Let’s just try an alternative universe of possibility. When the Western news agencies received the claims of the Hamas-run Health Ministry and the Pallywood footage from their cameramen, if they had, before running the story, demanded shots of the hospital damage, of the crater, of the hundreds of bodies strewn everywhere… if they had had real journalists working for them, prepared, with all precautions, to interview people who were there about Hamas activity after the strike (removing shrapnel)… if they had awaited Israeli response and intelligence… if their first headline had been “HAMAS OFFICIALS BLAME ISRAEL FOR PALESTINIAN ROCKET THAT, ACCORDING TO THEM, KILLED 500 GAZANS”… then maybe our “allies” in Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq (not Iran), threatened by their angry “street,” could have used this information to undermine the anger. After all, it’s pretty humiliating when your own side kills your own people in front of the world. …

Maybe if the media had behaved professionally, rather than like “stenographers” for Hamas; if Agence France-Presse had behaved like a serious operation, rather than as “Agence France-Palestine”; maybe if they reported on the evidence that Hamas will fire on its own people, to keep them from fleeing from Israeli fire and that Gazans are arming themselves to fight Hamas’ predatory greed; maybe if the Washington Post didn’t remove a bitingly accurate political cartoon because “it was seen by many readers as racist,” and then publish a long list of complaints about the unflattering caricature (as if that is not the very stuff of political cartoons); then maybe the media and the politicians who take them seriously wouldn’t wring their hands over Israel killing Gazan babies and women, and using figures from the very people who will kill them to prevent them from not being killed by Israel and who, on principle, label all casualties civilian, preferably children.

Then, maybe, Hamas would not be able to brag, as they did in 2014, that their propaganda “constituted the river from which the global media quenched its thirst for information about what was happening.”

(via Power Line)

[It’s worse than that, actually, The IDF has briefed reporters every single day of this conflict, have provided video and photographic evidence of Hamas crimes and lies, and screened the actual videos taken by Hamas terrorists on 10/7. Western media outlets frame all of this as suspect since it comes from the Israelis but swallow Hamas propaganda without a second thought or an honest attribution. Think ‘Gazan health officials,’ for instance. Western media outlets are at best willing fools, and more likely outright accomplices. — Ed]