Let me start with this, at the outset: The stories of Palestinians — locally and globally — deserve to be told. The war Hamas started when it invaded Israel and brutally slaughtered innocent civilians is taking an enormous toll on Palestinians in Gaza, including innocent ones. There is no denying that, and that story, drawing on the experiences of local Palestinian-Americans, must be told.
But in the Denver Post, what I am seeing, four weeks into this conflict, is a significant editorial bias, namely, privileging the Palestinian story over the Israel and the Jewish story, on top of many errors of fact in its reporting.
What has become clear to me is that the Post is doing no independent research but is accepting wholesale and then repeating what its interview subjects are telling its reporters, without doing any fact checking.
The Nov. 5 front page feature in your “Denver and the West” section exhibited both deficiencies.
To wit:
• You write: “More than 9,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza.” The Post provides no evidence for this. Not to mention, it has been well established that the only reporting of casualties is coming directly from Hamas without any independent verification.
• You write: “Hospitals are running out of fuel,” failing to mention that fuel is requisitioned and hoarded by Hamas to run its subterranean city, which is the center of its terror operations.
• You write: “239 people [were] taken as hostages, many of them still being held.” In fact nearly all of them are being held. As of your publication date, only four individuals had been released.
• You write: “It’s just like 1948, she told Zuaiter, when her own father was killed in the war that established the state of Israel.”
Israel was not established by war. The state of Israel was declared on May 14, 1948 on the day the British Mandate expired. Israel was established by the UN Partition Plan passed on November 29, 1947. Note: the Arab League and Arab Higher committee rejected the plan, which would have established two states. Instead, five Arab states invaded Israel.
When an armistice was declared in 1949, no Arabs — Palestinian or otherwise — established a state in any of the regions not under Israeli control.
Your writing adopts the Palestinian narrative, implying that Israel was the invader. To be sure, every people has its own narratives and interpretations of history, but the job of a journalist is to ferret out the truth, or, at a minimum, to explain that what’s being told is disputed.
• You write that “mosques in Colorado also have been threatened and had to increase security,” failing to mention the imam at a local mosque who recently taught youngsters that Jews are monkeys and are responsible for killing Jesus, among other outrageous statements.
But here’s the main issue: the Post’s coverage is zero sum game. In telling the Palestinian story, again, a story that deserves to be told, the Post largely ignore the Israeli and Jewish one.
You write that “Hundreds of Palestinians families live in Colorado,” but provide no comparable figures about the hundreds, in fact thousands of Jews who live in Colorado and who have connections to Israel.
You write that many members of a local Palestinian man’s extended family have been killed. Did you know that one of the first Israeli soldiers to die in this war is part of a Denverite’s extended family? Did you know that relatives of a relative of mine are being held in Gaza — grandparents, their children and their grandchildren, among them a two-year-old? Why haven’t you bothered to seek this out?
You include, as a mere aside, that the ADL has reported “a rise” in anti-Semitism in the US. In fact what the ADL has reported is a 400% increase in anti-Semitism, and the toxic anti-Israel and anti-Semitic culture that has taken root on college campuses has been widely captured on social media and elsewhere.
You thoroughly ignore what Jews in the US and locally are experiencing, right now, as a result of this war.
In other words, your reporting is totally one-sided, jettisoning all journalistic standards.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but on the Israel side, I have seen staff written stories and pictures about one topic only since Oct. 7, and that was the kidnapped relatives of Ben Raanan. On the other side, I’ve seen coverage of a pro-Palestinian protest at Auraria Campus (which also included a basic factual error, that Gaza has been under Israeli occupation since 1948, which is false), this dominant Denver and the West story and pictures from pro-Palestinian rallies. I have not seen staff coverage of the Israel solidarity rally on Oct. 15 at which the governor of Colorado and much of the Colorado delegation to Washington, including both US senators, spoke.
You led one day with two enormous photos of the destruction of a hospital in Gaza that it turned out Israel had not bombed, and it was a neighboring parking lot, not the hospital, and it was damaged by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a terror group.
The misreporting of that story across the globe fueled anti-Israel sentiment and led to the massive increase in anti-Semitism we’re seeing now. Indeed on the very day that the story was misreported, a synagogue in Tunisia was burned to the ground.
There are consequences to what you are doing.
In terms of AP/NYT coverage in the Post, nearly all of it has skewed to telling the Palestinian story, not least in the choice of accompanying photographs, often dominating the front page.
In other words: You are carrying the water for one side, when, as a daily, you should be doing everything you can to be balanced, especially considering that the spark for the current conflict was a brutal massacre of innocent civilians, mostly Jews, but also Palestinians and people of other nationalities.
I deeply value journalism and have a special relationship with the Denver Post. My grandfather, Max Goldberg, a member of Broadcast Pioneers of Colorado’s Hall of Fame, started his career in media at the age of five as a Denver Post newsboy. His “Side Street” column appeared in the Post for decades.
But like him, more important to me than journalism is my people. By marginalizing and minimizing the Jewish experience, either by misreporting or flat out ignoring it, the Denver Post is risking alienating a loyal readership.
Shana Goldberg may be reached at shana@ijn.com.
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