Is the Washington Post pro-Hamas?

Some supporters of Israel believe so. Erick Erickson, for example, says “the Washington Post’s leadership and staff have joined Hamas’s side.”

I have tried to refrain from making this accusation, but Erickson’s conclusion is becoming difficult to reject. Consider this passage from a Post article published a few days ago:

U.S. officials say more than 30,000 people have been killed in Gaza. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed in an interview Sunday with Axel Springer, the parent company of Politico, that Israel had killed approximately 13,000 Palestinian fighters, a claim that could not be independently verified.

(Emphasis added)

The first problem is that, as far as I can tell, Netanyahu did not state the approximate number of “Palestinian fighters” the IDF has killed. What Netanyahu said was that at least 13,000 “terrorists” have been killed.

If the Post doesn’t consider Hamas fighters to be terrorists, that itself shows pro-Hamas bias. In any case, the Post should at least report accurately what Netanyahu said. Even Reuters, whose anti-Israel bias is longstanding, was content to express its pro-Hamas sympathies by putting quotation marks around “terrorists” in its report about Netanyahu’s statement.

But the major problem with the Post’s report is, of course, its expression of skepticism about Netanyahu’s claim, coupled with its acceptance of the statement by “U.S. officials” that more than 30,000 people have been killed in Gaza. U.S. officials have no idea how many people have been killed in Gaza, and neither does the Post.

They are relying on claims by the Hamas controlled Gaza Health Ministry (and perhaps on pro-Hamas U.N. personnel who blindly accept Hamas’ claim). The claims have never been “independently verified.”

In fact,, Hamas’ death toll claims are made-up propaganda. They have been debunked by Abraham Wyner, a professor of statistics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Of Hamas’ estimates, Wyner writes:

The numbers are not real. That much is obvious to anyone who understands how naturally occurring numbers work. . . .

The first place to look is the reported “total” number of deaths. The graph of total deaths by date is increasing with almost metronomical linearity. . .This regularity is almost surely not real. One would expect quite a bit of variation day to day. In fact, the daily reported casualty count over this period averages 270 plus or minus about 15%. This is strikingly little variation. There should be days with twice the average or more and others with half or less.

Second:

We should see variation in the number of child casualties that tracks the variation in the number of women. This is because the daily variation in death counts is caused by the variation in the number of strikes on residential buildings and tunnels which should result in considerable variability in the totals but less variation in the percentage of deaths across groups. This is a basic statistical fact about chance variability. Consequently, on the days with many women casualties there should be large numbers of children casualties, and on the days when just a few women are reported to have been killed, just a few children should be reported. This relationship can be measured and quantified by the R-square (R2 ) statistic that measures how correlated the daily casualty count for women is with the daily casualty count for children. If the numbers were real, we would expect R2 to be substantively larger than 0, tending closer to 1.0. But R2 is .017 which is statistically and substantively not different from 0.

Third:

The daily number of women casualties should be highly correlated with the number of non-women and non-children (i.e., men) reported. Again, this is expected because of the nature of battle. The ebbs and flows of the bombings and attacks by Israel should cause the daily count to move together. But that is not what the data show. Not only is there not a positive correlation, there is a strong negative correlation, which makes no sense at all and establishes the third piece of evidence that the numbers are not real.

Furthermore:

The death count reported on Oct. 29 contradicts the numbers reported on the 28th, insofar as they imply that 26 men came back to life. This can happen because of misattribution or just reporting error. There are a few other days where the numbers of men are reported to be near 0. If these were just reporting errors, then on those days where the death count for men appears to be in error, the women’s count should be typical, at least on average. But it turns out that on the three days when the men’s count is near zero, suggesting an error, the women’s count is high. In fact, the three highest daily women casualty count occurs on those three days.

What to conclude?

Most likely, the Hamas ministry settled on a daily total arbitrarily. We know this because the daily totals increase too consistently to be real. Then they assigned about 70% of the total to be women and children, splitting that amount randomly from day to day. Then they in-filled the number of men as set by the predetermined total. This explains all the data observed.

I don’t expect the Post to report Wyner’s findings. That would be asking too much. At a minimum, though, the Post should not be expressing skepticism about Netanyahu’s numbers without expressing as much or more skepticism about those supplied by Hamas. At least Netanyahu’s estimate isn’t obviously suspect.

Nor is it any excuse to say that Hamas’ numbers have been accepted by “U.S. officials.” Since when does the Post uncritically accept claims by U.S. government officials, especially ones about matters these officials have no direct knowledge of? Only when the U.S. officials are making claims the Post likes.

Finally, I want to make a point about Wyner’s article that relates not to the Washington Post, but to Google. I remembered reading about the article on a blog, but couldn’t remember which one. (It was Hot Air, in an excellent post by John Sexton.)

To find the article, I went to Google and punched in variations of “Gaza death toll inaccurate. What I found was mostly links to articles vouching for the accuracy of Hamas’ estimates.

I did not find Wyner’s article. Only when I punched in the same inquiry coupled with the blogs I read most often did I find Sexton’s post, and through it, Wyner’s piece. When I went back to the Google results for “Gaza death toll inaccurate,” a word search for Wyner’s piece came up empty.

So it isn’t just the Washington Post that seems to be pro-Hamas. It’s also Google and, I sense, many other mainstream media organs and, perhaps, content aggregators.

I’m sure most of the Post’s Jewish subscribers have noticed the paper’s anti-Israel bias. I suspect, though, that the vast majority of them will continue to subscribe — just as they will continue to support Joe Biden, even as he keeps bashing Israel in the hope of carrying Michigan this Fall.