Pro-Israel group targets Post reporter

Source: Semafor

Max Tani
Feb 18, 2024, 6:31pm EST MEDIA

Pro-Israel group targets Post reporter

Pro-Israel groups, deeply critical of American news outlets such as the Washington Post over their coverage of the war in Gaza, have been working in public and behind-the-scenes to discredit specific journalists seen as biased against Israel.

SKDK, the Washington, D.C. public relations firm with close ties to President Joe Biden’s White House, has been running communications for the 10/7 Project, a consortium of five Jewish organizations founded last year to promote “continued US support for Israel and counter misinformation about the Israel/Hamas war.” Over the past several months, that work has largely consisted of sharing daily memos to journalists pointing out what the group sees as flaws in coverage, such as what it sees as under-coverage of Hamas’ sexual assaults of Israeli hostages taken on 10/7 and failures to acknowledge the US government’s assessment that Hamas had a military presence at the Al-Shifa hospital.

But it also has been keeping tabs on reporters that it felt were reporting and tweeting unfairly about Israel, and putting pressure on major national news organizations to punish or remove these reporters from the beat. In particular, the group has singled out the Washington Post and its foreign correspondent Louisa Loveluck, who has covered the war in Gaza with an emphasis on Palestinian civilians impacted by the violence.

In one five-page document shared with Semafor, the group included a list of grievances about Loveluck’s coverage of Gaza and tweets about the conflict. It included recent corrections and editor’s notes on her stories that it said demonstrated her “erroneous or biased reporting,” including one story an editor’s note conceded “mischaracterized some aspects of Israeli rules for permits that allowed some Palestinian women,” and a story that suggested “Doctors Without Borders accused Israeli forces of deliberately firing on a convoy carrying employees of the organization,” when the group had condemned the attack but not named a perpetrator. Loveluck also won the group’s ire by failing at times to note that Gaza’s health ministry is controlled by Hamas.

But the group went further into Loveluck’s past before her time as a journalist. The document also contained a deep dive of her tweets, going all the way back to 2009 when she was a student in college.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.semafor.com/article/02/18/2024/pro-israel-group-targets-post-reporter