TV News Is Not Equipped to Cover the Israel-Hamas War (Opinion)
On October 9, two days after Hamas terrorists crossed over into Israel from Gaza and unleashed the most deadly attack on Jews since the Holocaust, CNN appeared to make the brewing conflict about itself.
The network’s correspondent Clarissa Ward, in a flak jacket marked “press,” was near the Israel-Gaza border during a live shot when Hamas-fired rockets flew overhead. She and her crew of at least four scrambled, the camera still rolling, into a nearby ditch. Laying on her side, an arm extended above her head like she’s grasping at earth, she continued the shot even as she winces from the sound of explosions.
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Her tenacity in the moment is admirable, but its news value doesn’t extend beyond the adrenaline of “you are there.” Is this the conflict-zone version of Weather Channel meteorologists putting themselves at risk by broadcasting live and wind-battered from the middle of a hurricane making landfall?
The moment represents much of the TV news coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict from U.S. broadcasters. More even than the Ukraine war, it shows the deficiencies of TV news, especially when it comes to debunking misinformation and providing substance beyond sensation.
Each of the nightly news anchors on NBC, ABC, and CBS decamped to Israel. To his credit, ABC’s David Muir prioritized empathy over spectacle. He spoke to family members whose loved ones were abducted and taken as hostages into Gaza, which culminated in an hour-long “20/20” special that provided one of the most informative recaps of what exactly happened on October 7 and its aftermath.
Until October 19, NBC’s Lester Holt broadcasted each night from Tel Aviv, an hour’s drive from the conflict. CNN’s Anderson Cooper immediately flew to Israel. MSNBC didn’t send any of its top stars, with workhorse journalist Ali Velshi handling much of the on-the-ground reporting.
However, none of this helped us see more clearly through the fog of war or to dispel misinformation. First, there was the incomprehensible, since-debunked story that 40 babies were beheaded in Hamas’s initial attack. In truth, babies were among the murdered in the Hamas massacre, which is horrific enough — but the specificity was psychological warfare of its own.
An article published on NBC News examined how this misinformation spread so quickly, with the claim receiving more than 44 million impressions on Twitter/X. Marc Owen Jones, an associate professor of Middle East studies at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar, told the outlet that “Baby stories are very emotive. Historically, they’re stories that can be used to rationalize a very brutal response. It’s such a volatile information environment that such claims will inevitably be taken out of context, both deliberately and accidentally.”
Nevertheless, CNN’s Sara Sidner repeated the claim on-air. To her credit, she took to her Twitter feed and said she “needed to be more careful with my words and I am sorry.” However on ABC’s “The View,” which averages over 2.7 million viewers, co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin repeated that claim and never retracted it.
Sharing this misinformation might be interpreted as empathizing with Israel, but it could as easily be a claim generated by Hamas: If Israel accepted it as true, it might elicit a reactive, vengeful response with enough strength to derail its diplomatic progress with neighboring Arab states, leaving it increasingly isolated — a Hamas goal. (Already, Saudi Arabia has said that its tabling a move toward a normalization of Israel relations that seemed very possible before the events of October 7.)
Then there was the blast that nearly destroyed the al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City October 17. The idea that an Israeli airstrike was responsible for the explosion spread far and wide; since then, the BBC has recanted that initial claim saying its on-air reporting was “wrong.” Today, it’s become clear it was a misfired rocket from the group Islamic Jihad, which directed the explosive toward Israel.
Meanwhile, Twitter — so useful during the 2011 Arab Spring protests as a place for real-time reporting — has devolved into a cesspool of misinformation with users seeking confirmation bias.
For both TV news and social media covering this conflict, speed in reporting is not an asset. The delay to verify information is what’s valuable, even if it’s a complete anathema in today’s news cycle. The “report first, fact-check later” mentality may lead to journalists aggravating the conflict rather than making sense of it.
It’s self defeatist: Journalism is a profession that’s long believed that speed is the highest virtue, a faith only enhanced by real-time platforms. This conflict deserves a more serious approach than those business models can provide. Slower, steadier, and more accurate reporting will see journalists through this conflict, but that may be a pipedream as elusive as a speedy resolution to the conflict itself.
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