Holding the media to a higher standard: What are the consequence of misreporting on Gaza? - opinion

While we all rejoice at news of the Trump peace plan, this war revealed some very troubling issues regarding the media and its standards of truthfulness.

I believe in robust free speech – but not in shielding falsehoods. Under current US law, media outlets enjoy sweeping protections even when they disseminate untruths. In an era of weaponized legacy and social media, it’s time to reexamine this state of play.

However, the photos were misleading. Evidence soon emerged documenting the children’s preexisting medical conditions; one photo even cropped out an ailing child’s seemingly healthy brother in the background.

Any competent journalist should have questioned the photos, many of which were provided by the Anadolu Agency, the state-run wire service for the extreme anti-Israel Turkish government. Instead, they chose pathos over logos to tell their story – emotion over fact.

Semafor revealed that The New York Times knew the photo depicted a child with cerebral palsy and endeavored to find images of malnourished children who didn’t have preexisting medical issues. They evidently didn’t try very hard, because they instead ran an image of another child who suffers from genetic and other disorders.

The Times story featuring the photo was broadcast to its 55 million X/Twitter followers. Their half-hearted correction was disseminated via its PR account, which has fewer than 90 thousand followers.

These errors of judgment were compounded by the media’s recent amplification of the International Association of Genocide Scholars’ (IAGS) declaration of genocide in Gaza. Headlines like “Leading genocide scholars organization says Israel is committing genocide in Gaza” were damning – at least until an HonestReporting board member revealed that anyone could be a “leading genocide scholar” for a mere $30.

Since the October 7 attacks, reporters have repeatedly ignored information that complicates Hamas’s narrative that Israel is a sadistic and genocidal power, accepting Hamas statements uncritically while casting doubt on Israel’s. This unethical journalism hasn’t just harmed Israel’s reputation; it’s made Jews around the world less safe.

After the media echoed Hamas allegations that Israel had bombed a hospital and killed hundreds, riots erupted around the Arab world, and a Tunisian mob torched a historic synagogue. Unfortunately for the synagogue, the explosion was actually caused by a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that hit the hospital’s parking lot.

In the space of a few hours, The New York Times headline changed from “Israeli strike kills hundreds in hospital, Palestinian officials say” to “Hundreds reported killed in blast at a Gaza hospital,” a more neutral headline that should have been the original.

The paper later issued a note admitting that “Times editors should have taken more care with the initial presentation and been more explicit about what information could be verified.” That’s an understatement.

If I write something untrue about my neighbor that causes them reputational harm, and it turns out that I was negligent in researching the allegation before writing it, courts can hold me responsible for committing libel and force me to pay damages.

Unfortunately, the legal rules that apply to you and me do not apply to the media.

When writing about public figures or events, media organizations are held to a much lower standard than “negligence.” As long as the media organization wasn’t knowingly “malicious” or didn’t exhibit “reckless disregard” of the facts (both nearly impossible-to-prove standards), it can’t be held responsible for libel.

Somehow, my speech is held to a higher standard of accuracy and rigor than The New York Times is, despite their teams of researchers, fact-checkers, and journalists.

This imbalance was memorialized in a 1964 Supreme Court case, New York Times v. Sullivan, in which a historically permissive court majority sought to insulate the press from being drowned by libel suits that would chill their coverage of public figures. A fair concern for a free speech advocate, like me – but Sullivan should not give a pass from responsible speech.

It’s time to review that decision.

For generations, Americans were rightfully taught to respect the press’s democratic role to inform the citizenry and hold those in power accountable, but times have changed, and so has the media, which seems to have forgotten the tradition of ethics, of the Murrows and the Cronkites, that historically set our press apart from much of the rest of the world's. In a desperate race for clicks and audience share, it’s clear that even our most respected outlets have prioritized speed and narrative over fact. Others have simply weaponized words, with little regard for the truth.

Amid an information ecosystem rife with bad information, we need trusted sources more than ever. Unfortunately, coverage of Israel has shown that major outlets are willing to repeatedly commit the same grave errors, even in the face of the same terrible results. We need a mechanism to hold them accountable for demonstrably shifting public opinion and imperiling Jews around the world, which perhaps contributed to the murder of Charlie Kirk as well.

The media world has changed since Sullivan. It’s time for the courts to replace Sullivan with a fairer, more provable standard, perhaps supplemented by a rule like the UK’s “loser pays legal fees” in these cases. The press is afforded tremendous privileges by the US Constitution, and those privileges should come with the responsibility to, at minimum, make a good-faith effort to get the facts right.

There are several potential test cases on this issue currently in lower courts. Hopefully the Supreme Court takes up this issue soon, for all our sakes.