Brooke Gladstone: Hey there loyal listeners. Here's something old and something new. What's old is that we're asking for your support. What's new is that we have a matching grant, we don't get those much, but we have a couple of super fans who are putting something extra into the effort of keeping us healthy. Now, I have to assume that you all make an effort to follow the news, because you're listening to me right now, so you know that the station's been hit with a drop in corporate and foundation support. It's hurt the station and it's hurt this show, so we've got this match.

If we get 250 of you to support On the Media with a donation by November 10th, we'll unlock $15,000 from Bill G and Sue Carruthers. As a little incentive, you'll get our first ever On the Media T-shirt when you make a donation of $12 a month. Be the envy of lawyer friends. Just text OTM to 70101, or visit onthemedia.org. It might seem like 250 out of so many thousands of loyal listeners wouldn't be a heavy lift, but I am here to tell you, it is. I'm going to say something I never say, it's a cliché and I don't like it, but when it's true, it's true.

Now, more than ever, we need your support. Just text the letters OTM to 70101 or visit onthemedia.org now. Thanks. From WNYC in New York. This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Micah Loewinger. Actually, the last couple of weeks, we've been wrestling as a weekly show with how to cover a story that changes day by day. This is by no means unusual, but this one is particularly tough because of the stakes and all the unreliable narrators, and the inevitable Fog of War.

Brooke Gladstone: Hamas executed a well-planned attack killing brutally and at close quarters 1,400 people in Israel according to the Israeli government. As I write this 12 days later, the Israeli military has killed via airstrikes some 3,700 in Gaza according to the Health Ministry there. The world has watched as they say in horror, but it's a horror mediated and filtered through blatantly unreliable or premature accounts, and irresistible bias spreading a greasy smear over every lens. A wave of anguish and hatred has swept the discourse in print and broadcast, cable news, social media, and the world's dinner tables in streets.

Speaker 3: The Israelis dead, massacred in their own beds. What are you protesting for your barbarians?

Speaker 4: As Jewish New Yorkers, we are here to say not in our needs.

Brooke Gladstone: In our in President Biden's speech on Thursday, he spoke of our current wars, described this moment as an inflection point and tried to remind us yet again that we are a great people.

President Biden: We must without equivocation denounce antisemitism. We must also without equivocation denounce Islamophobia.

Micah Loewinger: A disgraceful scene at NYU where students were seen ripping down the posters of Israeli hostages, one of the NY--

Speaker 5: Horrible story out of Illinois today. A six-year-old Palestinian-American boy was senselessly stabbed to death. Police say he and his mother were attacked on Saturday by their landlord allegedly because they were Muslim.

Speaker 6: They say this man punched a woman Saturday night on the seven train passageway. A 29-year-old woman asked him why he hit her, which she says, he replied, "You are Jewish."

Speaker 7: The men walked and yelled something to the effect of free Palestine before the group of people in the cars got out and repeatedly punched and kicked one of the men who's 18 years old.

Brooke Gladstone: Not for the first time in recent years, there's a sense of the world unraveling out of range of reason. Journalist and editor David Cleon likened it to the moment rendered in that poem by William Butler Yeats. The second coming, hence soon after the First World War, and the Russian Revolution. I'll give the first few lines a try.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

The Fog of War is now subsumed into a fog of everything. Few really know what's happening, but everyone has an opinion about it. Well, nearly everyone, not TikTok are too raw, too real Tariq this week.

Tariq on TikTok: Well, excuse the hell out of me for not understanding over a 75-year-old, where it even goes back to the Biblical days. I cannot form an opinion on something I don't have the factual contextual comprehension on, but y'all want me to form an opinion when I don't know. How many times have I used my platform to tell people to shut the hell up when they speak on issues? They have absolutely no comprehension, absolutely no cultural competency on. Why the hell would I use my platform to do the same that I said I'm mad about?

Brooke Gladstone: One case of what we did not know. The 40 decapitated babies. A lot of grizzly photos and footage has emerged from the slaughter, but no one has confirmed 40 decapitated babies. In fact, it looks like it's a conflation of several stories.

Speaker 9: The Hamas attacks there include one site with the bodies of 40 babies, according to the Israeli soldiers who found them.

Speaker 10: They say what they've witnessed as they've been walking through these different houses, these different communities, babies. Their heads cut off. That's what they said.

Brooke Gladstone: US media on all platforms and across the political spectrum we're quick to amplify the story.

Speaker 11: We have some really disturbing new information out of Israel. The Israeli Prime Minister spokesman just confirmed babies and toddlers were found with their heads decapitated.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: I never really thought that I would see and have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children.

Brooke Gladstone: The White House later walked back the part about, "Seeing the pictures." Some journalists retracted their own statements too, but not before the unconfirmed report had reportedly reached upwards of 44 million impressions on the platform formally known as Twitter, and how about that horrific explosion at a hospital in Gaza Tuesday night.

Speaker 12: The Gaza Health Ministry says at least 500 people have been killed. Patients and civilians seeking shelter. The desperate search now to find any survivors in the rubble.

Brooke Gladstone: The first reports from the New York Times and CNN and others went with the Hamas account, hundreds buried under the rubble. Noga Tarnopolsky is an independent journalist in Israel who's written for the liberal Israeli paper, Ha'aretz, and The Washington Post among others. She was aghast that those initial reports allowed no possibility for doubt.

Noga Tarnopolsky: That it took Hamas, this terror group about three minutes to start to put out messaging, and it took us journalists less time than that to just swallow it, hook line, and sinker.

Brooke Gladstone: On Wednesday in daylight, photographs from the site showed that the hospital buildings were not hit directly. The deadly impact fell on a hospital courtyard where many displaced Gazas were sheltering. Meanwhile, as new evidence emerges, news outlets are attempting forensics from afar to determine who was most likely responsible. For instance, the BBC's investigative team reported evidence supporting the claim of the Israeli defense forces. That it was not to blame for the hospital attack, that the deaths were caused by the fallout from a rocket aimed at Israel from within Gaza.

Speaker 13: Now, we've shown these images to a number of weapons experts, and while they couldn't come to a firm conclusion, several of them told us that if the explosion had been caused by the type of bomb normally used by Israeli forces, the crater would've been bigger and there would've been more damage to the buildings.

Brooke Gladstone: The US Intelligence report noted no impact craters, but Gaza officials claimed that Israel had previously targeted the same hospital and had issued specific warnings to the hospital to evacuate. A widely disseminated video from Britain's Channel 4 News also disputed the Israeli claims.

Jesse Watters: Israel claims the Islamic Jihad failed missile was fired from here. A cemetery very close to the hospital but look again at the video of the event. The trajectory of the missile doesn't line up with that location. Too high, too horizontal. Confusingly, the Israeli's presentation also says the missile was fired from a location down in the southwest. It can't be both.

Brooke Gladstone: Certainly, the IDF has lied before. In fact, all sides have lied before. A lot. Only on-the-ground investigation will yield the truth and that's going to be a while. Anyway, the facts are beside the point. What is certain is that the hospital incident was a spark that lit a fire all across the dry tinder of the region, where many of its autocratic leaders are out of step with their people, especially on the issue of Israel. More on that later in the hour. Meanwhile, news outlets covering the story win or lose as is often the case, not on the quality of their news, but on the nature of their views. Dylan Byers is senior correspondent at Puck.

Dylan Byers: In the wake of October 7th to say anything that is at all critical of Israel, to say anything that even has the appearance of being sympathetic to the Palestinian plight or certainly anything that negates the suffering of Israelis on October 7th, touches a third rail of American politics.

Brooke Gladstone: Byers tallied how the cable news outlets fared in the last weeks. He says MSNBC is currently the biggest loser because--

Dylan Byers: MSNBC which has been quite comfortable appealing to the broad tent of left-of-center politics, whether it's the far left or the moderate left. Now, all of a sudden, has to figure out how to tow the line between the establishment worldview which is one that is very pro-Israel, whether or not they're folks are sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians or the nuanced nature of this conflict.

Brooke Gladstone: MSNBC's primetime ratings have declined by nearly a third.

Dylan Byers: At the same time Fox's audience is up by at least 40%.

Jesse Watters: I've had it with the Palestinians, I've given up on the Palestinians.

Brooke Gladstone: Jesse Watters of Fox News.

Jesse Watters: I don't like how people tried to differentiate between the Palestinians and Hamas.

Brooke Gladstone: Yet some people still try, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough.

Joe Scarborough: Let's be exact in our language. Let's be exact in our headlines because you supporting terror attacks against babies and against families, the slaughter of families, against grandmothers, that is not pro-Palestinian. Hamas says, our goal is to kill Jews.

Brooke Gladstone: The BBC was criticized for its decision not to call Hamas a terrorist organization and also for the inexactitude elucidated by Scarborough for which it did apologize.

BBC Reporter: Earlier on BBC News, we reported on some of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations at the weekend. We spoke about several demonstrations across Britain during which people voiced their backing for Hamas. We accept that this was poorly phrased and was a misleading description of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Now here's, the weather.

Brooke Gladstone: Keep calm and carry on should be the credo for any journalist, but in all my years covering the media and covering the media covering Israel and Palestine, not much has changed. It's now and forever a third rail. Here's John Stewart in 2014.

John Stewart: We'll start tonight in the Middle East what Israel--

Correspondents: What? Israel isn't supposed to defend itself?

John Stewart: Oh yes, Mexico Palm, Texas will be exercising--

[crosstalk]

Correspondents: Self-hating Jews?

John Stewart: Why don't we just talk about something lighter like Ukraine.

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, the falcon loses the falconer.