Tamar Sternthal is director of media research and analysis for CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy and Middle East Reporting and Analysis), and director of the organization’s Israel office.
(Oct. 18, 2026 / JNS)
“All men make mistakes, but only wise men learn from their mistakes,” Winston Churchill once remarked.
Recent failed news reporting highlights a related truth: All people harbor biases, but only the most remedial journalists allow their stubborn biases to repeatedly override factual accuracy. When bias, as opposed to factual reporting, is the driving force, even previously corrected falsehoods easily worm their unwelcome way back into coverage.
The Associated Press boasts that it is the “most trusted source of independent, nonpartisan and factual news in all formats,” and adds: “For nearly two centuries, The Associated Press has set the standard for independent, nonpartisan and fact-based journalism.”
Starting with news delivery via the Pony Express in 1846 to serving digital audiences, “we are always innovating to fast and factual news and information,” the storied news agency maintains.
In 2026, however, there are worrying indications that the news agency purportedly committed to “advancing the power of facts” is retreating from the factual front month to month.
On Aug. 4, AP wrongly reported that according to the (Hamas-run) Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip, “most” of the Gaza fatalities from Hamas’s war against Israel were women and children.
Preparing for a correction request, media watchdog CAMERA fact-checked what the industry giant neglected. The media monitor provided AP with OSINT data indicating that Hamas’s Ministry of Health began reporting in July 2025 that the majority of fatalities are men, not women and children.
In addition, on July 2, 2026 (1,000 days since the war started), the Hamas media office reported that out of 73,066 people killed during the war, 21,500 were children and 12,500 were women. Thus, Hamas’s Ministry of Health and its Government Media Office agreed that the total of children and women (34,000) is less than half of all those killed.
In addition, CAMERA pointed to The Washington Post’s two corrections of the identical error from just days earlier.
AP’s ensuing correction on Aug. 11, republished in more than 60 secondary media outlets, commendably clarified that women and children “constitute roughly half of the dead, according to data from Gaza’s Health Ministry, not most of the dead.”
However, unlike the proverbial wise man, the news outlet didn’t learn from its mistake. Barely two months later, the identical fallacy reappeared on Oct. 15 in English and Spanish, as if the trusted news agency had never corrected this precise point. The (Hamas-run) Health Ministry “doesn’t give a breakdown of civilians and militants, but says women and children make up most of the dead,” AP repeated.
Again, CAMERA intervened, reminding them of their own correction just a handful of weeks earlier.
Once again, AP was compelled to correct, but the wire service’s slipping grip on the facts further encroached. While the original correction rightly cited Gaza’s Health Ministry as the source of the “roughly half of the dead” fatality figure for women and children, this month’s correction (picked up by more than 100 media outlets globally) adopted the Hamas figure as fact.
Dropping the attribution to the Hamas source, the Oct. 15 clarification stated as fact: “This item has been corrected to show that almost half, not most, of the dead are women and children.”
“Anything in the AP news report that could reasonably be disputed should be attributed,” the news agency’s own “Telling the Story” principles advise.
Hamas’s casualty statistics for women and children could be reasonably disputed. Indeed, they are.
Thus, in “Questionable Counting: Analysing the Death Toll from the Hamas-Run Ministry of Health in Gaza,” Andrew Fox of the Henry Jackson Society noted that the ministry “overstates the number of women and children killed.”
Fox, a senior associate fellow at the society, cited, for example, “a 22-year-old registered as a 4-year-old, a 31-year-old registered as a 1-year-old and several men with male first names registered as female—artificially increasing the numbers of women and children reported killed. The lists also include people who died before the war and people who died from attacks by Hamas rather than the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).”
Purely on the strength of Fox’s findings, there are certainly enough holes in the terror group’s fatality figures to require proper attribution.
But AP’s second correction of the very same issue is less careful than the first, adopting the terror organization’s faulty figures as fact. So much for mistakes making AP wiser.
The incremental decay of factual reporting with each repeated mistake is the result of unreined bias.
The women-children breakdown is not the media outlet’s first correction on Gaza fatalities.
In August 2024, CAMERA compelled AP (and more than 80 secondary news outlets) to correct after the news outlet falsely reported that “civilian death toll has now exceeded 40,000.” In fact, Hamas, which doesn’t distinguish between combatants and civilians, cited that figure as the number of all fatalities at the time, not just civilians.
It’s revealing that AP’s misreporting on Gaza fatalities consistently tilts in one direction. Notably, the untruths reflect and boost the false “genocide” libel.
The new agency tipped its hand on its bias towards the grotesque genocide libel with Aug. 12 reporting on Nobel Peace Prize laureate Navi Pillay, a participant in the three-member U.N. Commission of Inquiry which accused Israel of genocide, despite a member’s acknowledged lack of evidence to support the grave accusation.
AP propped up the baseless genocide libel with manufactured consent, reporting: “Human-rights groups and many experts on genocide have reached similar conclusions.”
Falsely positioning Israeli and U.S. officials alone in denying genocide, AP ignored the thousands of legal experts and scholars, as well as scores of military authorities who rejected the finding.
“I have no thought of saying The Associated Press is perfect. The frailties of human nature attach to it,” wrote Melville Stone, the great general manager of the AP in 1914, adding: “the thing it is striving for is a truthful, unbiased report of the world’s happenings … ethical in the highest degree.”
The AP insists his words “are true today.”
True, one wonders, like the Aug. 11 Gaza fatalities correction that the AP itself promptly ignored?