AG Report 7.18.2024
NBC News Defamation Trial Proceeding
In 2020, a viral story claimed that a gynecologist at a migrant facility in Georgia was experimenting on and performing unnecessary hysterectomies on migrant women. The story was based on an alleged whistleblower complaint from a former nurse working with pro-migrant legal activist groups.
The complaint was first picked up by The Intercept, which has a long history of reporting scandalous claims that have little support or are directly contradicted by evidence. All the other major news outlets later picked up the story. Within a few days, congressional democrats were also expressing outrage.
NBC News and their affiliates at MSNBC went further than just reporting the claims, they also named the doctor allegedly behind the procedures. They did this despite extensive evidence that the claims in the complaint were false and that the alleged whistleblower had no firsthand knowledge of such procedures being performed.
The doctor sued NBC Universal for defamation because of their questionable reporting. A judge has since ruled that Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow, and Nicole Wallace made 39 “verifiably false” allegations against the doctor, thus allowing the defamation case to proceed to trial.
The way this story developed typifies how many stories go viral nowadays. It starts with activists who feed the story to friendly reporters eager to promote specific narratives. While that does not mean the story is necessarily false, the reporter’s enthusiasm leads to little vetting done before it’s disseminated. This happens because reporters are not held accountable when they get a story wrong. The only reason this case might be different is NBC News made the mistake of defaming a private individual with baseless claims.
NYT On Hamas War Tactics
After more than 8 months, The New York Times has published a report highlighting the obvious: civilian human shields are central to Hamas’ entire war strategy in Gaza. The report goes into detail about how Hamas has seized civilian infrastructure in Gaza for military purposes, including Mosques, UNWRA facilities, schools, and civilian homes. They intentionally wear civilian clothing, booby trap civilian houses, fire rockets from homes, and even utilize children as actual shields and lookouts. All of this has been obvious since almost the start of the war, but it is worth noting that this strategy and its continued use only makes sense if Hamas themselves believe that Israel is actively trying to avoid killing civilians.
Trump Assassination Attempt