A CNN anchor getting the population of Gaza wrong by 350 percent. Another CNN personality, Christiane Amanpour, said on-air that Israeli hostages held by Hamas experienced better conditions than the “average Gazan.” A photographer working for Reuters news wire, Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa, encouraging Gazans to infiltrate southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, on social media. These are just three of the countless issues that pro-Israel media watchdog Honest Reporting has responded to in two-plus years since Hamas’ terror attacks.

That period coincided with the majority of Gil Hoffman’s tenure as Honest Reporting’s Executive Director. Hoffman, who came to the organization after two decades at The Jerusalem Post, spoke about his organization’s work in a pair of events last week – on Monday, Nov. 10, at Congregation Neveh Shalom and on Tuesday, Nov. 11, at the Eastside Jewish Commons.

Honest Reporting is a quarter-century old, Hoffman said, but when he was hired in 2022, “I decided, together with my boss, who’s based in Florida, that we’re going to make this a lot more aggressive.”

Since then, Honest Reporting has called attention to the problems above and many, many more – from factual errors to the connections between journalists and terror networks and multiple instances of media personalities posting blatantly antisemitic content on social media.

That work has helped shift the landscape and has had an impact beyond corrections and retractions. Fifteen journalists affiliated with global news outlets like CNN, The New York Times, and the Associated Press have been reassigned or fired due to pressure from Honest Reporting, and Reuters publicly said they held images of a Hamas-associated photographer out of their submission for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News Photography because of Honest Reporting’s work.

It’s certainly a different media landscape than when Honest Reporting was founded – an event sparked by an Associated Press photograph of an Israeli boy who was rescued from a Palestinian mob by a Druze Israel Defense Forces soldier was mis-labeled as a Jewish police officer assaulting a Palestinian – the photograph appeared on the front page of The New York Times. Today, Honest Reporting’s newest battlefront is on social media.

“If you TikTok, ‘what is Zionism,’ you will get things with hashtag ‘Free Palestine,’ hashtag ‘Allah Akbar,’ hashtag ‘Kill the Jews,’” Hoffman said.

Honest Reporting has responded by publishing its own social media campaigns about Israel, Hamas, and the war between the two.

“Following a bloody coup in the Gaza Strip in 2007 Hamas has held control over virtually every single aspect of life in the territory,” a sample of such a video, which Hoffman played at Neveh Shalom, explained. “Not all Gazans are Hamas, but Hamas is all of Gaza.”

“If you want people to show any empathy with the people of Israel, it is important to show empathy with the Gazan people, even if you believe that most of the people in Gaza are guilty in one way or another for what happened on Oct. 7. You would have a basis to believe that because the overwhelming majority of the people who infiltrated Israel on Oct. 7 to rape, kidnap and murder Israelis were not Hamas terrorists. They were ordinary Gazan people,” Hoffman said. “It is still not right strategically to say that. Better to have empathy because the people of Gaza, they deserve to have better leaders.”

Because of the volume of media content being produced and consumed worldwide, Honest Reporting has spent considerable time and resources developing an artificial intelligence system that monitors news outlets and flags problematic content so that errors and falsehoods can be pushed back on within minutes of their publication.

“You remember when people had to write letters to the editor?” Hoffman said. “It doesn’t work that way anymore.”

Part of why Honest Reporting has developed AI technology is that anti-Israel activists have already done so. Hoffman explained that Israel’s post-Oct. 7 war has been fought on 10 fronts – seven separate physical battlefields, plus mainstream media, social media, and college campuses. Hoffman lamented the Israeli government’s own failings in those last few arenas, noting that the IDF has had a politically-driven revolving door of public relations staff, their quality deteriorating over time, i.e.,  the spokeswoman for the Prime Minister’s office has repeatedly answered questions about New York City Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani with extended rants praising President Donald Trump. Hoffman also criticized, both from the podium in Portland and in print in The Jerusalem Post, the Israeli government’s continued denial of foreign journalist access into Gaza.

Born in suburban Chicago, Hoffman graduated from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and worked at the Miami Herald and The Arizona Republic before making Aliyah. After serving in an IDF combat unit, he transferred as a reservist to the IDF’s public affairs division – for reasons that resonate in his work today.

“I wanted to use my skills and experience as a journalist to help Israel against its enemies,” he said.

Learn more at honestreporting.com.