In the Guise of a Tribute to Dead Children, the “New York Times” Offers a Mixture of Half-Truths, Distortions, and Propaganda

Last week, the New York Times published a graphic on its front page, titled “They Were Only Children,” made up of thumbnail portraits of children killed in the recent fighting between Israel and Hamas. This was accompanied by a lengthy feature about the 69 children who had lost their lives—67 Gazans and two Israelis. Shortly thereafter, the Times issued a correction: one of the pictures was misidentified; it was not of Rahaf al-Masri, but of a random photo of an Arab child that had been circulating the Internet for years. In a separate story, published on Sunday, the Times noted that among those included in the list was a seventeen-year-old Hamas fighter—technically a child, but not a civilian. Yet these corrections do little to fix the fact that the report, masquerading as a neutral memorial to war’s most horrific effects, was little more than carefully crafted propaganda. Robert Satloff writes: