Responsible Reporting: Citing the Gaza Health Ministry
Further analysis reveals that NBC News and Washington Post have been especially egregious in their reporting, with nearly 80% of their respective 63 and 125 articles published between October 7 and November 12 about the conflict omitting mention of Hamas when citing information from the Gaza Health Ministry.
October 18, the day after the bombing near the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, served as a turning point for news outlets. On October 17, major news organizations including The New York Times and NBC News published articles, posted on X, and pushed mobile notifications claiming that Israel was at fault for bombing the hospital, citing the Gaza Health Ministry on the attack and the casualty toll. As has since been verified, this was false reporting. First, Israel is not to blame for the incident; second, the hospital itself was not hit, but an adjacent parking lot; and third, the Gaza Health Ministry supplied unsubstantiated casualty data. But the damage was done. Journalists and news organizations witnessed first-hand the dire consequences of taking the Gaza Health Ministry at its word.
Following this error, more articles citied the Gaza Health Ministry with explicit mention that it is controlled by Hamas. October 18 is the first time that explanations like “Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry” outnumber mentions of the ministry without reference to Hamas. This more responsible reporting trend peaks on October 25, when the White House shared intelligence that Israel was not responsible for the hospital bombing. This is a positive development. Between October 21 and 28, the majority of articles which cited information from the Gaza Health Ministry did mention Hamas within ten words.
However, a new status quo is emerging. The media continues to cite data from the ministry but often does not provide caveats. Since October 28, the number of articles with and without explicit reference to Hamas’ control has fluctuated. After reaching a low on October 31, the number of articles without explicit mention of Hamas’s control of the Gaza Health Ministry has been on an upward trajectory. This demonstrates that about 50% of reporting still omits reference to Hamas when citing information from the Gaza Heath Ministry. We expect this trend to continue as journalists and readers get further away from their irresponsible reporting blunder on October 17.
ADL calls on all news organizations to properly caveat data and information cited from the Gaza Health Ministry with clear mention that it is controlled by Hamas and that it has shared false and misleading information in the past. Journalists and news organizations must acknowledge when their sources may be unconfirmed or unreliable.
[1] Data from Media Cloud queries scanning for references of “Gaza Health Ministry” and its derivates between October 7, 2023, and November 12, 2023
[2] Media Cloud search query guidance recommends using the number 10 for proximity searches within a typical sentence: https://www.mediacloud.org/documentation/query-guide
[3] ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News, NBC News, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post
The article is published courtesy of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
