When three emaciated and tortured Israeli hostages were released on February 8 in exchange for 183 Palestinian prisoners, BBC News live coverage stated that there were “concerns over appearance of hostages on both sides.”
That same day, CNN reported, “Three freed Israeli hostages appear in poor health. Many Palestinian prisoners freed by Israel have also seemed emaciated upon release.” And the Guardian wrote, “Fifth Ceasefire Exchange sees gaunt captives emerge from Gaza and Israel.”
These outrageous fabrications and others were exposed in an HonestReporting article a few days later titled, “Rock-Bottom BBC Hits a New Low”. Which is all in a day’s work for HonestReporting, the U.S. and Israel-based nonprofit organization whose mission is to ensure truth, fairness and integrity in the media as it relates to Israel.
Jacki Alexander, the Global CEO of HonestReporting, is not an untried warrior in the battle for honesty about the Jewish State. She spent 15 years working for AIPAC before joining HonestReporting, working on Florida campaigns and spending three years as Director of Operations for Florida in the Southeast offices.
Born and bred in Miami, Alexander left the Sunshine State after college and headed to the London School of Economics, where she earned a Masters in the History of International Relations. It was there that she was “introduced to antisemitism on a level that I had never been introduced to before,” including discrimination on campus. That experience led her to her first job at AIPAC.
In an interview with Alexander in Florida, where she currently resides, she tells me that she “likes pushing the needle”. That energy is tangible in our discussion about the inaccuracies and bias that HonestReporting confronts on a daily basis and how it responds. In the media world, where anti-Israel bias has pushed past acceptable boundaries, her grit has helped propel HonestReporting to the forefront of combating both anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
As with so many other things, October 7 changed the face of how HonestReporting monitors the news. When I ask Alexander to describe the difference between monitoring pre- and post-October 7 in terms of sheer volume and intensity, she replies, “Night and day.” This is especially true in the realm of social media, “where people are looking for answers, specifically Gen Z and Millennials.”
Alexander considers her start with HonestReporting in December, 2022 as fortuitous. “What happened is that we were able to find our voice and figure out how to do social media in the months leading up to October 7. That’s where people are looking for information, and they started to trust our voice. In 2022, HonestReporting, across all platforms, had only 4 million impressions. In October and November of 2023, we got a total of just under 80 million impressions. We were ready, knew what to do, and had the right staff in place. Since then, it’s only grown.”
HonestReporting continues to scrutinize traditional media, but the process has changed after October 7. “Historically, we had our team of editors, around three people, who monitor 86 newspapers manually,” Alexander explains. “We would either read a physical newspaper or go to media sites like nytimes.com and type in key word searches or use advanced search tools. Then we would discuss our findings, decide upon the most severe findings, write our pieces, and publish.”
Before October 7, HonestReporting would find dozens of findings daily, and their process “was enough.” Afterwards, the numbers jumped dramatically, and the organization did not have sufficient manpower to handle them.
In May of 2024, “We finally said, “This is insane.’ So, we started working with an Israeli startup company that had an algorithm already built, and we started training it on bias. We had to train it because we’re not just focusing on what the NYT is writing about Israel. We need it to show whether the NYT is calling Hamas ‘militants’ or ‘fighters.’ Or that the NYT is talking about Yahya Sinwar without mentioning that he was treated in an Israeli hospital. Or that they’re covering 17 paragraphs of the Palestinians and one sentence of the Israelis.”
It took HonestReporting about six months to train the algorithm in order to cease all manual checking. “We are back to monitoring 86 newspapers because we have an algorithm highlighting it for us. That’s a whole new ballgame that we’re in and we still have more advances that we’re going to create.”
The algorithm has led to significantly increased output, including tweeting about 20 articles a day on social media, and plans to expand the algorithm to find bias beyond news sites. ”We want to look at archeology magazines, even food magazines, where we have found bias against Israel. Teen magazines are big ones too.”
It has also led to the ability to do in-depth investigations into freelance journalists that are being hired by the Western press that “have really curious things in their background”. For example, “Motaz Azaiza, a Gaza-based journalist, who talked on Sky News a month ago about how the released Israeli ‘prisoners’, not hostages, look happy and well fed. He said that with absolutely no pushback.”
Sometimes pushback from Honest Reporting leads to corrections. When Hamas handed over the wrong body of Shiri Bibas, NPR described it as a simple “mistake”, despite the prompt delivery of her remains two days later, proving Hamas knew exactly where she was. But, according to HonestReporting, “ABC News and The Telegraph went so far as to cast doubt on whether the wrong remains had even been handed over, framing Israel’s DNA-confirmed identification as a mere ‘allegation.’ Both outlets only corrected their reports after HonestReporting intervened.”
When I ask how challenging it is to secure corrections, Alexander explains the process but emphasizes that bias against Israel has gone way beyond factual errors. “There’s a process that we go through with BBC and Australian News specifically. With many others in the press, we know the journalists or editors and we send them an email. If it’s a factual error, nine times out of ten they’re going to correct it. But if it’s a narrative based error they’re not. And I think that’s what caused us to change how we’re doing business because yes, factual errors still exist, but activism journalism is really where things are going. Then corrections don’t matter anymore because it’s an intentional error.”
I point to some outlets like the Wall Street Journal, whose news, though not its editorial, has become surprisingly narrative based, like calling Hamas “militants”. Alexander agrees. “Sometimes it’s quite subtle too. I’ll read something and I have to read it a second and even a third time until I say, ‘Aha, that’s how you got me!’ There was a WSJ article in August that, if any normal person not following this bias would have read it, they would have thought it was a well-researched article. But all the nuance in it changed everything. We wrote quite a lengthy critique of it.”
What about bias through omission? How do you tackle something if you can’t call them out on it? “We do sometimes, but not if it’s a tweet because it’s way too nuanced. Bottom line – I don’t think we can change the news. I think we are moving towards activism journalism. The editors don’t have as much of a say as they used to have, and I’ve heard this from inside stories from within the major newsrooms. There’s also a lack of trust in traditional media by many people. And it doesn’t reach nearly as many people as they used to.”
Alexander maintains that if the news can’t be changed, it is imperative to start impacting the news consumer. “We have to be making sure that we’re getting our stories, our education, our critiques out.”
This includes pointing out the moral equivalency that the press harps on between Israel and the Palestinians, like “hostages” versus “prisoners”; exposing the fixation on the negative in Israel; and highlighting double standards. “The press focused on some groups of Israelis blocking aid going into Gaza,” Alexander says. “That was their biggest story. Forget about all the other aid that’s actually going in and Hamas is stealing it.”
In addition to corrections, HonestReporting’s work has led to several concrete successes. Despite the small size of the organization’s staff, they have had large achievements.
“We are a C3, so we can’t get involved in policy,” Alexander clarifies. “But we brief both American and Israeli politicians. Our Executive Director in Israel, Gil Hoffman, met with Vice President JD Vance when he was a senatorial candidate. He meets with Moody’s and Fitch every year before they give their annual rating of Israel’s economy. We had a big expose on November 8 of journalists who are part of Hamas. That resulted in 14 State Attorneys General coming out and saying that willful blindness in hiring proxies is no longer an excuse for negligent hiring practices, and it will be considered providing materials to terrorism if you continue to hire these people.”
Alexander proudly relates that HonestReporting was instrumental in getting 12 journalists fired in the last two years. And when a group of Northwestern University alumni asked HonestReporting for help in getting the university to cancel ties with Al Jazeera, the organization gave them a dossier of information that led to Northwestern cutting ties.
Videos put out by HonestReporting have also reached “insane amounts of people”, Alexander says proudly. “Our average video gets about 50-55 thousand. The last couple we put out have all been over 100 thousand.”
However, she takes the greatest pride in how HonestReporting is tackling social media, which she sees as the most dangerous threat. “Social media has changed the world, and we can’t keep playing the same games that we played even had October 7 never happened. Any organization that is not looking to have a presence and an understanding of social media is fighting the last war.
“People under the age of 45 are looking to find an ‘authentic’ source of news. That’s very dangerous because it opens them up to influencers on social media who are peddling a narrative. As much as we don’t like traditional journalists for how they’re being irresponsible in their reporting, there are at least some standards, some ethics. But you have none of that with social media influencers.”
Alexander explains how traditional media that use social media is also guilty. “I think it was WSJ, Washington Post and NYT on social media that have not had anything on the hostages but covered the Palestinian prisoner releases. It’s as if the hostages don’t exist. Even if you say this isn’t an American story, Keith Siegel is an American. They don’t cover hostages coming out looking like Holocaust survivors. It’s completely ignored at the expense of talking about the prisoners and the so-called everlasting famine, which is always present though never really executed in Gaza.”
HonestReporting is doubling down on the tools it uses to confront these pernicious threats. “I see us expanding our tools to become public tools available to the community so that they can really understand the dangers of social media. We want to help them with fact-checking and basic media literacy. Forget just the younger people. Older people know that social media is dangerous but they don’t know how and why.”
The difficulties with social media are compounded with the advent of AI. Alexander explains that “the biggest problem is that the AI that Google uses at the top of searches trains itself on Wikipedia.” Wikipedia has been notoriously anti-Israel.
HonestReporting has had success escalating incidents with some tech giants like Meta, which has been responsive. With TikTok, where so much anti-Israel bias is spread, they have met with a brick wall. “Basically, they said that if we want them to take us more seriously, we should consider our ad spending with them.”
I ask Alexander if she is hopeful that President Trump will have a positive impact on cracking down on misinformation. She is less sanguine than I anticipated. “No. First of all, the news media is run by advertising dollars. They just don’t care. Reuters and NPR were both on record about this. NPR CEO Katherine Maher even said that ‘Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that is getting in the way of finding common ground.’ That’s crazy!”
Yet, I point out, the majority of Americans who voted for President Trump recognize the bias in the media, not just on Israel but on a host of issues affecting them. Alexander agrees that right-wing media, such as FOX News, Newsmax and Breitbart have been “historically quite good” on Israel, but she is less hopeful about the extent of their impact.
“The problem with hope is that there has to be something to be hopeful for. A distrust of the mainstream press is only good if there’s somewhere else where people can turn to for news. There is an advent of alternative news that’s incredible, but even assuming that conservatives will trust the rightwing media, what about the rest of the population? Where are they turning to? CNN is not getting any better. They’re going to turn to news sources that are even worse.”
This bleak outlook is met with determination to make more than a dent in confronting it. With the onslaught of anti-Israel bias seemingly overwhelming, Alexander and her team are coming up with novel ways to combat it. These include an upcoming new website that includes educational curriculum and media and social media literacy fact-checking.
Alexander realizes that “basic fact-checking and critical thinking don’t exist anymore.” Therefore, she wants HonestReporting to be the “address” for teaching which influences can be trusted and how to fact-check. They also work with Chabad to train their shluchim, and Alexander has met with a campus Hillel director.
HonestReporting guides Jewish communal leaders as well. Because of her experience at AIPAC, Alexander has donors reaching out before briefing local members of Congress. “They’re looking for information on, for instance, the so-called famine. Everyone points to the IPC (Integrated Food Security Phase Classification) data, which keeps saying with high level of certainty there is a category 5 famine. But when they do the retrospective look back, it has not existed. There is no famine. Many of these Jewish communal leaders don’t have this information. There are so many leaders who know Israel isn’t an apartheid state or that there’s no genocide, but they don’t have the talking points.”
Then there’s the project in the works that is geared towards all Jews all over the world. Alexander is creating a new group that comprehensively tracks every antisemitic incidence. “I can say anecdotally that when there’s negative reporting in Israel, it absolutely leads to antisemitic attacks around the world. But now we are actually going to run our internal HonestReporting hard data to prove that. That’s very important because if the data shows that two days after bad news comes out of Israel there are antisemitic attacks, the Jewish community must increase security.”
Jews know all too well the perils of bias, misinformation and propaganda. Certainly, Alexander’s job description itself is a summation of these threats and their interminable proliferation. But it’s also a summation of Pirkei Avot 2:21: “It is not incumbent upon you to complete the work, but neither are you at liberty to desist from it.”
