AP runs sympathetic story on Hezbollah terrorists

‍The Associated Press is trying to drum up sympathy for Hezbollah terrorists with a human-interest story about those who were wounded in Israel’s exploding pager operation last year.

At around 3:30 PM on September 17, 2024, thousands of pagers belonging to members of the Iran-backed terror group exploded in unison. Twelve people were killed and over 2,800 were hospitalized, many of them maimed. Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon lost an eye. Lebanese hospitals and health systems were immediately overwhelmed. 

Twenty-four hours later, dozens of walkie-talkies belonging to Hezbollah members suddenly detonated, killing nine and injuring over 300. One of the devices exploded at a Hezbollah funeral, blowing off the hands of its owner.

While the operation caused some collateral civilian casualties, most of the victims were members of the Lebanon-based terror group. Hezbollah has not only carried out attacks against Jewish civilians worldwide, but has also killed American military personnel.

On Wednesday, the AP published a report titled “Survivors of Israel's pager attack on Hezbollah struggle to recover.” It featured interviews with six people who were either members of Hezbollah or affiliated with the group. 

At no point does the report refer to Hezbollah members as terrorists or the organization as a terror group. Instead, terrorists are referred to as “fighters,” “personnel,” or “workers,” and the terror organization is called a “militia.”

“Hezbollah won't say how many civilians were hurt, but says most were relatives of the group's personnel or workers in Hezbollah-linked institutions, including hospitals,” the report reads.

“Ten months later, survivors are on a slow, painful path to recovery. They are easily identifiable, with missing eyes, faces laced with scars, hands with missing fingers — signs of the moment when they checked the buzzing devices. The scars also mark them as a likely Hezbollah member or a dependent.”

It’s not just Hezbollah

Like other legacy media outlets, the AP has a track record of propping up the narratives of Islamic terror groups. In a recent interview, former AP reporter and award-winning journalist Matti Friedman described how his reporting was censored on Hamas’s orders.

“Hamas fighters were dressed as civilians and were being counted as civilians in the death toll, an important thing to know, that went out in an AP story,” Friedman recounted. But his Gazan source, who had relayed that information, called him and insisted it be removed from the report.

“It was clear that someone had spoken to him,” said Friedman. “I took the detail out of the story. I suggested to our editors that we note in an Editor's Note that we were now complying with Hamas censorship. I was overruled, and from that point in time, the AP, like all of its sister organizations, collaborates with Hamas censorship in Gaza,” he added.

It’s not just the AP

The AP is not alone. As recently published in The Gold Report, a leaked internal BBC memo ordered staff to adopt Hamas’ narrative when reporting on humanitarian aid to Gaza. The memo came as no surprise to those familiar with the BBC’s historic anti-Israel narrative. The outlet has been so dedicated to Hamas’ messaging, in fact, that former BBC Television Director Danny Cohen recently called the BBC’s Arabic channel “the media wing of Hamas.”

The outlet has also closely collaborated with Hamas. The BBC’s film “Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone” paints Hamas and its supporters as victims of Israel, which is portrayed as a genocidal aggressor. It is narrated by a 13-year-old boy who has since been revealed to be the son of senior Hamas member Ayman Alyazouri.

Like the AP, the BBC has consistently avoided calling members of Islamic terror groups “terrorists,” instead referring to them as “freedom fighters,” “gunmen,” or “militants,” and takes considerable care to favorably depict terror groups that target Israelis. In December, for example, the BBC published a story titled: “Five Gaza journalists killed in Israeli strike targeting armed group.” The “armed group” was Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), an organization that has carried out dozens of attacks on Israelis—including several suicide bombings—and is designated a terror organization in the United States, Canada, Australia, the UK, and the EU. The “five Gaza journalists” were really PIJ terrorists, a fact the BBC only acknowledged later in the article.

The BBC also uses sleights of hand to depict Gazans—who overwhelmingly support Hamas and even participate in attacks—in a favorable light. When including quotes from Gazans, for example, the network deliberately mistranslates the Arabic word al-yahud, which means “the Jews”, to “the Israelis” in an effort to gloss over Islamic antisemitism.

An epidemic among legacy media

The BBC is among many legacy media corporations that have unquestioningly adopted Hamas’ narrative, a recent analysis found.

The report, published by the Network Contagion and Research Institute (NCRI), noted how Western media consistently cite the “Gaza Ministry of Health” as their primary source. But the fact that the ministry is a Hamas entity doesn’t seem to spark concerns about political neutrality, nor do news outlets find it problematic that it has a track record of pushing disinformation.

“The Ministry has a proven and systematic history of lies, deceptions, duplicated data, and exaggerations which strain credulity of any nonpartisan observer,” said the NCRI.

Not only do news publications frequently use Hamas’ “ministry” as its main source, but most of the time they don’t disclose this in the headline—presenting the story as fact.

“Of the high-engagement news articles NCRI analyzed, Hamas-linked officials and organizations, such as the Gaza Health Ministry, were directly cited in headlines more than any other named source,” the report explained. “In nearly three-quarters of those cases, it was not disclosed in the headline that the source was a Hamas affiliate. Every blame-casting headline targeted Israel or the GHF – while not a single one held Hamas responsible.”

The NCRI described the intense smear campaign against the GHF.

“Within days of GHF’s first meal deliveries, it became the target of a deliberate narrative assault, driven less by verifiable facts than by the demands of a competing narrative,” the report states. “Reports and evidence of violence at aid sites began to surface, and international and U.S. media outlets, social media influencers, and NGOs started publishing articles that ascribed blame to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) or GHF for intentional violence against civilians, war crimes, and complicity in the crime of genocide. The reports quickly condensed into viral headlines, but the claim that the IDF was systematically murdering civilians was usually sourced from Hamas-run ministries or anonymous accounts, and often unverified. Moreover, evidence that Hamas could be responsible for violence around aid sites – evidence provided by non-Hamas Palestinian sources, by Hamas’s online communications, and by video that in some cases shows Hamas operatives deliberately firing on Palestinian civilians– was almost never suggested.”

These headlines have fueled conspiracy theories against the GHF on social media, such as its participation in drug trafficking operations. They also drum up support for Hamas while undermining the United States. Using an AI language learning model (LLM), the NCRI randomly selected five high-engagement news articles related to the GHF and found that they created a 70% drop in blame for Hamas violence near aid sites, a 38% drop in support for US aid efforts, and a 10% drop in trust in American sources of information related to humanitarian aid.

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