Q: What happened to Goebbels after he committed suicide?

A: He got a job with the New York Times.

Paul and I have been covering the robustly deserved collapse of trust in journalism, particularly including its leading organs, the Washington Post and the New York Times. Trust has collapsed for a simple reason: They’re no longer trustworthy. Much of this is because they lie relentlessly, a good bit of it in the service of The Agenda. Hence, they spent years lying about COVID, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and Donald Trump’s “service” as a Russian agent, among numerous other things.

But it’s not just the lying. Much of it is three other things — (1) suppressed coverage of very important stories, e.g., the staggering reduction in crime during the era of get-tough policies; (2) misleading coverage even in the absence of outright lying; and (3) stories wildly slanted to favor The Agenda.

A big part of The Agenda these days is the portrayal of the Brownshirts taking over campuses as social justice warriors in the mold of the Freedom Riders of the Sixties or Vietnam war protesters. As has become increasingly evident, they are no such thing. They’re Nazis or, probably more often, Nazi-wannbees, parading around in keffiyehs, as if that were supposed to fool anyone. Mostly they’re just traditional anti-Semites with a healthy dose of professional far Left “activists” thrown in.

A major part of anti-Semitism has now funneled itself into pro-Hamas and anti-Israel MSM stories, covering Hamas’s barbaric war on Israel as if, you know, there’s blame to go around on — ready now? — both sides. Today’s news of the freeing of four Israeli hostages from the God-only-knows-how-ghastly conditions in which they’ve been held for eight months put a temporary dent in that sort of coverage. The Left doesn’t have a lot of self-awareness, but it has enough to know that any roughly normal person is going to be happy to hear that news.

But the key word is “temporary.” It took only a matter of hours for the MSM, and the NYT in particular, to find a way to blame Israel for rescuing its citizens from hell. That’s why I featured Goebbels in the title of this post. You would think only Goebbels could find a way to blame Israel.

You would think wrong.

Here’s the latest coverage from the Times, which I will quote liberally so you can judge for yourself whether I’m exaggerating.

The Israeli operation to rescue four hostages in the town of Nuseirat in central Gaza on Saturday unleashed a heavy aerial bombardment and ground operations that killed more than 200 people, according to two hospital officials in the area.

Residents there said it was the heaviest onslaught they could recall during the eight-month-old war. One hospital official said Israel struck a busy market, and video footage from the immediate aftermath of the attack showed bloodied bodies on the ground in what appeared to be a market that was struck.

Other video footage showed people running for cover as a powerful airstrike exploded near them.

Dr. Khalil Daqran, the spokesman for Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in nearby Deir al-Balah, and Marwan Abu Nasser, the acting administrative director of Al-Awda hospital in Nuseirat, said their two hospitals had received a total of more than 200 dead and many of the wounded from the attack on Saturday. Many of those killed were women and children, the hospital officials said.

You knew “women and children” were going to get prominent mention. Of course hundreds of women and children, including infants, were raped, mutilated, sliced up, burned to death and bludgeoned to death by Hamas on October 7, but let’s put that………………………….over there.

Down page the Times does add this:

The New York Times could not independently verify the death toll and it was not clear how many were civilians and how many were Hamas militants.

Oh, OK. But most readers won’t get that far. For those who do, the Times isn’t finished yet, not by a long shot.

Hours later some of the dead had already been buried by their families while others had yet to be claimed, according to Dr. Daqran.

“The martyrs who have yet to be identified are still in the morgue. It is difficult to identify them,” he said. “It is difficult to identify them because some of the martyrs who arrived are nothing more than torn limbs from children and women and elderly.”

Tens of thousands of Palestinian residents of Gaza have fled to Nuseirat in recent weeks to escape Israeli bombardments in other parts of the embattled territory such as the southern city of Rafah, where Israel launched a new offensive recently….

The strikes went on for two hours in an “insane way” and they couldn’t move from the house, [one woman] added. One of her colleagues, another teacher, later found out that two of her relatives had been killed. They huddled in one room with the students, she said, as around them homes were being struck….

At Al Aqsa hospital, the wounded and bodies of those killed filled the wards and corridors, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

“The situation is catastrophic,” Dr. Daqran said. “We don’t have enough beds for all the wounded. We have five times as many injured than we have hospital beds.”

You see what’s happening here. The heroic (and extremely dangerous) rescue of hostages — hostages whose capture violated, not just international law, but the basic norms of civilized life — gets turned into a 100-proof propaganda piece for Hamas.

Still, I might be off base in thinking that this is something out of Goebbels; on second thought, it’s so mind-bending it would make Goebbels blush.