The news media has helped normalize Hamas

Journalists feel most comfortable criticizing all sides, which breaks down when one side is especially vile

As a former foreign correspondent in the Middle East, I’ve frequently found myself defending the industry with Israelis who charge media bias. But as I observe the cluelessness of Hamas apologists worldwide, I realize a mea culpa may be due. We have failed to tell the story of a jihadi outfit considered a terrorist group by the United States with excellent reason.

I refer not to the usual media watchdog quibbles about headlines or the finer points of journalistic ethics but rather to a basic failure to communicate. And it is a failure mostly by omission, the most vulgar of journalistic derelictions; one can plausibly deny an intention to mislead.

To be clear, I would not sugar-coat the execrable Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor ignore Israel’s fundamental misdeeds: for 57 years it has ruled and misruled millions of West Bank Palestinians to whom it has not extended the right to vote. It should have disengaged. None of the excuses—security needs, refusals of peace offers—make it right. Israel must own that.

But support for Hamas in this war is not support for the Palestinian cause of an independent state on a share of the Holy Land. That is not only not the cause of Hamas—it is precisely what Hamas has for decades been laboring to prevent. Much of the world seems not to know this central fact. Social media spreads disinformation, yes, but surely the captains of much-maligned mainstream media would not claim total impotence or wash their hands of the result. They must own that.

Serious media must do more than quote all sides and hide behind some lazy and craven definition of “the reporting”; it must dig deep, think hard, grown a spine and distil the essence.

And what, on Hamas, is the essence?