When a study is released purporting to show widespread Hamas manipulation of casualty data for its own ideological purposes, it is typically widely and virtually entirely ignored by Canadian news media outlets.
But when an organization makes allegations which portray the Jewish State in a particularly negative light, there is a high likelihood that it will garner coverage in the Canadian news media.
On January 9, five authors penned an article in The Lancet, a British medical journal which earlier in the summer published a letter which made the unfounded claim that hundreds of thousands of Gazans could die in the Hamas-Israel war.
Unsubstantiated Palestinian Casualty Claims Given A Platform
In the new recent article, the authors asserted that they used “multiple data sources to estimate deaths” in Gaza, and arrived at the figure of more than 64,000, far exceeding numbers far exceeding Hamas’ own widely criticized claims.
The Lancet’s accusations received coverage in both The Globe and Mail, as well as CTV News.
In a January 9 article in The Globe and Mail entitled: “Gaza war toll likely significantly undercounts deaths, says study in The Lancet journal,” and which was also published the next day by CTV News, Reuters reporter Maggie Fick told readers that the journal used a tactic called “capture-recapture,” which essentially compares data from various sources in an effort to arrive at an accurate result, quoting only one source: lead author Zeina Jamaluddine, who said “our research reveals a stark reality: the true scale of traumatic injury deaths in Gaza is higher than reported.” Jamaluddine has previously called Israel’s counter-terrorism operations against Hezbollah an act of terrorism.
Why The Globe and Mail and CTV News decided that this claim was worthy of being published, but others, which using statistical analysis and an evaluation of Hamas’ own casualty claims, found the terrorist group lied about the death toll, were ignored.
Dubious Methodology Ignored
What the article failed to tell readers is that despite the seemingly legitimate method being employed, there is little data independence between the data sets used by the authors. As researcher Salo Aizenberg has pointed out, the ‘capture-recapture’ method “is only reliable if each data set is arrived at completely independently; but this is not the case for the Gaza fatality lists as the Ministry of Health (MoH) data uses the other data sources…scrubs them, removes duplicates (as they have over time with each list cleaner than the prior one) to compile supposedly ‘reliable’ information.”
In other words, The Lancet authors have used Hamas figures, in a sense repackaged them, and then disingenuously reframed them as being independent, when they are anything but. When the Hamas-run “Gaza Ministry of Health” crowdsources death toll claims, those same sources then cannot be relied upon as being supposedly independent, but that is exactly what The Lancet authors did.
While CTV News and The Globe and Mail are entitled to report on these claims if they so wish, their selectivity is striking. Only when academics are making claims hostile to Israel do they receive press, but when it is Hamas’ data manipulation in the cross hairs, Canadian news media outlets find themselves curiously disinterested in reporting on these stories to the general public. It’s time that they answered why.
