The Media Research Center hates (non-right-wing) journalists so much, it effectively roots for them to be hurt or killed. So it’s no surprise that a May 16 MRC post by Nicholas Fondacaro defended Israel from blowing up offices in Gaza that contained offices for the Associated Press and other media organizations on the pretense that terrorist group Hamas also had offices there, by cheering then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for ordering the bombing:
In a Sunday appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called out The Associated Press for lying about the Saturday bombing of the building they willing shared with Hamas terrorists. He also schooled CBS fill-in moderator John Dickerson by noting the extra measures Israel took to reduce the number of civilian casualties in the areas they were targeting.
During the course of their interview, Dickerson seemed to scoff at the idea that Israel had proof that Hamas was using the media as human shields. Asking: “It’s inconceivable you would have talked to [President Biden] and not shared proof of Hamas in those buildings that housed the journalists. Did you share that with him?” Dickerson seemed uninterested in why Biden had not condemned the bombing.
Netanyahu noted that they passed the information along through the proper intelligence channels and then went after the AP for their lies suggesting they had only just escaped the building before it collapsed:
In fact, occupants of the building were given as little as 10 minutes to evacuate the building before it was blown up, which is not very much time at all and, thus, not the “lie” Netanyahu (and, by extension, Fondacaro) wants you to believe it is.
Fondacaro then declared that “Many have pointed out that there was no way that the AP didn’t know Hamas was using the same building as them; they would be very poor journalists otherwise or lying.” He didn’t identify who this “many” were or if any of them were not right-wing media-haters or MRC employees. Indeed, the Israeli government was forced to walk back a claim by an Israeli military official that AP and Hamas employees drank coffee together each morning, claiming he was only speaking figuratively.
Likewise, Fondacaro also huffed that “Dickerson wanted to see the ‘smoking gun’ proof that The Jerusalem Post had reported was shown to the United States” without offering evidence that everybody should trust Netanyahu’s word on its face.
It’s apparently easier for Fondacaro to believe that AP employees are terrorist sympathizers than human beings whose lives have inherent value even if they don’t share his rigid right-wing ideology.