Last week, The Free Press ran an investigation into a dozen viral photos published by major international media outlets aimed at depicting starvation in Gaza. All 12 pictures featured distressed Gazans, mostly children. All were skin and bones. And all suffered from preexisting conditions, like cerebral palsy.
Crucially, that last piece of information was absent from the captions or news stories they accompanied. In leaving out that context, the outlets presented an incomplete story. Rather than typifying the situation in Gaza, right now, these are exceptional cases.
We are proud of the report and the reporters who tracked it down. In doing so, Olivia Reingold and Tanya Lukyanova performed a public service by asking and answering a simple question: In a moment of widespread charges by international institutions and news outlets about hunger in Gaza, are these photographs representative? More: How is it that journalists failed to scrutinize information coming out of a war zone with an active terrorist group conducting kinetic and information warfare?
Journalistic outlets love to boast about “impact,” and this story has had more than its share. CNN updated its piece after our reporting, noting at the top that the story had been “updated to reflect new information regarding the condition of some of the subjects.” So did The Washington Post, issuing a correction to say that it had “incorrectly” used a year-old photo in its current coverage of “mass starvation” in Gaza. The Guardian issued no correction but stealthily added one important detail to its coverage: that a previously featured child had cerebral palsy.
In a normal time, this is the kind of work that would be praised by our peers for getting to ground truth. But we don’t live in normal times. And that is not how some of our colleagues in the news media saw things.
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Author: The Editors
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