The New York Times reporter who covers the US State Department, Edward Wong, has had a rocky past few weeks, inflicting a series of half-truths and outright falsehoods on Times readers.

Wong’s technique sometimes is to write a sentence that is technically accurate but leaves out so much significant context that it winds up being functionally inaccurate, or at least highly misleading.

Consider, for example, this sentence in a recent Times article about American military aid to Israel: “The annual aid had been about $3 billion, but Mr. [President Joe] Biden increased that amount after Israel began waging war in Gaza after the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks by Hamas.”

Actually, it wasn’t only “Mr. Biden” who increased the aid, but also Congress, which under the US Constitution has the power to appropriate funds. There have been several votes on this since the Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attack on Israel, and they’ve been overwhelming. For example, an April 20, 2024 House vote on the “Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act” was 366 in favor and 58 opposed. An April 2024 vote in the Senate was 79 to 18. Even before the Oct. 7, 2023, attack, the aid levels had been at $3.3 billion in foreign military financing and an additional $500 million a year in cooperative missile defense funding.