Why Are Media Outlets Using Hamas as Their Sources?

It’s not often that a mainstream media outlet publishes a piece so full of disinformation that it ridicules itself as a credible news source.

We wrote this back in February regarding UPI’s inability to produce reliable news. Five months later, nothing has changed at the press outlet. Serial offender Adam Schrader is still unabashedly using terror groups and state-run Palestinian agencies as his main sources in articles.

Being a journalist comes with immense responsibility. Reporting complex world issues to the public is not something to be flippant about. While many have an agenda, it’s simply unacceptable and irresponsible for a reporter to consistently copy apparent press releases of recognized terror groups and pass them as your own pieces.

In the last few days alone, two articles dropped that seemed like sponsored content from both Hamas and the state-run WAFA Palestinian news agency.

In the first article, titled “Haniyeh touts Hamas’ diplomacy efforts in Eid message,” Schrader’s only source is Hamas, and the sole person quoted is Hamas political head Ismail Haniyeh. The whole article strokes Haniyeh’s ego, painting him as the diplomat of the century.

Schrader points to Hamas’ alleged ceasefire proposal in early May, which it claimed had been approved by Qatar and Egypt.

The Hamas leader pointed to its May 6 approval of a ceasefire proposal mediated by Egypt and Qatar, which outlined a three-phase plan to de-escalate the ongoing conflict. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met the proposal with conditions.

If he had integrity, Schrader would write that a deal could not be “approved” if Israel was not involved in the negotiation process. He failed to acknowledge this important fact because again, he was only using Hamas as his source.

Likewise, his second article, titled “Israel uses UNRWA building as sniper post, report says,” is just as absurd — citing WAFA, as well as Amnesty International, a Palestinian NGO, and politicized Israeli organization B’Tselem — none of which have opposing views of the report at hand.

The official state-run Palestinian News Agency, known as WAFA, reported that Israeli forces detained a Palestinian person and injured a minor with shrapnel in the Far’a refugee camp, northeast of the occupied West Bank city of Nablus, during the operation.

The arrest comes as nearly 9,300 Palestinian prisoners have been arrested and are currently held in Israeli prisons and detention centers, according to the Palestine Prisoner’s Society. Around 250 prisoners are children… Palestinians and their supporters often equate this practice to kidnapping.

It’s unclear if intentions are deliberately malicious, agenda-fueled, or if they result from sheer laziness. Regardless, there is zero context given to the IDF raid of a UN aid facility or the arrest of a “Palestinian person” during the raid and others during previous raids.

While he attributes the facts to their sources, there is no ignoring his one-sided report.

We suspected that Schrader was parroting a Hamas PR document back in February when we wrote that UPI was effectively using Hamas’ own talking points.

In this case, it’s not just Hamas’, but other terror supporters’ talking points as well.

As we said back then, “replete with errors, blatant anti-Israel bias, and some appalling Hamas-inspired justifications … it’s hard to believe a supposedly respectable news agency would publish such pieces…”

… or even continue to employ this writer. He’s not even close to doing his job. On the other hand, UPI seems like a lost cause.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

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