The media is constantly fighting “disinformation”. But it defines “disinformation” as information it disagrees with. The media has dismantled internal fact-checking and instead built an offensive fact-checking machine aimed at its political opponents while it spreads disinformation.
Shamelessly and relentlessly.
There may be no better example of that here and now then the New York Times having Sheera Frenkel write an article titled, “Lies on Social Media Inflame Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”.
Frenkel has an inside perspective on that sort of thing from the last major round of fighting that was triggered when Hamas terrorists kidnapped and killed 3 Israeli teenage boys.
And Frenkel built up her journalistic rep at BuzzFeed by insisting that it wasn’t Hamas, vocally arguing on Twitter that, “There is a Hamas official in the story saying they are not Hamas.”
In a more detailed takedown of Sheera Frenkel’s disinformation campaign, Seth Franzman, who actually is a journalist and knows a lot about the region, noted that
The saga began with a tweet by Buzzfeed writer Sheera Frenkel, claiming that “After Israel’s top leadership blamed Hamas kidnap for 3 teens, they’ve now admitted killers were acting as ‘lone cell.’”…
She had relied on a tweet by Jon Donnison, the BBC Sydney Correspondent covering Australia, but who formerly covered the West Bank and was now back covering it during the war with Hamas….
At 2:28 pm on July 25, he tweeted “Israeli police Mickey Rosenfeld [sic] tells me men who killed 3 Israeli teens def lone cell, hamas affiliated but not operating under leadership.” Frenkel had picked this up two hours later at 5:40am; but notice how she changed the wording around to claim “Israel’s top leadership…now they’ve admitted killers were acting as ‘lone cell.’”
Except that is not what Donnison had tweeted at all. He had done a good job relaying accurate information from the Israel Police Spokesman Micky Rosenfeld about the investigation focusing on the Hamas cell of the Qawasmeh clan; Marwan Qawasmeh and Amer Abu Aisha. The Hebron area based clan or large extended family has produced numerous Hamas members over the years, including the bomber of Jerusalem bus 2 massacre in 2003.
Sheera Frenkel effectively forced her report to fit her own preconceived notions, arguing in a “recap” that Israel had arrested hundreds of Palestinians, leading to the murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir and the Gaza conflict, all based on a mistaken presumption. The narrative she implied was that since Hamas was not involved that the resulting conflict was a terrible outcome…
When I first noticed the false reporting by New York Magazine on July 25, I contacted Frenkel and Donnison. Donnison didn’t reply, but Frenkel told me to “learn twitter” and claimed I had misrepresented her tweet.
Sheera Frenkel failed at the most basic elements of ethics and integrity, but succeeded as an anti-Israel troll, garnering lots of traffic, and driving news coverage based on her disinformation campaign.
So obviously she ended up at the New York Times for more of the same.
As I noted at the time in my article on Hamasbara, “A Tweet by an Israeli police spokesman was spun by BuzzFeed troll Sheera Frenkel into a claim that Hamas had not kidnapped and murdered the three Israeli boys. The story was then repackaged by New York Magazine for a post that had over 200,000 social media shares. The post was dishonest and untrue… but that didn’t matter.”
Still it takes a certain amount of chutzpah to roll out the disinformation troll behind one of the most infamous recent disinformation campaigns targeting Israel… to accuse Israel of disinformation.
As usual, the agenda is urging Big Tech companies to censor Israelis and pro-Israel activists to avoid “inflaming the conflict”. Obviously there’s no call to censor INNers and the pro-Jihad camp from posting terrorist propaganda and passing off fake atrocity photos.
Nor are there any calls to deplatform Hamas.
Or to censor Sheera Frenkel considering her history of spreading misinformation.
Despite the existence of Pallywood, Sheera Frenkel, with tedious predictability focuses most of her fire on Jews. That is as it should be at the New York Times which hired an internet troll who built her career on disinformation to accuse Jews of disinformation.
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