Why I just canceled my WashPost subscription

While Israelis are simultaneously still riding the high on the recent eliminations of Shukr, Haniyeh, and Deif while also mentally preparing for an Iranian retaliation this weekend, I thought I would distract you with a different story: why I canceled my Washington Post subscription this week.

I fell in love with the Washington Post in college, and as soon as I graduated, I began paying for a monthly subscription. (I don’t even pay for Spotify, if that tells you where WaPo was on my priorities list.) That was just over seven years ago. This week, I unceremoniously cut ties with WaPo, a decision that’s been several months in the making.

If you’re pro-Israel, you might be thinking “what took you so long?” The truth is, for the first few months of the war I totally believed — in all of my free time outside of reserves, so like, five seconds every few days — that WaPo was doing fine on the Israel angle, and I was just thankful it wasn’t worse.

In order to write this op-ed, though, I scrolled all the way down WaPo’s “Israel-Hamas War” category to October 7 to take a fresh look at how they’ve been covering this conflict. And now I’m angry all over again.

The first headline on October 7: “Videos show captives in Gaza and Israel.” That makes it sound like both Gazans and Israelis had taken captives. The second headline: “‘Humiliated and defeated’: Fear, shock grip Israel after Hamas assault.” Humiliated and defeated, thanks so much guys — is that really the main message that was supposed to be conveyed as Hamas was still massacring our people?

After that, though, the headlines are pretty much okay or even positive for Israel for awhile. Here are two from October 10: “What to know about the hostages taken from Israel in Hamas attack” and “He listened, helpless, as Hamas closed in on his family: ‘They came to kill’.”

Let’s skip to October 17, what I call the most important day for international media in the entire Israel-Hamas war: the night of the Al-Ahli Hospital incident. The first relevant WaPo article is titled, “Gaza hospital where hundreds were killed is owned by Anglican Communion branch.” Huh? I don’t even know what to make of that. But strike one: They never changed the “hundreds” in the headline after the numbers were quickly proven to have been inflated by Hamas. And strike two: In the article they wrote, “An Israeli rocket hit al-Ahli on Saturday” — something they never bothered to change either.

The next article about the event says as follows: “The Palestinian Health Ministry said at least 500 people were killed” and that “Palestinian officials said an Israeli airstrike hit the hospital courtyard” followed immediately by “Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, called the strike a ‘crime of genocide.’” How ridiculous is it to neglect to  differentiate between the Palestinian Health Ministry and Hamas in the same paragraph?

Then again, literally every international outlet failed us in their reporting of Al-Ahli. Let’s skip to the first article that really caught my attention a few months after it was published: “Israel has waged one of this century’s most destructive wars in Gaza” on December 23.

This article was full of inconsistencies and confidently made a point that its own data did not back up, but you had to pay close attention to realize that. After seeing a few great tweets on this subject, I made a video about how according to WaPo’s own numbers, the war in Gaza was actually less destructive than in the other three wars it analyzed. As in, the exact opposite of what the headline claimed.

A graph I made to show how the level of destruction in Gaza by the end of March was less than the destruction in Raqqa, Mosul, and Aleppo. (Courtesy)

In the same week, an editor’s note appeared on this November 17 atrocity: “Israel’s war with Hamas separates Palestinian babies from their mothers.” It went viral at the time, only to be wholly disproven. The editor’s note on the article says the following: “An earlier version of this article… mischaracterized some aspects of Israeli rules for permits…  The article incorrectly said that all Palestinian mothers who received authorization to leave Gaza for humanitarian reasons had to return to Gaza… In fact, it was not always necessary… In addition, The Post neglected to seek comment from Israeli officials for this article, an omission that fell short of The Post’s standards for fairness.”

Honestly, I’m not sure if I prefer the article still being up with all the editor’s notes or if I’m angry it wasn’t taken down completely.

On January 18, we got this doozy: “A famine looms in Gaza.” Subheading: “As Israel continues to wage its military campaign against Hamas, we break down why it has blocked humanitarian aid — including food — into Gaza. Hunger and disease now threaten hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza.” Once again on March 3: “How Israel’s restrictions on aid put Gaza on the brink of famine.”

As everyone in Israel knows, this is the reality: After the first three weeks of the war, Israel was in no way blocking or restricting humanitarian aid — especially food — from entering Gaza. Here is my previous op-ed that explains why the “looming famine” narrative was never true; the Washington Post, along with every other news outlet, should have done better.

I could go on and on (and I already have for quite awhile), but I’ll skip to the three most recent egregious offenses.

On June 8, the day the IDF bravely rescued four Israeli hostages from would-be Gazan “civilian” captors in broad daylight, WaPo’s headline about the event was “More than 200 Palestinians killed in Israeli hostage raid in Gaza.” Unconscionable.

On July 18, WaPo tweeted the following: “Omer Neutra has been missing since the Oct. 7 attack on Israel. When his parents speak publicly, they don’t talk about Israel’s assault on Gaza that has killed over 38,000 Palestinians, according to local officials.”

Can you imagine anything more disrespectful to a hostage — not a missing person, a hostage being held against his will by Hamas — than criticizing his parents for not speaking about something other than their son’s captivity? WaPo actually deleted the tweet and posted “We’ve deleted a previous tweet for this story that mischaracterized the efforts of Neutra’s parents,” but that does not take back the salt they had just rubbed in our wounds.

Finally, the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. On Monday, after Hezbollah carried out the deadliest attack on Israel since October 7 and killed 15 children in Majdal Shams, the front page of the Washington Post looked as follows:

The front page of the Washington Post on Monday, July 29th. (Screenshot)

There is no way that pairing that photo from the funeral of the Israeli children killed by Hezbollah with the headline “Israel hits targets in Lebanon” was not done intentionally. There is no way it wasn’t a decision made to make Israel look like the aggressor in this situation — as always.

That was the moment I realized: this is no longer journalism — this is an anti-Israel agenda. I can no longer give them the benefit of the doubt that what I don’t like is simply due to “individual reporters’ biases” or “what will bring them the most clicks.” I can definitely no longer call them “mistakes,” which I easily did in May when a WaPo Instagram post referred to Israeli Independence Day by the wrong calendar date (a fact that takes exactly two seconds to Google). The Washington Post’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war has made them unrecognizable to me, and much of this journalistic malpractice is clearly intentional.

How did this happen?

Maybe this is the result of Al Jazeera running training courses for over 75,000 journalists around the world. Yes, this is really happening, as can be verified by Al Jazeera’s own website’s FAQ.

Maybe it’s an increase in influence of WaPo writers like Louisa Loveluck and editors like Sally Buzbee, whose biases against Israel are clear from their histories on the paper — and things like the latter’s daughter participating in the “pro-Palestinian” college campus protests and Buzbee being “reluctant to investigate” where the funding was coming from. Buzbee stepped down from her post in June, but the damage she did for the majority of this war is irreparable. For Loveluck’s part, I find it interesting that her byline appears on a very large percentage of the paper’s anti-Israel articles, but according to her bio, she has never actually worked out of the Israel bureau. Hmm.

Maybe it’s because, like Loveluck, at least six WaPo’s reporters previously wrote for Al Jazeera. They include WaPo’s Middle East editor, Jesse Mesner-Hage, who spent over a decade as an Al Jazeera news editor. “The Al Jazeera-Washington Post pipeline raises ethical questions for an American newspaper that prides itself as a bulwark against threats to ‘democracy,’ said Joe Simonson, a senior investigative reporter for the Washington Free Beacon.

Maybe there are myriad of reasons, social media pressure being one of them, that so many different writers and editors for the Washington Post (and other prominent news outlets) are so biased — whether implicitly or explicitly — towards the Palestinians and against Israel.

The fact is that there is a deliberate infiltration by our enemies into the American press (not to mention social media, but that’s a whole other subject) to inject a pro-Hamas, anti-Israel bias into the Western world. WaPo is just one of their many casualties, but it’s the one that saddens me the most.

Within a few days of me canceling my subscription, they sent me an email titled, “Miss us already? We miss you, too.” Yes, Washington Post, I miss the old you. The one that I could count on for objectivity and facts. When and if you decide to make the change back, I’ll consider giving you a second chance.