On October 17, the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry said that an Israeli rocket hit a hospital and killed 500 people. That literally could not be further from the truth. Not only was the explosion caused by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s rocket misfire, but the bulk of the damage was done to the parking lot next to the hospital.
No one should be surprised that the same terrorists who perpetrated the worst war crimes imaginable would also lie about it. So you would think the news outlets would take their talking points with a massive grain of salt, right? Turns out, the New York Times didn’t think it was necessary to do so.
Only after all the damage it created – from massive protests across the United States and around the globe – did the New York Times finally admit this week that they got the headline wrong.
But what was the Biden State Department’s “disinformation” apparatus – the Global Engagement Center (GEC) – doing about it in real time? Evidently nothing.
If GEC’s mission is to combat disinformation around the globe, why did they just stand by while a major piece of disinformation was doing serious harm to our ally, Israel?
That is why the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Accountability held a hearing with GEC’s leadership: to demand answers and transparency on what the entity does. Given its past history of sending grants to third-party partners including an organization that marked conservative news outlets as “risky,” it seems like GEC is more interested in suppressing conservative voices at home than countering disinformation abroad. And that’s certainly not an acceptable use of your tax dollars.
