BBC and Other Mainstream Outlets MisAttribute Gaza Rocket Attack
Dangerous amounts of misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war are spreading on social media, say governments and mainstream news organizations. “We don’t turn on our televisions or open news apps on our phones and find ourselves routinely inundated with misleading information,” wrote Bloomberg columnist Michael Arceneaux in the Washington Post. ”The same can’t be said for social media. In the hours and days following Hamas’ attack, posts and videos with false information — including one from a video game — were viewed millions of times on X [formerly Twitter].” CBS concurred, running a story headlined “Social media disinformation spreads amid war in Israel.”
But events from the last few days show that mainstream news media organizations and governments have themselves been spreading false information. The mainstream news media worldwide, including the BBC, Reuters and CNN, reported that Israel had bombed a hospital and killed 500 civilians, based on information they received from the Hamas-led Gazan Health Ministry. Further, EU official Thierry Breton sent letters to various social media companies, including Tiktok and Meta, warning the platforms they spread “illegal content.”
“Hundreds feared dead or injured in Israeli airstrike on a hospital in Gaza, Palestinian officials say,” read one BBC’s headline. "The Israeli military have said they are investigating,” reported a BBC Correspondent on air, “but it’s hard to see what else this could be, really, given the size of the explosion, other than an Israeli air strike or several air strikes." The BBC ultimately changed its headline to “Israel denies airstrike on hospital in Gaza, saying failed militant rocket to blame.”
Ultimately, there is video footage of the hospital building still standing, and it appears that the blast actually hit the parking lot. A US intelligence official told CNN that the explosions killed between 100 to 300 people while a European official told Agence France Press that they killed between 10 and 50. US officials say that the blast was probably from a misfired rocket launched by Islamic Jihad. At a minimum, headlines suggesting the hospital had definitely been hit, and that the information was reliable, were wrong.
From my years as a fact checker at Conde Nast magazines,” noted David Zweig in his criticism of the media’s coverage of the Gaza hospital explosion, “one of the rules we had to follow was not only to make sure that attribution of a quote or statement was correct but that the content in the statement itself was correct. News outlets failed to do this.“
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