A former correspondent for the Associated Press just exposed how far the bias goes in favor of Hamas when it comes to media coverage.
Journalist Matti Friedman — formerly with the Associated Press — made some revealing statements during an interview at the American Jewish Committee Global Forum this year when he was interviewed by AJC Chief Communications and Strategy Officer Belle Etra Yoeli.
In that interview, one moment stuck out, fueling the notion that coverage of the conflict between Israel and Palestine is not representative of the truth when it comes to fighting Hamas.
Wow! This is.. revealing to say the least!pic.twitter.com/jS4LWd6z5w
— Ant (@AntSpeaks) August 5, 2025
“As far as I know, I was the first staffer to erase information from a story because we were threatened by Hamas, which happened at the very end of 2008,” Friedman told the audience.
“We had a great reporter in Gaza, a Palestinian who had always been really an excellent reporter. We had a detail in a story. The detail was a crucial one.
“It was that Hamas fighters were dressed as civilians and were being counted as civilians in the death toll,” Friedman explained.
He then told the audience this was not ultimately included in the AP’s coverage.
Can the traditional media be trusted to report the truth at all?
“That went out in an AP story. The reporter called me a few hours later. It was clear that someone had spoken to him,” adding the reporter told Friedman, “Matti you have to take that detail out of the story.
“And it was clear that someone had threatened him. I took the detail out of the story.”
“I suggested to our editors that we note in an editor’s note that we were now complying with Hamas censorship. I was overruled.
“And from that point in time, the AP, like all of its sister organizations, collaborates with Hamas censorship in Gaza.
“What does that mean? You’ll see a lot of dead civilians and you won’t see dead militants,” he told audiences, admitting the AP was now complying in the face of these threats.
“And this is the kicker: The center of the coverage will be a number — a casualty number that is provided to the press by something called the Gaza Health Ministry, which is Hamas.”
That number “is a way of basically settling the story before you get into any other information, because when you put … 50 Palestinians were killed and one Israeli on a given day, you know, it doesn’t matter what else you say. The numbers kind of tell their own story, and then it’s a way of kind of settling the story with something that sounds like a concrete statistic, and the statistic is being given to us by one of the combatant sides.”
An extended version of the interview can be viewed below:
No one can blame a reporter for fearing for his life, but we have to consider how far that practice described by Friedman has skewed the narrative.
It lends credibility to the assertion that objectivity in reporting is nearly impossible in a conflict like this.
If Friedman’s casting of the AP — it might as well be a mouthpiece for Hamas — has held true since 2008, how can they be trusted as a reliable source of news?
This is a news organization carrying the message of barbarians by giving their side a generous portrayal.
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