SKDK Needs to Read Michael Crichton
A note to Democrats furious about the media's fake news about Israel: welcome to the party, pal–just wait til you read their domestic political coverage
If you’re a normal person, you’ve never heard of SKDK, the massive PR firm run by Democratic Party luminaries–which has employed countless Democratic hacks, like current senior advisor to Joe Biden, Anita Dunn.
One of the group’s clients is the 10/7 Project, which was founded by a constellation of Jewish and pro-Israel groups to combat the endless lies propagated by American and international media outlets that serve only to benefit the terrorists running the Gaza Strip and their allies around the world.
Among the 10/7 Project’s missions is to “CALL[] OUT BIASED COVERAGE And hold[] biased media accountable, and provide[] accurate information with appropriate perspective.” And yet, some journalists were shocked when the group started disseminating a memo that would do just that!
Before getting to the specific memo, it’s worth remembering just how awful, and outright pro-terrorist, much of the media coverage has been with regards to Israel. Since Hamas launched its unprovoked attack on Israel, slaughtering more Jews in a single day than anyone has since the Holocaust–and kidnapping hundreds of Israelis and Americans in the process–there has been no shortage of instances of media bias. It’s hard to think of one graver than how outlets like the New York Times reported on a nonexistent hospital bombing, relying solely on sourcing from Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist entity.
This reporting, of course, was used as rocket fuel by terrorists around the world to protest outside our U.S. embassies. Of course, this bombing never actually happened–but guess what: not a single journalist has been fired for reporting on a strike against a hospital that simply never happened.
However, you could easily also point to Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah’s condemnation of “Israel’s assault on Gaza” and its commensurate dangers for journalists–including Al Jazeera’s Ismail Abu Omar. There’s at least one problem here…
Abu Omar is, per the Israeli Defense Forces, “a deputy company commander in Hamas’ Eastern Battalion of Khan Yunis who filmed himself in Kibbutz Nir Oz during the October 7 massacre.” The so-called journalist that Attiah defended, without any retraction, was a high-ranking Hamas operative who used Qatar-funded Al Jazeera as a cover for his terrorist activities.
There was also a bombshell report from Honest Reporting that documented how reporters like Hassan Eslaiah, who covered the massacre for outlets like the AP and CNN, rode into Israel on a motorbike with a grenade in his hand.
Eslaiah has also been photographed with Yahya Sinwar, the terrorist mastermind behind the October 7th terrorist attacks.
Following these revelations, CNN, for example, cut ties with their terrorist-loving reporter. CNN denied any advance notice of the terrorist attacks. One outlet that knew in advance of its Gaza-based reporters’ love for Jewish genocide, however, is the New York Times.
Soliman Hijjy was rehired by the Times after it had previously fired him due to posts like “How great you are, Hitler.” Lest there be any ambiguity, he separately had written of being “in a state of harmony as Hitler was during the Holocaust.” Those posts were too much for the Times, but Hijjy was rehired by the outlet just days after the massacre.
This is all important to set the stage for what’s going on with reporting on Israel: outlets hire literal terrorists who drove, armed with grenades, into Israel alongside Hamas and so-called Palestinian civilians to murder and kidnap Jews and non-Jews alike.
This brings us back to SKDK, which has taken a break from representing horrible entities like TikTok (as I’ve previously covered), to team up with the good guys. Over in Semafor (an outlet derided by some as Ximafor due to its close ties to the Chinese Communist Party), Max Tani has a story about a dossier circulated about a Washington Post reporter, Louisa Loveluck, whose coverage of this conflict would make terrorists like Sinwar jump for joy while they hide in tunnels likely financed by American taxpayers like you and me!
Tani’s story revolves around a five-page dossier sent to him by SKDK on behalf of the 10/7 Project, which includes, among other problems with Loveluck’s work, her failure to abide by basic journalistic practices. While Loveluck “fail[s] at times to note that Gaza’s health ministry is controlled by Hamas,” she simultaneously also “neglected to seek comment from Israeli officials for this article, an omission that fell short of The Post’s standards for fairness,” per one of the many editor’s notes that accompany stories with her byline.
The irony to me here is that SKDK’s Jill Zuckman is entirely correct in telling Tani that Loveluck “repeatedly displayed bias toward the subjects of her reporting in her tweets and retweets.” There’s no doubt that’s true–but for a Democratic Party PR firm to suddenly care about media bias from “mainstream” outlets that normally just regurgitate their propaganda is of course totally ludicrous. A look at SKDK’s clients in 2020 alone reads like the yellow pages for Democratic Party operatives.
If SKDK, which is literally paid to foster glowing press from the useful idiots it works with in journalism, thinks that Loveluck’s activism and shoddy reporting practices are a problem (which they are!), wait until they meet her colleagues. This is the outlet that pays Taylor Lorenz to serve as a TikTok propagandist, for crying out loud.
The Post’s reaction to Tani is interesting for two reasons: it defended its reporter–but not her tweets (“[which included] hundreds of [tweets] criticizing Israel, but just a handful that mentioned Hamas or [that were] sympathetic to the hostages,” the 10/7 Project noted to Semafor), and also opposed any “efforts that could endanger or jeopardize their safety,” as if that’s what’s going on here.
Hilariously, the Post additionally “noted that it also cited Israeli government figures,” throwing in an insane false equivalency between the government of Israel and the terror regime of Hamas. This is the exact equivalent of an outlet rushing to use stats from Al Qaeda as the wreckage of the Twin Towers was still being cleared while refusing to quote anyone in the Bush administration. Both instances are radical Islamic jihadist terrorists launching a surprise attack on a civilized country–and yet Tani notes that, nowadays, news outlets “face intense internal pressure from younger staffers and correspondents in the region to tilt more toward Palestinian perspectives.”
Tani’s piece, which seems intended to be a peek behind the curtain, is ironically laced with its own overt biases against Israel–and reality. “It is not abnormal for interest groups to have frustrations with individual reporters, and supporters of Israel have for decades accused Western correspondents of sympathizing with Palestinians over Israel’s security demands,” he writes.
The problem here, of course, is that criticisms of the media when it comes to Israel are far simpler: it’s not that journalists sympathize with Palestinians over “Israel’s security demands,” it’s that journalists slobber over all stripes of Islamic terrorists (remember that the Washington Post’s love affair with terrorists goes well beyond Loveluck; that’s the outlet that mourned the death of “austere religious scholar” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, after all) while ignoring Israeli…people.
On the rare occasion where Democrats actually think critically about the media’s horrendous coverage of Israel, you would think that it would prompt them to think critically about the endless litany of attacks they’ll see immediately before and after targeting their Republican counterparts. However, that is not the case–and it takes probably the most talented fiction writer to ever live, Michael Crichton, to explain the concept in his Gell-Mann amnesia effect.
In a 2002 speech, Crichton described that:
The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well…You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
Ironically, the horrendous coverage of the non-existent country of “Palestine” is what this whole piece here is all about. But Crichton does offer some hope, emphasis my own below:
That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.
If your colleague is always lying to you about the weather, or sports, or anything else under the sun, eventually you stop believing them. And yet, we give way too much credence to journalists who, knowingly or unknowingly, peddle false information about terrorist attacks that never happened–to no consequence whatsoever.
For years, SKDK has made a pretty penny pushing the press to write whatever it wants. Now that it faces a potentially implacable foe–journalists who love dead Jews–it’ll be interesting to see how it operates.