Anti-Israel bias blinded the media to political reality

If there was ever a time for certain big “mainstream” news organizations to realize how far they’ve moved away from the actual American mainstream, it’s now. The first extensive look at the November election shows these news outlets that Americans aren’t buying what they’re selling.

Perhaps the clearest example is the New York Times. When then Vice President Kamala Harris lost, the paper rushed to argue that she should have moved farther to the left in rewarding the anti-Israel hate movement. As The Algemeiner noted, the “Times — in two opinion pieces, a news article, and a top-of-the-front-page Sunday headline — falsely blamed Israel and the Gaza war.” 

On They Stand Corrected, my audio podcast and newsletter fact checking the news, I took on one of those op-eds. With the headline, “Democrats Ignored Gaza and Brought Down Their Party,” the piece was given a half-page spread in the paper’s Sunday edition — top real estate for everyone clamoring to be heard in what was once considered “the paper of record.” 

Times essays are supposed to be “based on fact.” This, like so many others, was filled with nonsensical claims, misreadings of data, and Hamas propaganda presented as truth — with no mentions of the Hamas massacres in Israel or other terrorism from Islamist groups. Instead, the piece, by anti-Israel activist Peter Beinart, discussed Black and young voters, and argued that the war had sparked “one of the greatest surges in progressive activism in a generation.” 

At the time, Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, posted on Threads, “Disregarding all the exit polls in order to retroactively scapegoat the Jewish state for the D’s actual defeat is just as dangerous and indefensible as proactively scapegoating the Jewish voter for the R’s potential loss.” (That was a reference to Trump saying that if he lost, “the Jewish people would have a lot to do” with it.)

Greenblatt asked why the Times publishes “such indefensible nonsense.” I replied, “Because the NYT is institutionally biased against Israel.”

The Times was not alone. MSNBC proffered a similar argument. (You can hear a clip here.) In January, some news reports claimed that a survey found a statistical basis for the argument. In reality, that survey was conducted by an activist group that blames Israel for violence carried out by Palestinian terrorists. It had a small sample size, leading questions about Israel attacking “innocent civilians,” and no references to Hamas or terrorism. 

Now, Blue Rose Research, a Democratic firm, has come out with the first large-scale examination of what actually happened in the election. Pulling together millions of data points, it finds that these arguments were the opposite of what happened. In fact, voters saw Harris as being “more ideologically extreme” than Trump. They saw her as being too far left.

Did liberal Black voters turn against Democrats? No. In that demographic, there was a 0% change between 2020 and 2024. As for young people, their actual shift was to the right. David Shor, head of data science at Blue Rose Research, told the Times’ Ezra Klein, “Young people have gone from being the most progressive generation since the Baby Boomers… to becoming potentially the most conservative generation that we’ve experienced maybe in 50 to 60 years.”

The study also looked at which issues voters cared about most. War in the Middle East was not in the top half. And terrorism outranked it — no surprise, given how fears of terrorism can hit home something Americans were reminded of after the election, when an Islamist terrorist killed people in New Orleans on New Year’s. 

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Was it a turnout problem for Democrats? According to the study, no. If everyone who could have voted showed up, Trump’s win would have been even bigger, Shor said. 

It’s a textbook case of the media being so caught up in the normalization of far-left thinking that it loses sight of reality. 

Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York, a Democrat leading the fight against antisemitism within his party, has rightfully called out the “hysterical demonization” of Israel. Much of the media has fallen prey to this. And in this case, we’ve seen what it leads to: hysterical blindness.

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