Here is a sadly typical example of the phenomenon I’m seeing: The Washington Post recently published an article headlined “They Criticized Israel. This Twitter Account Upended Their Lives.” The story, by the reporter Pranshu Verma, looked at the organization StopAntisemitism, which, according to the Post’s summary, “has flagged hundreds of people who have criticized Israel’s actions in Gaza. Many were swiftly fired.”

But that’s not actually an accurate description of the reality that the Post is reporting. The people featured in this article did not simply criticize Israel or its actions in Gaza. One woman was fired from her job at a branding firm for a video in which she declared that “radical solidarity with Palestine means … not apologizing for Hamas.” (Refusing to say a bad word about a U.S.-designated foreign-terrorist group is undoubtedly not the way her firm wanted to be branded.) Another person, a therapist, was caught on video ripping down a poster of Israeli hostages. She subsequently promoted the conspiracy theory that the Israelis taken by Hamas on October 7 were actually kidnapped by their own country. ...

News outlets have a duty to both accurately report the news and include the context necessary for readers to understand it. The Post article not only casts the whitewashing of Hamas and the murders it committed as “criticism” of Israel; it also fails to explain Hamas’s aims—which include the complete destruction of Israel by any means, including the mass murder of innocent civilians. What happens to public discourse around the most controversial issues when media outlets don’t talk about what we’re actually talking about?