Joe Biden had a private meeting with Wall Street executives in late October and was not pleased with the journalistic fiasco that unfolded regarding the Israeli operations in Gaza. Israeli ground troops invaded the Gaza Strip on October 28, an anticipated retaliatory strike following the vicious October 7 terror attacks committed by Hamas, which led to the deaths of 1,400 Israelis.
The level of brutality shocked the Jewish state, uniting the entire country from the Left to the Right in support of continuing military actions until Hamas is eliminated or so severely degraded it could never launch what we saw in early October ever again. Either way, Israeli forces are staying in Gaza for the foreseeable future, handling all security responsibilities in the strip.
Yet, before the ground invasion, Israel was pounding Gaza with sustained air and artillery strikes. A hospital in Gaza provided the media’s first reporting failure, one that inflamed tensions in the reasons, and it was total fake news—the New York Times blamed Israel for the strike, which supposedly killed hundreds. In truth, it was an errant rocket salvo from Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The rocket exploded in the parking lot; the hospital was never destroyed. And 10-50 were killed, not hundreds. How could such a fantastical tale ever come to life? Well, the media took the word of terrorists and got burned.
Hamas controls every government agency, which has been the case since 2007 when they violently took over the strip. You can’t trust anything. The story ignited a firestorm throughout the Muslim world. Biden was reportedly infuriated that such a story was printed in an American publication. The New York Times eventually apologized for almost triggering a regional war that week based on laughably false information (via Semafor):
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President Joe Biden raged against The New York Times in a private White House meeting early last week, after the Times amplified a Hamas claim that an Israeli airstrike was behind the Oct. 17 bombing of a Gaza hospital.
The news of the deadly explosion scuttled a planned presidential trip to Jordan, but the White House now believes a stray Palestinian rocket, not Israel, was to blame. (A more recent Times report has also called that assessment into question, and independent analysts continue to debate the evidence.)
The president told a small group of Wall Street executives in the White House’s Roosevelt Room early last week that he thought the headline was irresponsible and could have triggered military escalation in the Middle East, two people briefed on the conversation told Semafor. He fumed in particular that the headline had appeared “in an American newspaper.”
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Biden’s Wall Street meeting was also an attempt to manage a key domestic political constituency that leans hard toward Israel. Apollo CEO Marc Rowan sparked a donations boycott from some wealthy University of Pennsylvania alumni over what he said was the university’s failure to condemn pro-Palestinian student views and events that bordered on antisemitism. Billionaire investor Bill Ackman said he wouldn’t hire any students from Harvard, his alma mater, who had signed a letter blaming Israel for the Oct. 7 attacks.
Financiers funneled more donations to Biden than any other industry group, according to Open Secrets, and many have turned on him over his administration’s securities-law and antitrust crackdowns. But support for Israel is a cause they agree on, and a political opportunity for Biden to keep them onside.
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The Oct. 17 headline and push alert led to an extended apology from the publication, which published an editors’ note explaining the mistake and a podcast interview with executive editor Joe Kahn. (Some Times brass, one person familiar with their views told Semafor, were unhappy with how hard host Lulu Garcia-Navarro pressed Kahn.)
While other news outlets also jumped on Hamas’s claims, the Times faced the brunt of criticism from supporters of Israel and political pundits, and remains a punching bag: A Fox News host this week compared the move to the paper’s flawed coverage of the Holocaust.
On this, I’m not even going to give Biden a hard time because he was right. Second, no one should feel bad for the Times; they will survive this trip-up. Third, because they’re not going anywhere, keep using them as a punching bag, especially when they screw up like this—that’s our right. And the paper should be pressed hard like grapes being mashed up for wine.
Now, regarding whether this happened, I can believe it. Biden and this publication do not get along, especially with the slew of stories they’ve printed about him being slow and his staff acting as guardian angels regarding gaffes. He’s also cantankerous by default. It’s also possible what he said regarding the economy with these executives was incoherent in the nth degree.
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