Swamp Rabbit and I were re-reading a New York Times story posted shortly after the October 17 Gaza hospital explosion that killed scores, or perhaps hundreds, of civilians. The question of who’s responsible for the explosion is still up in the air, but that didn’t stop NYT from using this presumptuous headline: “Israeli strike kills hundreds in hospital, Palestinians say.”

“This story reminds a lot of people of that quote attributed to Mark Twain,” I said in regard to the headline. “‘A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth gets a chance to get its pants on.'”

“So the media ain’t to be trusted, everything they report is lies,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Is that what you’re saying?”

Most reporters don’t set out to lie, I told him, but the idea that their stories will be processed and published without being altered to fit someone’s agenda is naive, to say the least. Editors at a powerful entity like NYT don’t make final content decisions in a vacuum, free from the influences of competing interest groups fighting for coverage that will cast their views in a favorable light.

I told him that the big media outlets often tweak news stories to fit what they think is the prevailing public mood regarding important issues. For instance, the prevailing public mood after 9/11 was overwhelmingly hawkish, so the mainstream media more or less ignored war foes and fell into lockstep with government liars who said Iraq had WMDs and must therefore be vanquished.

In the case of the hospital explosion, NYT editors surely realized that much of the world was appalled by video showing high casualties in Gaza caused by Israeli forces reacting to the October 7 massacre of 1,300 Israelis by Hamas. Responding to what seemed to be the prevailing public mood, the editors apparently jumped to the conclusion that the Israelis were responsible for the hospital bombing. In order not to be accused of bias, they added the weasel words, “Palestinians say.”

“They assumed an ‘Israeli strike’ caused the explosion,” I said. “They assumed hundreds were killed in the explosion, even though the death count hadn’t been independently verified. They ignored the possibility that Hamas may have been responsible for the explosion. They unwittingly turned the hospital story into a big victory for anti-Israel propagandists.”

“You’re saying the NYT screwed up but they didn’t lie?” Swamp Rabbit asked.

“I’m saying the Times and a lot of other big media outlets obscured the truth in response to a strong public outcry by supporters of the Palestinians,” I replied. “That’s not the same as lying but it might be just as bad.”

Footnote: The Times ran an updated version of the hospital explosion story that includes some unacknowledged corrections. The headline is “Hundreds reported killed in blast at a Gaza hospital.”