The New “Free Press” Editorial Defending its Famine Denial Includes Fundamental Errors

The news outlet founded by Bari Weiss, The Free Press, issued an editorial defending its recent reporting efforts that have sought to undermine claims that Gaza is facing a famine. The outlet’s reporters have probed the medical histories of many of the children who have died or are dying of starvation and malnutrition and found that they also had pre-existing health complications.

Of course, the first to fall victim to a famine are obviously children who are already facing health difficulties. Cerebral Palsy, which The Free Press makes a big deal out of, is not fatal in children if treated. If they died with Cerebral Palsy, it probably wasn’t Cerebral Palsy that killed them. It was the lack of treatment and the malnutrition. For a normal person, this would be obvious.

The outlet specifically complained that five people in particular had been unfair to them: myself, my Breaking Points colleagues Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti (Emily Jashinsky got a pass, apparently, though she’s been critical of them too), Glenn Greenwald, and Pod Save America’s Ben Rhodes, who they noted bore the nickname “Hamas” as an Obama administration official. (They forgot to note that it was AIPAC that called him that, not his colleagues.) They write:

To Krystal Ball, host of Breaking Points, our journalism was “just so disgusting.” Ball’s co-host, Saagar Enjeti, chimed in to compare our reporters to Holocaust deniers, saying that a “key tenet of holocaust denial is trying to claim that many of the initial victims or purported victims had other preconditions and that’s part of the reason why they died.”

Those who care about the truth will note that these children were not presented as the initial victims of anything; they were deceptively promoted to reflect the average Gazan. To suggest otherwise betrays a fleeting relationship with reality.

Ball and Enjeti are not alone. Glenn Greenwald, a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist,” argued not just for our censorship, but for our “trial at the Hague.”

Barack Obama’s former deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes (whose nickname, incidentally, in that administration was “Hamas”), says we are “sociopathic.” Ryan Grim, co-founder of Drop Site News, predicts reporter Olivia Reingold’s “name will become notorious for a generation.”

They then repeatedly assert that they are not propagandists but are journalists who are only concerned with accuracy. In the next breath, they parrot a flagrant lie from the Israeli government. Had they not spent half their editorial accusing us of getting things wrong and the other half celebrating their commitment to journalistic accuracy, I’d leave it there. But they did do that, so I won’t.

They write this: “Why have these reporters ignored credible reports of the United Nations and its allied organizations themselves blocking the distribution of aid in Gaza? And why are they twisting the truth about Hamas’s theft of aid? Similarly, why have they ignored the fact that the United Nations-associated body that attempts to assess whether there is a famine monkeyed with the metrics for its assessment in Gaza?”

The link to “credible reports” goes to a Fox News report and is not remotely credible. The U.N. is not blocking aid. The link regarding Hamas’ theft of aid goes to a Free Press article. Even Israeli media admits Hamas is not looting aid. The IDF maintains 24/7 drone surveillance of every inch of the aid distribution routes. Any looting by Hamas would be trumpeted by the IDF.

Those first two half-hearted lies are barely offensive because nobody is expected to believe them. But the final lie is the most egregious, because it’s aimed at a genuinely curious audience, and seeks to undermine the official declaration of man-made famine in Gaza.

If you click on “monkeyed with the metrics,” you arrive at a column by Seth Mandel, who would probably not even take offense at being called a propagandist for Israel. His column links to the “Washington Free Beacon,” which, again, is the same.

The notion that the Famine Review Committee fudged its numbers originated with the Israeli X account, which said publicly that when it came to Somalia and Sudan, the IPC used a standard of 30 percent of malnutrition, whereas with Gaza, they used 15 percent, relying on a measurement known as MUAC, for “Mid-Upper Arm Circumference.”

My colleague Ball has a much more detailed look at this claim today, but simply put, the Israeli military was lying, and the Free Beacon, Seth Mandel, and the Free Press either never checked, didn’t care, or fact-checked the claim and still published a lie.

All we have to do is go read the Sudan report. To determine famine, as Krystal explains, officials prefer to take a detailed population survey of height and weight. But famines are not always found in ideal conditions; in such cases, measuring the depleting circumference of people’s arms is a substitute because the arm withers at a slower rate than the overall body. Seeing a collapse of arm circumference is more alarming, which is why the threshold is set at 15 percent rather than 30 percent for that measurement.

And reading the Sudan report, we find that the IPC indeed relied on MUAC: “The FRC relied on a Rapid Nutrition Assessment (RNA) conducted by MSF/Epicentre in Zamzam camp in January 2024, which was also used in its August 2024 review. This assessment, using MUAC, reported GAM at 23.1 percent.” The term MUAC shows up more than two dozen times in the Sudan report from 2024.

It was also used to determine famine in the 2020 South Sudan report, and that report even includes a discussion of why MUAC numbers are lower, by a range of 7 to 15 percentage points, than height/weight numbers. Israel never complained in 2020 when this metric was applied to South Sudan. MUAC shows up more than a dozen times in the Somalia report, as well. It is not new to the Gaza report.

The Free Press editorial finishes with a flourish of sanctimony.

For the Gaza information warriors, it’s not enough to acknowledge that there is hunger in Gaza. No. It must be premeditated genocide. Introducing facts into the discourse that complicate that judgment is condemned as genocide denial. Whatever one wants to call this kind of discourse, it’s certainly not the work of journalists.

Ball gives the game away in her segment on Breaking Points. She asks at one point, after quoting our piece: “Is that supposed to be a propaganda win for Israel?”

No. It’s just reporting the context that the mainstream, and the serially online YouTubers, leave out lest their narratives disintegrate and their audiences evaporate along with them. In other words, it is journalism.

A rule of thumb is that there is generally an inverse relationship between how loudly someone tells you that they are honest and how honest they truly are. The more times a propagandist tells you they are a journalist, and that their work most certainly “is journalism,” the more skeptical you should be.

Today’s fairly short “Free Press” editorial touts their journalistic bona fides at least five or six times, while twice in the piece – seriously, twice! – asserting that their reporters “performed a public service.” It’s quite a performance, at least that much is true.

Ryan Grim is a reporter and editor at Drop Site, co-host of Counter Points and Deconstructed, and an author.

RELATED: