A new study from The Washington Institute for Near East Studies has published a news study that sheds further light on the Washington Post’s biased coverage towards the war in Gaza. According to Robert Satloff, the Post accounts for 72 percent of all non-official anonymous sources.
The study looked at “seven leading U.S. media platforms—the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, along with ABC News, CBS News, ABC News, and CNN.”
It further found 436 stories included anonymous sourcing, but 379 included “government or organizational official or someone described as being knowledgeable about sensitive political, military, or diplomatic issues.”
That left 57 stories “that cited local people as anonymous sources.” Of these, 41 came from the Washington Post.
Satloff notes some justifications “were simply bizarre, such as one purporting to protect a ‘local charity worker’ from being inundated with requests for assistance.”
Additionally, Satloff provides five examples of the Post using anonymous sources as the story’s main story. One story about Israel separating Gazan mothers from their premature babies born in Israeli or West Bank hospitals was so bad, that Satloff himself wrote an article in the Times of Israel rebutting the claim, “which led to the Post re-reporting the story and issuing an apology and a correction.”
A second baby-related story about doctors being forced to choose which premature babies to save also required an apology and correction after another Satloff article.
Satloff also notes:
In three of these five stories, the lead reporter was Jerusalem-based Miriam Berger; in the other two, the lead reporter was Hazem Balousha, a longtime contributor to the Post, the Guardian, and Deutsche Welle who relocated from Gaza to Amman with his family early in the war. Overall, 48 Post reporters or contributors had bylines on Gaza stories citing anonymous sources, but these two were the most frequent, with Berger’s name on the byline of 39 percent of all such stories and Balousha’s on 22 percent of them. On four occasions, Berger and Balousha shared a byline on an anonymously sourced story, meaning that one or both were listed on more than half (51 percent, 21 out of 41) of all these stories.
In a tweet promoting his study, Satloff claimed the study focused on anonymous sources because he found it to be an objective way to measure bias. That is a laudable desire, but we can add several anecdotal examples of the Post’s biased coverage.
- Oct 12: The Post publishes an article falsely stating Israel dropped more bombs in Gaza in a week than the U.S. dropped in Afghanistan in a year. It would later issue a correction.
- Oct. 17: Even after contrary evidence emerged, the Post’s Twitter account was still giving credence to the idea that Israel bombed al-Ahli Hospital.
- Nov 1: Fact-checker Glenn Kessler defends Hamas’s casualty figures despite conceding it does not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants.
- Nov. 8: The Post deletes a cartoon criticizing Hamas’s use of human shields after people complained it was racist.
- Nov. 22: Kessler shames President Biden for saying Hamas decapitated babies.
- Dec. 21: The Post argues that Israeli evidence that Al-Shifa Hospital was used as a Hamas base is lacking despite video footage of weapons being found there.
- May 30: The Post deletes an article without explanation claiming Israel bombed a safe zone full of civilians after reporting confirmed Israeli denials.
- July 19: The Post deletes a tweet lamenting that the parents of an Israeli hostage do not speak about Palestinian deaths in Gaza.
- July 30: The Post apologizes for not referencing Hezbollah killing 12 children in reports of Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon.
Those are just some examples. As for Satloff, he concludes, “Indeed, abuse of anonymous sourcing at the Post appears to be a systemic problem, with responsibility that runs from correspondents in the field to the most senior editors in Washington. This may not be the reason the Post is currently going through convulsive change, but one can only hope that it comes out at the other end with this problem fixed.”
