An anonymous WorldNetDaily writer dutifully parroted a conservatively correct narrative in a Nov. 8 article:
A new report about the images that came out of the Oct. 7 terror attack by Hamas on innocent Israeli civilians is raising questions about the actions of photographers apparently employed by AP, CNN, Reuters and the New York Times.
The charge is that the photographers were “EMBEDDED” with the Hamas terrorists.
They “accompanied the terrorist group into Israel. They knew the attack was coming and participated in it.”
It is at Honest Reporting the details are spelled out.
“Hamas terrorists were not the only ones who documented the war crimes they had committed during their deadly rampage across southern Israel. Some of their atrocities were captured by Gaza-based photojournalists working for the Associated Press and Reuters news agencies whose early morning presence at the breached border area raises serious ethical questions,” it explained.
[…]A report from Pam Geller, commentator and activist, said, “We need war tribunals to prosecute these war criminal news orgs. The names of the photographers, which appear on other sources, have been removed from some of the photos on AP’s database. Perhaps someone at the agency realized it posed serious questions regarding their journalistic ethics.”
One social media commenter said, of the positioning of the photographers alongside Hamas, “Yes, this is real.”
But it wasn’t. As we documented when the Media Research Center pushed this same claim, HonestReporting eventually admitted it had no evidence to back up its claim of embedding — it was playing the “we’re just asking questions” card. The news organizations accused of embedding all denied HonestReporting’s claim as well.
Despite the fact that the story wasn’t true, WND insisted on continuing to promote it anyway. Bob Unruh wrote in a Dec. 7 article:
Congress has begun investigating various media outlets that had reporters “embedded” with Hamas during the terror organization’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7.
That was when terrorists, likely drugged up and with instructions to commit atrocities against Israeli civilians, did just that, beheading babies and burning entire families alive.
Further details revealed after the attack that killed an estimated 1,400 show that the terrorists raped both men and women, and murdered them in stunningly brutal fashion.
Having reporters embedded with an event is a common occurrence for media organizations, such as at protests, parades and such. But the legal and ethical questions of allowing reporters to knowingly accompany terrorists on a murder spree raise red flags the size of the state of Texas.
Unruh failed to tell readers that the claims were disproven and that HonestReporting never had any evidence to back it up.
It’s shoddy reporting like this that makes WND utterly untrustworthy.