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Last Tuesday, some of the world’s most prominent news organizations spread word about a terrible tragedy unfolding in the Gaza Strip. Images of a blast at a hospital were beginning to circulate on social media. The Palestinian health authorities claimed that Israel was responsible for the death of some 500 civilians. Because the details were extremely murky, it was impossible to tell who had caused the explosion or how many people had died. And yet some of the most reputable names in news media sent push alerts that broadcast Hamas’s claims far and wide.
“Hundreds feared dead or injured in Israeli air strike on hospital in Gaza, Palestinian officials say,” wrote the BBC. “At least 500 people were killed by an Israeli airstrike at a Gaza hospital, the Palestinian Health Ministry said,” wrote The New York Times.

Along with others, these news outlets ascribed these details to Palestinian authorities, thereby doing the minimum to ensure that their readers would understand where the claims originated. But both push alerts would have led reasonable readers to conclude that these statements must basically be true. Both talked about “Israeli” air strikes. Both uncritically reported that many hundreds had died. Neither explained in their push alerts that the health  authorities—and all other authorities—in Gaza are controlled by Hamas, the Islamist organization that had brutally killed more than 1,400 people, most of them civilians, in a recent surprise attack on Israel.

News of the supposed Israeli strike quickly had huge real-world consequences. The king of Jordan canceled a planned meeting with President Joe Biden. Mass protests broke out in cities across the Middle East, some culminating in attacks on foreign embassies. In Germany, two unknown assailants threw Molotov cocktails at a synagogue in Berlin. A wider regional war seemed to inch closer.

But as more details about the blast emerged, the initial claims so credulously repeated by the world’s leading news outlets came to look untenable. Israel released what it said were recordings of Hamas operatives discussing the blast as the misfire of a rocket launched by Palestinian Islamic Jihad. (The group has denied this version of events.) A live video transmission from Al Jazeera appeared to show that a projectile rose from inside Gaza before changing course and exploding in the vicinity of the hospital; the Israel Defense Forces have claimed that this was one of several rockets fired from Palestinian territory. Subsequent analysis by the Associated Press has substantially corroborated this. In addition, pictures of the site taken by Reuters showed a small crater that, according to independent analysts using open-source intelligence, is inconsistent with the effect of munitions typically used by Israel. It came to look doubtful that the missile had directly hit the hospital; as a BBC team investigating the blast reported, “Images of the ground after the blast do not show significant damage to surrounding hospital buildings.” Even the death toll itself has come to be in doubt: U.S. intelligence agencies now estimate that 100 to 300 people died—a horrific loss but one that is inconsistent with the claims made by Hamas.

By Wednesday morning, a fresh consensus started to emerge among experts. “The evidence this morning, though NOT conclusive by any means, points more towards a failed rocket launch than an Israeli air strike,” Shashank Joshi, the defense editor of The Economist, posted on X (formerly Twitter). By evening, U.S. security agencies had analyzed the available evidence and come to an even more certain verdict: “We feel confident that the explosion was the result of a failed rocket launch by militant terrorists and not the result of an Israeli airstrike,” Mark Warner, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote on X. Officials in France and in Canada concurred. A number of observers who are critical of Israel and had at first condemned the attack subsequently acknowledged that initial reports had likely been mistaken.

Finally, this morning, The New York Times acknowledged the extent of its error in an editors’ note. “The early versions of the coverage—and the prominence it received in a headline, news alert and social media channels—relied too heavily on claims by Hamas, and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified,” the newspaper admitted. “The report left readers with an incorrect impression about what was known and how credible the account was.” And it concluded: “Times editors should have taken more care with the initial presentation.” (CNN and other news outlets have not yet followed suit in apologizing for their own, very similar, missteps; a BBC statement on the topic applied only to a correspondent’s words, and not its push alerts or the initial reporting on its website.)

The cause of the tragedy, it appears, is the opposite of what news outlets around the world first reported. Rather than having been an Israeli attack on civilians, the balance of evidence suggests that it was a result of terrorists’ disregard for the lives of the people on whose behalf they claim to be fighting.

In the absence of major new facts pointing to a different conclusion, this means that the Palestinians who died at the hospital in Gaza should be added to the already grim death toll for which Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad bear responsibility since the surprise attack on Israeli civilians. That judgment also makes the misleading reporting by the world’s most influential journalistic outlets one of the most consequential media failures in recent history. As Ted Lieu, a progressive member of the House of Representatives, posted on X, the “news organizations not only got it wrong” in spectacular fashion, but in “their rush to judgment caused other nations to wrongly interpret the hospital blast.”

Such a glaring example of major outlets messing up on a very consequential event helps explain why trust in traditional news media has been falling fast. As recently as 2003, eight out of 10 British respondents said that they “trust BBC journalists to tell the truth.” By 2020, the share of respondents who said that they trust the BBC had fallen to fewer than one in two. Americans have been mistrustful of media for longer, but here, too, the share of respondents who say that they trust mass media to report “the news fully, accurately, and fairly” has fallen to a near-record low.

Journalists and media executives understandably tend to apportion blame for their failings elsewhere. If people no longer trust quality outlets, the fault must lie with the “misinformation” they encounter on social media. But such an easy allocation of responsibility won’t work when, marching in unison, major news organizations seem to have fouled up in as blatant a way as they have over this past week.