Everyone has their own reasons for distrusting major media, so Gallup’s latest polling isn’t surprising. The new survey finds trust in media at a low point, tying the nadir it reached in 2016. And although modern media giants recoil at the suggestion that they have only themselves to blame, an honest rendering of history reveals that simple explanation to be the accurate one.
Take, for example, an issue with as much resonance today as a century ago: conflict in the Middle East. Reading Yardena Schwartz’s superb, meticulous and hauntingly detailed account of the 1929 Hebron Massacre—Ghosts of a Holy War, which was published earlier this month—I was struck by some of its minor sections on the role of the media then and now. This isn’t the focus of the book, which knowledgeably traces the causes and legacy of the massacre that wiped out a millennia-old Jewish community in its place of birth and set the mold for the next hundred years of Arab-Israeli conflict. But it is a key part of the story.
And it is the part of the story that highlights a test that media companies passed in 1929 but continually fail today. Reversing those failures, as the book shows, is a matter of life and death for Jews around the world.
The Hebron Massacre, which set the stage for everything that followed it, was part of a Palestine-wide campaign of violent riots. The prime mover of these riots was deliberate incitement by Arab leaders, specifically the Al-Aqsa Blood Libel—the lie that Jews were going to seize the mosque compound built by imperial Muslim conquerors atop the site of the ancient Jewish temple as a demonstration of supremacy over the land’s original inhabitants.
Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the first Palestinian Arab nationalist leader (and later well-paid Nazi recruiter and envoy to the Muslim world), was Jerusalem’s grand mufti and had been chipping away at Jewish prayer rights at the Western Wall. Contradicting the city’s own official Islamic guides to the area, Hajj Amin began claiming that the Western Wall was a Muslim site, not a Jewish one. British suppression of Jewish prayer services gave the mufti the opening he needed to widen the propaganda war and mobilize a pogrom. The mostly Arab police force either stood by or joined the slaughter.
The gruesome scenes, as Schwartz notes, would be echoed on Oct. 7, 2023, the next time the Jews in their homeland would be subject to that level of barbarity on such a scale.
The British response to Hebron was to further empower Hajj Amin and the Arabs of the Mandate while arresting Jewish self-defense volunteers and restricting Jewish immigration. Thus rewarded, Hajj Amin’s Palestinian nationalists had established a blueprint they would return to time and again, and the contours of the conflict were set.
The campaign of incitement was successful using only local word of mouth. But today, that same pogromist propaganda gets a lift from global media and even politicians in the West. Members of Congress, such as Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have echoed similar false rumors about Al-Aqsa even as the consequences continue to play out.
It is Schwartz’s indictment of the media in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre, however, that shows how globalized the incitement has become:
“As a journalist writing about October 7, I experienced the direct impact of these false claims. One editor I was working with on a story about Israeli hostages two weeks after October 7 objected to my reference to Hamas atrocities. Those ‘reports,’ she wrote, were ‘laying the ground’ for Israel to ‘exterminate the Palestinians.’ One of her edits to my text described Hamas’s attack as ‘stunning.’ She ultimately decided to kill my story.”
That Schwartz, a veteran of NBC who has written for the New York Times, would encounter such heavy-handed bias within the press for her own story is chilling.
Beyond that, she points to the fact that in 1929 Hebron, responsible global media knew better than to unquestioningly echo the talking points of Hajj Amin and other terrorists. Yet in the current war, “confusion was fueled by the traditional arbiters of truth—news organizations that recycled Hamas claims while presenting Israeli statements as unverified.”
This was not just about casualties or lies about supposed Jewish provocations, but also instances like those of al-Ahli hospital, which the New York Times immediately reported was struck by Israel, killing 500. In fact, as would soon become clear, the Israeli counterclaims were correct: it was an errant Palestinian missile and the death count was far lower. “But the damage had already been done. The outrage had led Jordan to cancel a summit between President Biden and Palestinian and Egyptian leaders, and fueled anti-Semitic attacks in Europe, and riots across the Middle East.”
Similar mistakes were repeated throughout the war regarding al-Shifa hospital, obviously inflated civilian casualty claims (which led to the depiction of the war as a “genocide,” Schwartz notes), and false rumors about numerous other incidents. (I wrote about one here, in which American journalists amplified a brazen lie accusing Israel of boobytrapping cans of tuna fish.)
The sad truth proved by Oct. 7 and its aftermath, as laid out by Schwartz, is that since the Hebron Massacre a century ago, “responsible” media have only gotten worse, helping to globalize a war against the Jews that these outlets knew enough to stay away from in the past. Hard to blame the growing number of Americans who don’t trust them.
