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Report: Mainstream Media Embedded With Terrorists During Attack

[Ilan Costica, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons]

In 2019, President Trump sent the media into a tizzy by uttering one phrase about them. He called them “truly the enemy of the people.” 

Polling on trust in the news media has shown that the people, while not necessarily thinking of them as an “enemy,” do not trust the mainstream media. 

Fortune wrote that “half of Americans in a recent survey indicated they believe national news organizations intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view through their reporting.

The survey, released Wednesday by Gallup and the Knight Foundation, goes beyond others that have shown a low level of trust in the media to the startling point where many believe there is an intent to deceive.

Asked whether they agreed with the statement that national news organizations do not intend to mislead, 50% said they disagreed. Only 25% agreed, the study found.

Similarly, 52% disagreed with a statement that disseminators of national news “care about the best interests of their readers, viewers and listeners,” the study found. It said 23% of respondents believed the journalists were acting in the public’s best interests.”

As it comes to the terrorist attack in Israel in early October, New Conservative Post has already documented how biased American media has become in favor of Hamas, but a new report states that some outlets went even further than repeating terrorist talking points. 

It appears that some employees of the AP, CNN, New York Times, and Reuters were embedded with terrorists as they brutalized women and children. According to reports, photographers knew the “attack was coming and participated in it.” 

On October 7, Hamas terrorists were not the only ones who documented the war crimes they had committed during their deadly rampage across southern Israel. Some of their atrocities were captured by Gaza-based photojournalists working for the Associated Press and Reuters news agencies whose early morning presence at the breached border area raises serious ethical questions, writes Honest Reporting.

What were they doing there so early on what would ordinarily have been a quiet Saturday morning? Was it coordinated with Hamas? Did the respectable wire services, which published their photos, approve of their presence inside enemy territory, together with the terrorist infiltrators? Did the photojournalists who freelance for other media, like CNN and The New York Times, notify these outlets? Judging from the pictures of lynching, kidnapping and storming of an Israeli kibbutz, it seems like the border has been breached not only physically, but also journalistically.

Is it conceivable to assume that “journalists” just happened to appear early in the morning at the border without prior coordination with the terrorists? Or were they part of the plan?

Even if they didn’t know the exact details of what was going to happen, once it unfolded did they not realize they were breaching a border? And if so, did they notify the news agencies? Some sort of communication was undoubtedly necessary — before, after or during the attack — in order to get the photos published.

Either way, when international news agencies decide to pay for material that has been captured under such problematic circumstances, their standards may be questioned and their audience deserves to know about it. And if their people on the ground actively or passively collaborated with Hamas to get the shots, they should be called out to redefine the border between journalism and barbarism.

The outlet obtained screenshots of now-removed tweets in which an AP photographer took pictures of himself standing in front of the Israeli tank. He was not wearing a press vest or a helmet, and the Arabic caption of his tweet read: “Live from inside the Gaza Strip settlements.”

This is not the first time that The Associated Press has been accused of working with Hamas. Fox News reported in 2021 that “The Associated Press came under fire Saturday for claiming to be unaware that they were sharing office space with Hamas militants in Gaza, dismissing the Israeli government’s claim that the terror group was operating inside the media building that was destroyed in an airstrike over the weekend.

Multiple international media organizations were reportedly based in the Al-Jalaa tower, among them AP and Al Jazeera. Occupants were reportedly notified to evacuate an hour before the building was attacked by Israeli airstrikes in a retaliatory attack against the militant group.

The Israeli Defense Forces in a statement said that the high rise was targeted because it was being used by Hamas military intelligence. AP condemned Israel for the attack and claimed to have ‘no indication’ that the U.S. designated terrorist organization operated from the building.”  

“We have had no indication Hamas was in the building or active in the building,” AP President and CEO Gary Pruitt said in a statement at the time. “This is something we actively check to the best of our ability. We would never knowingly put our journalists at risk.”

The AP leader said he was “shocked and horrified that the Israeli military would target and destroy the building housing AP’s bureau and other news organizations in Gaza.”

This was called a lie by critics. An 2014 article written in The Atlantic by a former AP reporter Matti Friedman revealed that the Associated Press often acted with Hamas. “When Hamas’s leaders surveyed their assets before this summer’s round of fighting, they knew that among those assets was the international press. The AP staff in Gaza City would witness a rocket launch right beside their office, endangering reporters and other civilians nearby—and the AP wouldn’t report it.”

The Associated Press more recently received criticism for refusing to call Hamas terrorists. The Washington Free Beacon wrote, “The Associated Press instructs reporters and organizations that rely on its style guide to avoid referring to Hamas as a terrorist organization….The news outlet states in its “Israel-Hamas Topical Guide” that because “terrorism and terrorist have become politicized, and often are applied inconsistently … the AP is not using the terms for specific actions or groups, other than in direct quotations.” The guidance will affect how dozens of regional newspapers and national outlets like Politico report on the ongoing war in Gaza.

Hamas, an Islamist militant group dedicated to the annihilation of Israel and Jews around the world, is classified as a terrorist organization by dozens of countries, including the United States and the European Union. Hamas has undertaken hundreds of terrorist attacks against civilians since 1993, according to the Jewish Virtual Library.

Instead of referring to Hamas—which earlier this month killed hundreds of innocent civilians, including children in an unprompted attack on Israel—as a terrorist group, the outlet says journalists should call its members ‘militants.'” 

The AP is not the only major outlet to have found itself hiring alleged antisemites from the region. The New York Times recently found itself in hot water for hiring a reporter who praised Hitler online. 

The New York Post noted that “Palestinian filmmaker Soliman Hijjy hailed the Nazi leader as recently as 2018 in a post on Facebook, when he shared a photo of himself captioned that he was “in a state of harmony as Hitler was during the Holocaust,” per a translation from Arabic by pro-Israel media watchdog site HonestReporting.

That same year, Hijjy was hired by the Times as a freelance journalist and worked on a slew of “visual investigations” published by the organization through 2021, including one on an Israeli airstrike that killed 44 people.”

Hijjy’s byline has appeared several times since the initial attack on Israel. In response to the criticism, the Times essentially said, “look, sometimes you have to hire a Nazi who likes Hitler.” 

The newspaper told Fox News Digital, “We reviewed problematic social media posts by Mr. Hijjy when they first came to light in 2022 and took a variety of actions to ensure he understood our concerns and could adhere to our standards if he wished to do freelance work for us in the future.”

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