and Israel as "uniquely evil, uniquely disgusting, uniquely inhuman," in Douglas Murray's words, and the effort to distract from a thoroughly documented report of the horrors perpetrated by Hamas on October 7.
But the harm from shoddy journalism such as Kristof's is much broader. Ironically, among the victims of Kristof's journalistic malpractice might be Palestinian prisoners themselves. Any person or institution subjected to poorly researched, feebly argued accusations will be in danger of ignoring all criticism and avoiding the requisite self-examination, on the grounds that whatever they do, the lies will multiply.
Haviv Rettig Gur, among others, has pointed to this danger. As he notes, nowhere in the world are prisons nice places, and all prison systems are subjected to large numbers of abuse claims. And it would be hard to believe that undertrained young IDF recruits pressed into service by the flood of new prisoners after October 7 have always treated the same Palestinian prisoners with kid gloves. Those recruits have all watched the videos produced by those same prisoners gleefully documenting the savagery they inflicted on Israelis, included hundreds of concertgoers the same age as the recruits.
Rettig Gur admits that the obvious propaganda found in Kristof's piece and the absurdity of many of his claims was "a relief." Kristof made it easy to "ignore everything."
BUT THERE IS an even greater danger of the proliferation of the type of journalism in furtherance of a particular narrative or political cause of which Kristof's is only one example. As Senator Pat Moynihan once said, "You are entitled to your own opinions; you are not entitled to your own facts." When truth-seeking is no longer the ultimate journalistic virtue, there are no longer generally accepted facts, and every group will live in an alternative reality based on where they get their news.
Once accuracy and truth-seeking were at least the ideal. As one veteran Chicago journalist wrote in 1976, "If your mother says she loves you, check it out." That year a Gallup poll of trust in public institutions found that 72% of respondents expressed a "great deal" or a "fair amount" of trust in mass media. The comparable figure today is 28%.
In those days, the most prominent journalists, like Jimmy Breslin, Mike Royko, and the somewhat younger John Kass, viewed themselves first and foremost as investigators of the nitty-gritty of the cities upon which they reported. They came from working-class backgrounds and lacked fancy college degrees.
That is not to say that the reporting of an earlier time had no political implications. "Hizzoner," the late Mayor Richard J. Daley, and his machine, no doubt viewed Royko as his biggest irritant. But the subject matter was more likely to be uncovering graft and corruption than advancing a set of progressive beliefs.
Today, an elite college credential is the entry card to prestigious media outlets. And with that elite credential goes a certain hubris about the rightness of one's judgments and a commitment to those causes favored primarily on elite campuses.
Michael Shellenberger ("Why Liberal Journalists Are So Arrogant," Public) details the many areas in which the guardrails once in place against error no longer work, in large part because journalists increasingly collaborate with partisan activists drawn from the same professional-managerial class. The mainstream media botched the border crisis, gender-affirming care, climate change, Russiagate, the origins of Covid, and Hunter Biden's laptop, just as today it is distorting the actions of Israel in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran.
Nor were the mistakes innocent. In 2016, a month before the New York Post went public with Hunter's laptop and the evidence it contained of Biden family graft, an organization called Aspen Digital, which had probably been tipped off by someone within the FBI, conducted a game-playing exercise, including national security reporters from the New York Times and the Washington Post, and organized by a former executive with NPR and the NYT, to rehearse how to respond to the anticipated leak.
The chosen script, which was subsequently acted upon, was to dismiss the laptop as "Russian disinformation," even though the FBI had by that time already confirmed the laptop's veracity. The letter of 51 former senior security and intelligence officials subsequently organized by future secretary of state Anthony Blinken on behalf of the Biden campaign dovetailed perfectly with that reportage. (Some conspiracies, it appears, do succeed.)
When journalists view themselves as "owning" a public soapbox, rather than as owing a responsibility to those who rely on their reporting, the result is a loss of public trust. And when that trust is lost, the result is a public that is skeptical of many things that are obviously true, and, at the same time, willing to credit any conspiracy theory, no matter ridiculous.
A recent NewsGuard/YouGov poll of 1,000 Americans makes the point clearly. Asked whether three assassination attempts on Donald Trump, including that at the fairgrounds in Butler, Pennsylvania, were staged or real, a majority of the public in each case responded either "staged" or "not sure." Only a plurality of 45% thought that each was "real."
How absurd. A bystander, firefighter Corey Comperatore, was killed by the would-be assassin, Thomas Crooks, at Butler, and two others were critically wounded. Trump's upper right ear, less than an inch from his brain, was nicked. Crooks was eliminated by a US Secret Service sniper team. To believe that the assassination was staged, one would have to believe that Crooks was willing to give up his life to further the ruse, and that Trump trusted Crooks's skills as a marksman to the same degree that William Tell's son trusted his father to shoot the apple off his head. Yet nearly a full quarter of those polled, and 42% of Democrats, answered that the event was "staged."
When trust in institutions breaks down and citizens no longer live in a shared reality, social cohesion goes with it. David French notes in a recent Times op-ed, the United States is the only one of 25 comparable democracies in which the majority of the citizenry think that their fellow citizens are morally bad. "Negative partisanship" — i.e., voting primarily based on one's disdain for the other side — is a central feature of American politics.
And Commentary's Abe Greenfield points out, widespread mistrust, anger, and a susceptibility to conspiracy theories to explain who is responsible for all the perceived evils of the world have never been good for the Jews. That was true in Weimar Germany. And it is true today.