The New York Times building in New York City. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The New York Times reporter who covers the US State Department, Edward Wong, has had a rocky past few weeks, inflicting a series of half-truths and outright falsehoods on Times readers.

Wong’s technique sometimes is to write a sentence that is technically accurate but leaves out so much significant context that it winds up being functionally inaccurate, or at least highly misleading.

Consider, for example, this sentence in a recent Times article about American military aid to Israel: “The annual aid had been about $3 billion, but Mr. [President Joe] Biden increased that amount after Israel began waging war in Gaza after the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks by Hamas.”

Actually, it wasn’t only “Mr. Biden” who increased the aid, but also Congress, which under the US Constitution has the power to appropriate funds. There have been several votes on this since the Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attack on Israel, and they’ve been overwhelming. For example, an April 20, 2024 House vote on the “Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act” was 366 in favor and 58 opposed. An April 2024 vote in the Senate was 79 to 18. Even before the Oct. 7, 2023, attack, the aid levels had been at $3.3 billion in foreign military financing and an additional $500 million a year in cooperative missile defense funding.

Wong uses the same half-truth technique in a different sentence in the same article: “At one point, Mr. Biden said he was withholding a single shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel to try to dissuade it from destroying Rafah, a city in southern Gaza, but the Israeli military reduced most of Rafah to rubble anyway.”

This conveniently omits that the Israeli military didn’t merely reduce “most of Rafah to rubble,” but that also the Rafah governorate is where Israel killed the leader of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar, and also where Israel rescued two hostages, Fernando Marman and Louis Har. It further omits that the humanitarian catastrophe that the Biden administration warned would ensue after a Rafah invasion by Israel — “I have studied the maps. There’s nowhere for those folks to go,” Vice President Kamala Harris said — failed to materialize.

Wong writes that “some Democrats in Congress and their aides are certain to be furious at the administration for trying to push through the $8 billion package of weapons sales to Israel.” Under the Constitution, the “aides” don’t have a say in the matter; the members of Congress do. The $8 billion is part of a $15 billion package that passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. Any Democrats or Republicans who wanted to block the weapons had their opportunity, and they lost the vote.

What is driving Wong’s selective reporting?

Wong made his own views clear in a “news analysis” published in the Times. That article claimed, without evidence, that, “Mr. Biden’s unwavering public support of an Israel led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as it wages a deadly war against Hamas in Gaza has been especially costly in terms of American and global public opinion.” That’s not “news analysis”; it’s a false claim.

The same piece claimed, without evidence, that “no foreign policy issue has been more divisive for Mr. Biden than his support for Israel throughout its war in Gaza.” Actually, aid to Ukraine has been more divisive; the Ukraine aid passed the House only by a 311-112 margin, still overwhelming, but narrower than the Israel aid vote.

During the US presidential campaign, Donald Trump criticized Biden for not being supportive enough of Israel, saying in one debate that Biden had become “like a Palestinian.” If Wong thinks Biden’s problem with American public opinion is that Biden’s been too pro-Israel, it’s evidence of the far-left Times readership and social circles of Times journalists, not any indication of the underlying reality.

The headline and subheadline of the Wong news analysis claim, “Biden and Aides Courted Allies Who Undermined US Goals/The Biden administration has been caught by surprise when partners like South Korea and Israel have acted against US.interests and principles.”

What “US interests and principles” has Israel acted against?

The article claims, “America’s alliances and partnerships under Mr. Biden’s stewardship have been complicated. Key partners have acted counter to the values that Mr. Biden has espoused, notably democracy, rule of law, and human rights. In some cases, those countries have undermined the power and standing of the United States in the world.” Yet not a single example is provided of how Israel has “undermined the power and standing of the United States in the world.”

Nor is the counterfactual example considered of how it would have undermined the power and standing of the United States in the world if the US had chosen instead to abandon Israel to defeat by Iranian-backed terrorists hoping to wipe Israel off the map. Is that the policy that Wong would have preferred, a Hamas takeover of Israel along the lines of the Taliban takeover of Kabul? Would that have been a big boost to American prestige? How would an alternative policy of allowing Israel to be conquered by Iran-backed terrorists have been consistent with American values of democracy and human rights?

The talking head that Wong musters to support his article’s point of view is Matt Duss, an extreme aide to extreme socialist Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Sanders recently ran afoul of the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, who posted, “The idea that @BernieSanders voluntarily would sit for an interview with Hasan Piker, an individual who routinely has used his platform to spread anti-Jewish tropes, amplify propaganda from a designated terrorist group, and promote toxic anti-Zionism, says an awful lot about the senior senator from Vermont and the normalization of antisemitism.”

Instead of holding Sanders to account for his extremism, the New York Times and Wong choose to amplify his point of view and basically endorse it as reasonable. It’s blame-Israel-and-its-USsupporters-for-everything-that-goes-wrong.

And Wong has a track record. He was out on social media claiming falsely that “the Israeli military has killed more than 100 Palestinian journalists in Gaza in the last year,” omitting that many of the so-called journalists were actually terrorist operatives, according to Israel. I previously described a June 2023 article by Wong as “so egregiously slanted against Israel that it reads as if it were dictated by the Iranian information ministry.” Perhaps it’s time for the Times editors to reassign Wong to a different beat, or counsel him that if he’s determined to pursue an anti-Israel advocacy agenda, he might find himself better suited applying for a position elsewhere.

Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.