On Thursday night, CNN sent out its cartoonishly pathetic senior media reporter Oliver Darcy to do what he dubbed “Shooting Down a Smear” in the wake of HonestReporting’s bombshell alleging Gaza freelance journalists for CNN and The New York Times as well as Associated Press and Reuters embedded with Hamas terrorists during the group’s animalistic October 7 terror attack.
Sure enough, Darcy glossed right over the fact that Eslahiah was more than cozy with Hamas as an undated photo surfaced showing him receiving a kiss on the check from Hamas leader and reported mastermind of the October 7 attacks, Yahya Sinwar.
To see our past coverage of the accusations, check out our Nick Fondacaro’s comprehensive reporting here and here. His Thursday piece included a statement from CNN to NewsBusters that they would “no longer” be “working with” Eslaiah, insisting he was only “an occasional freelancer for AP and other international news organizations in Gaza.”
Cue the eye rolls.
Returning to Darcy, he used the network’s Reliable Sources newsletter to cheer the outlets for having “strongly denied” they “had prior knowledge of Hamas’ Oct. 7 terror attack” and, as usual, engaged in plenty of stochastic terrorism to put down even the most mild questioning of what’s, at best, a dubious, indirect relationship with terrorists.
He kvetched that such concerns “stoked questions about their credibility over a thinly sourced report from an agenda-driven group that insinuated news organizations knew about the looming assault.”
Touting the outlets “strongly pushing back against the report from the staunchly pro-Israel media watchdog, HonestReporting, that claimed photographers for the news outlets were present during the initial attack,” Darcy insinuated there’s nothing further to see since the AP and CNN “severed ties with the freelance photographer Hassan Eslaiah”.
The former conservative reporter pointed to an AP story doing damage control and doing what the liberal media do when targeted, which is try to smear and maim those who criticize them:
The AP's David Bauder reported that by Thursday evening HonestReporting's executive director "admitted ... the group had no evidence" to back up the assertion journalists were in cahoots with Hamas and "said he was satisfied with subsequent explanations from several of these journalists that they did not know" about the attack in advance.
To the shock of no one here, Darcy and the AP were a tad misleading.
HonestReporting published a statement Friday morning that, while they “unequivocally condemn calls for violence or death threats aimed at bona fide media workers” and disagree with arguments that there’s no distinction between terrorists and journalists, “HonestReporting stands behind the legitimate questions we asked media outlets in our recent expose.”
Back to CNN from the night prior, the dictatorial dweeb bemoaned that “the damage had already been done” in that “Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu...used HonestReporting’s story to give credence to the false notion that newsrooms were aware of the terror attack prior to it taking place” with a member of his war cabinet saying terrorists and those who stood as “idle bystanders...are no different”.
Always one to show how it’s always about them and how fundamentally unserious the profession is, a Committee to Protect Journalists statement closed out Darcy’s section of the newsletter on Honest Reporting:
The Committee to Protect Journalists denounced the rhetoric, warning it could put media workers in harm’s way. "Attempts to smear, delegitimize and criminalize journalists who are doing their job, are outrageous and irresponsible, and they put journalists at further risk," Gypsy Guillén Kaiser, CPJ’s advocacy and communications director, said in a statement. "Targeting journalists with disinformation only endangers them."
