The Associated Press recently distributed to news outlets all over the world a story about Gaza that included the dreamy misinformation that so far, the IDF had killed “40,000 civilians” in Gaza. Not even Hamas has dared to say that; instead it says that “40,000 people in Gaza have been killed” — hoping that the unsuspecting reader or listener will assume, and far too many do, that “people” means “civilians.” The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), which has become the foremost organization dedicated to correcting media errors in reports on Israel and the Palestinians, promptly protested to AP about this gross error. To its credit, AP at once published a correction, and so did 83 media outlets that had relied on the AP in reporting about those “40,000 civilians.” More on this win for CAMERA can be found here: “Press Release: More Than 80 North American Media Outlets Correct After AP Outflanks Hamas Casualty Claims,” CAMERA, August 22, 2024:

On Aug. 19, an Associated Press correction appeared in more than 80 media outlets across North America, after the leading wire service wrongly reported that the civilian death toll in the Gaza Strip exceeded 40,000.

The Jerusalem office of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) prompted the AP correction, which was subsequently published or hosted on numerous news sites, from major national outlets like ABC and The Washington Times to local television stations and newspapers such as the Aspen Daily News and The Norwalk Hour in Connecticut.

In their Aug. 18 article highlighting differences in the platforms of U.S. presidential candidates, AP journalists Will Weissert, Jill Colvin, and Seung Min Kim falsely reported that the Gaza Strip’s “civilian death toll has now exceeded 40,000” (“Harris and Trump offer worlds-apart contrasts on top issues in presidential race”).

For an error this egregious, so obviously damaging to the image of the Jewish state, one hopes that AP will discipline the three journalists responsible, Will Weissert, Jill Colvin, and Seung Min Kim, perhaps by assigning them to subjects where such sloppiness is less likely to do harm, such as pet care, high school sports, and reviews of young-adult novels.

CAMERA pointed out to AP editors that not even Hamas has alleged that more than 40,000 Palestinian civilians in Gaza have been killed in the war between Israel and the terror organization. While the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health in Gaza has reported over 40,000 total deaths among Gaza’s residents, its data does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. Israeli sources, meanwhile, estimate that over 17,000 of those killed are Hamas combatants.

“AP’s grossly inflated and unfounded civilian casualty figure fuels pernicious false narratives accusing Israel of genocide, further inflaming the conflict,” charged Tamar Sternthal, director of CAMERA’s Israel office.

As a result of CAMERA’s swift work, the AP issued a rare correction on Aug. 19. The revised text now states: “More than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, the territory’s Hamas-controlled Health Ministry says, but how many are civilians is unknown. The ministry does not distinguish between civilians and militants in its count. Israel says it has killed more than 17,000 militants in the war.”

That correction is good, but it does not go far enough. There ought to be a recognition that in Gaza the monthly number of deaths from natural causes — cancer, heart disease, falls, car accidents — have in recent years accounted for 800 deaths a month. During the past ten months, then, 8000 of those whom Hamas counted as having been killed by the IDF actually died of natural causes. That means that at most 15,000 civilians — not 40,000 — have been killed in Gaza.

The AP also commendably appended a correction to the bottom of the article, alerting readers to the original article’s misreporting of the civilian death toll.

Shortly after AP issued the correction, scores of media outlets — including Seattle Times, Yahoo, MSN, Galveston County News, and dozens of local CBS, ABC, NBC, and Fox affiliates across the country — showed the corrected story with the appended note. The 83 corrections are the most that CAMERA has prompted at once from a single wire service story.

Yet, three days after CAMERA notified NBC of the extant error remaining on several local NBC affiliates in major markets including Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, the network had failed to correct. Sternthal reports that NBC has promised to address the outlying sites….

NBC has “promised to address” the NBC affiliates in the three largest markets — New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles — which three days after CAMERA had notified NBC of the need to change the story about civilian casualties, still had not issued retractions. Why were these three NBC affiliates dragging their feet about announcing corrections to their initial incorrect, and deeply harmful, reports about “40,000 civilians killed in Gaza”? This bears looking into.

CAMERA’s Tamar Sternthal reminds us that the initial misreporting about something too often sticks in the public’s mind, and may not be entirely dislodged by a subsequent report of a correction. How many today believe that the IDF “killed 40,000 civilians in Gaza”? A great many, alas, who paid attention to AP’s first, misleading report, but not to the correction put out afterwards, after CAMERA had notified the wire service of its error. But think how much worse things would be without the eagle-eyed tireless guardians of the truth, and enemies of untruth, at CAMERA, HonestReporting, and UN Watch.