In life, there are three constants: Death, taxes, and Israel getting a raw deal in the press.
NBC News recently published a report misleading readers into believing Israeli forces targeted and killed Palestinian Khalil Hamadeh.
“A Gaza mother mourns her only child killed by a missile in the latest Israeli-Palestinian fighting,” read the NBC headline.
The news outlet shared the article on social media, tweeting the accompanying news blurb: “It took five rounds of IVF treatments for a Palestinian woman to conceive her only child. The 18-year-old was killed by a missile in the latest Israeli-Palestinian fighting.”
It’s not until the article’s 20th paragraph, more than halfway through the story, that readers are informed that Hamadeh was most likely killed by Palestinian militants, not by the Israelis.
“Israel estimated a total of 47 Palestinians were killed, including 14 killed by misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rockets — numbers that could include Khalil,” the report said. “The Israeli military said it carried out no operations in the area of the Jebaliya refugee camp at the time of the strike that killed Khalil. It released video footage that purportedly showed a barrage of rockets fired by militants, with one falling short.”
It added, “The militant group had announced a rocket attack on the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, just north of Jebaliya, around the same time as the explosion, according to the Associated Press.”
For the record, the Associated Press corroborated an “errant rocket fired by Palestinian militants killed civilians late Saturday, including children, in the town of Jabaliya, in northern Gaza. … A Palestinian medical worker, who was not authorized to brief media and spoke on condition of anonymity, said the blast killed at least six people, including three children.” It’s unclear why NBC is being coy about the corroborated facts despite citing the Associated Press’s independent reporting.
NBC did not just bury the lede. It intentionally misled its readers.
Read the above headline and news blurb and tell me with a straight face it wasn’t NBC’s explicit intention to make it sound as if the Israelis killed the Palestinian. Good luck.
Burying the lede again
Motherboard published a “shocking” story last week: Facebook aided Nebraska law enforcement officials in hounding and prosecuting an 18-year-old girl for procuring an abortion.
“This Is the Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion,” read the Motherboard headline.
Its subhead added, “Motherboard has obtained court documents that show Facebook gave police a teenager’s private chats about her abortion. Cops then used those chats to seize her phone and computer.”
The story soon went viral, prompting scores of women to encourage others to delete their Facebook accounts. The hashtag #DeleteFacebook trended nationally. Copycat reports at competing outlets soon followed.
“Facebook turned over messages in disturbing abortion case against a teen and mom,” reported the Daily Beast.
USA Today said, “Nebraska woman faces abortion-related charge after cops seize family Facebook messages.”
“Facebook turned over chat messages between mother and daughter now charged over abortion,” reported NBC News.
There’s a problem, though. The mother and her then-17-year-old daughter did more than just terminate a pregnancy. There’s more to this story than the headlines suggest.
As Motherboard itself eventually reported, citing court documents, “After taking the medication … [Celeste Burgess] gave birth to a stillborn fetus. She and her mother allegedly enlisted the help of a 22-year-old man to bury the fetus, and later discussed via Facebook DM burning it to dispose of it. (The man, Tanner Barnhill, is charged with attempting to conceal the death of another person, a misdemeanor.)”
Barnhill, for his part, “reportedly confirmed to the investigators that the mother and daughter had attempted to burn the fetus before putting it in the ground,” the New York Post reported.
To recap: The mother and daughter duo conspired to abort a 23-week-old, fully formed child, according to the charging documents. The two then burned the body and buried the evidence. They discussed all of this over Facebook, including the date of the abortion. Those communications were then obtained by a search warrant executed during the subsequent criminal investigation.
Facebook didn’t “narc” on the duo, as Motherboard and others in the press would have you believe. The mother and daughter are not being charged merely for the act of aborting a fully formed child. The mother is being charged with “performing or attempting an abortion greater than 20 weeks, performing an abortion when not a licensed doctor, removing/concealing/abandoning a dead human body, concealing the death of another person, and false reporting, according to Nebraska CBS News affiliate CBS14. The daughter is being charged as an adult with removing/concealing/abandoning a dead human body, concealing the death of another person, and false reporting,” according to the New York Post.
The Facebook data were procured only after law enforcement officials launched a criminal investigation. This isn’t a story about Big Brother conspiring with Big Tech to punish a poor, scared little girl. This isn’t a story about Big Tech tattling on a woman simply for obtaining an illegal abortion. This is a story about a serious and heinous crime, about a burned and mutilated body, something well beyond just abortion. The tech company merely complied with the investigation of said crime. Few, if any, would complain if Facebook turned over a suspected murderer’s private messages, especially if those messages confirmed the killings.
Facebook is not the bad guy here. The people who burned, buried, and attempted to hide an infant corpse are.
Teacher’s pet
CNN chief White House correspondent and former Daily Caller reporter Kaitlan Collins is still a disappointment.
Last week, during a White House press briefing, Collins unironically reenacted that scene from The Simpsons in which Maggie is made to ask her father’s employer and gubernatorial candidate “Monty” Burns: “Mr. Burns, your campaign seems to have the momentum of a runaway freight train. Why are you so popular?”
Collins, who is slated to serve as the next president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, asked White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, “How does [President Joe Biden] plan to use the string of wins that he’s had lately and that Democrats have had lately to turn it into a sense of momentum — not just for his own low approval ratings but also to help Democrats in the midterm elections?”
How do you plan to do even better with all your success?”
Imagine having access to the Brady Room and this is the question you ask. Truly, the public interest was served that day.
Becket Adams is the program director of the National Journalism Center.
