A quick look at NPR’s lead story on Israel’s commemoration of the third anniversary of Hamas’ October 7 attack last week is all it takes to understand the extent of the institutionalized media bias now facing Jews, Zionism and the Jewish nation.
The piece – benignly titled “3 years on, Israelis grapple with reports Netanyahu was warned before Oct. 7 attacks” – promised to deliver a deep dive into the ways Israelis are contending with newly-released reports that their Prime Minister knew a Hamas attack was possible, yet failed to protect the nation. Framed against the backdrop of yet another day of Israeli national mourning, the piece proposed an almost unspeakable paradox – a people still mired in grief ruled by an arrogant and impune leader who recklessly allowed their suffering to happen.
This would have been a difficult-yet-necessary story, if only NPR had written it. Instead, the piece – all 23 paragraphs of it – was little more than a laundry list of allegations against the Prime Minister with just a single Israeli voice crammed in with scant consideration or context.
This is hardly the only example of what might be called the mainstream media’s penchant for “bait-and-switch” editorializing around Israel. But its timing – and egregiousness – powerfully reflect long-standing efforts to embed an activist agenda into what might nominally appear as standard reportage and storytelling.
The NPR “Netanyahu was warned” feature led a pair of October 7 reports, the second more innocuously focused on Israel’s actual mourning. But it is the Netanyahu piece that NPR editors chose to lead with, which is why its failures demand such close scrutiny.
The piece’s most manipulative element is not in what it includes but what it is missing. Paragraph after paragraph detail how everyone from former Palestinian Authority official Sufian Abu Zaida and UAE leader Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, to Egypt’s ex-head of intelligence, Abbas Kamel, along with a series of Israeli interlocutors, informed Netanyahu of a potential Hamas attack. Such reports originated and were recirculated in leading global and local media outlets, including The Atlantic, Haaretz and The New York Times.
Arriving just as Netanyahu fights for his survival before Israel’s upcoming national elections on October 27 – the first since the October 7 massacres – the Prime Minister has repeatedly branded these claims as baseless and politically motivated.
Perhaps.
But the allegation’s veracity is actually the least of the piece’s problems, at least in terms of messaging and journalistic integrity. Because while the piece’s three – yes, three! – writers manage to more than adequately cover the “Netanyahu knew” portion of their headline, the far more consequential coverage of Israelis “grappling” with this knowledge this past October 7 is almost entirely missing.
There is one graph – just one among 22 others – that gives voice to an outraged Israeli citizen supposedly “grappling” with “the lightning rod” that has resulted from Netanyahu’s possible malfeasance.
“You didn’t protect my son,” yelled out one bereaved Israeli father whose son was killed in the Hamas-led attack, as the prime minister spoke at a memorial ceremony this week for the victims.
A bereaved father. An incompetent national leader. An incomprehensible loss made all the more senseless by the heartwrenching thought it didn’t have to happen. If this is not “grappling,” then what is? Except here again, just like with the piece’s headline, the father’s outburst overpromises and underdelivers.
Unnamed and of uncertain motivation, the father’s pleas, while tragic and understandable, do not a nation torn apart make. The reader has no real idea if this father is berating Bibi over his larger failure to keep Israel’s citizenry safe three October 7s ago, or because of the specific allegations that the Prime Minister actively ignored those disputed warnings.
This distinction is hardly minor; in fact, it’s the only way the story’s headline can actually deliver as promised. NPR staked their October 7 coverage on presenting Israelis consumed by furor over Netanyahu’s recently revealed blunders. And the only Israeli they trot out to demonstrate that furor cannot directly connect his Prime Minister’s negligence with his nation’s anger.
NPR, of course, wasn’t the only media outlet to focus on Israel’s “failures” during last week’s October 7 news blitz. But even names rarely associated with pro-Israel coverage delivered far more truthful versions. Take the BBC: Their piece, “Israelis demand accountability over 7 October failures three years after attacks,” followed a similar narrative as NPR, but did a far better job with the finished product.
Their headline, for instance, omitted any mention of Netanyahu and the immediate politicization he elicits. The Prime Minister, of course, appears throughout the story – blasted over those ignored warnings and for failing to mount a formal state investigation into the Hamas attack.
But the piece includes more Israeli voices, complete with names, such as Elad Levy, and their exact connection to the massacre – uncle of Roni Eshel, a young female soldier killed at the Nahal Oz army base along the border with Gaza who, for months, sent (ignored) warnings of possible Hamas escalations to her superiors.
Also appearing in the middle of the BBC piece is the exact same bereaved father manipulatively deployed by NPR to illustrate their claims of widespread Israeli fury. Here too the man remains nameless, but we learn that he berated the Prime Minister on October 5 at a memorial in Jerusalem.
Most crucially, his quote is used by the BBC to illustrate Israeli rage at “the refusal of political leaders – including Netanyahu – to accept responsibility” for the lives lost on October 7 and the failures that allowed it to happen, and not just at the Prime Minister himself. This father’s words, while no less saddening, are simply far more honest.
Ultimately, even the most sophisticated media consumers can be forgiven for overlooking such dishonesty. Because dishonest media platforms like NPR are counting on it. Filled with targeted omissions and editorial obscurity, their brand of “bait-and-switch” journalism offers the veneer of balance and impartiality, while delivering little of either.
The effect is intentional, calculating and coercive: Use the voices of Israel and Israelis to deny them their rightful places in their nation’s own narratives.
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© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
