“The question has never been whether individual acts of sexual assault may have occurred on October 7. The central issue is whether the New York Times presented solid evidence that Hamas deliberately and systematically deployed sexual violence as a weapon. And to this day, neither the Times nor any other institution has presented compelling proof to back that explosive assertion.”
Full email from The Intercept, 15 March 2024:
Over the last few weeks, The Intercept has exposed massive holes in the New York Times’s marquee front-page exposé on alleged sexual violence committed on October 7.
Instead of addressing the gaping flaws in the story and issuing a correction, the Times has launched an internal “witch hunt” targeting employees based on their national origin, ethnicity, and race to track down anyone who may have talked to The Intercept about the story, according to the union that represents the Times newsroom employees.
The Intercept is continuing to investigate and expose false reports and anti-Palestinian bias in major news outlets like the New York Times.
The controversy around the New York Times’s shabby October 7 reporting isn’t just some inside baseball media story. The Times’s December 28 report on sexual violence in the Hamas attack has had a massive impact on the policy debate in Washington and helped stifle growing opposition to Israel’s brutal assault on the civilian population of Gaza.
But major problems with the story emerged almost as soon as it was published.
One of the reporters who bylined the story was found to have “liked” social media posts calling Palestinians “human animals” and urging Israel to “turn the [Gaza] strip into a slaughterhouse.”
Later, the same reporter admitted that her initial reporting had been unable to uncover a single complaint about sexual violence during the October 7 attack from Israeli hospitals, rape crisis centers, trauma recovery facilities, and sexual assault hotlines. The Times reporters then turned to reported eyewitnesses — some of whom had already been exposed in the press as being unreliable narrators.
The Intercept revealed that the Times’s flagship podcast “The Daily” shelved an entire episode based on the December 28 story amid an internal firestorm about the strength of the paper’s original reporting.
Now, even the spokesperson for Kibbutz Be’eri, the village where the Times specifically claimed rapes had occurred, has told The Intercept that two of the victims singled out in the Times report “were not subjected to sexual abuse.”
To be clear: The question has never been whether individual acts of sexual assault may have occurred on October 7. The central issue is whether the New York Times presented solid evidence that Hamas deliberately and systematically deployed sexual violence as a weapon. And to this day, neither the Times nor any other institution has presented compelling proof to back that explosive assertion.
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