Another mainstream media news organization has been accused of hiring a terrorist — this time CNN, which has been accused of hiring a freelancer in Gaza named Abdel Qader Sabbah, who reportedly has ties to Hamas.
Since the October 7 attack, several organizations — the New York Times, the Associated Press, Reuters, CNN, and Al Jazeera — have faced claims that journalists in Gaza with whom they have worked are also close with terrorists.
The watchdog website Honest Reporting, which has done much of the investigating, reported Tuesday:
A CNN freelance journalist in Gaza, Abdel Qader Sabbah, photographed himself with a senior Hamas leader, served in a Hamas-run body to which he also provided work, praised terrorists, and shared anti-Israeli propaganda online, an HonestReporting investigation revealed.
Throughout the Israel-Hamas war, CNN has given a prominent platform to news reports by Sabbah, who has also worked for the Associated Press, and the exposure of his links to the terror group casts a long shadow over the network’s vetting procedures and journalistic standards.
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What’s clear is that someone like Abdel Qader Sabbah cannot be considered an objective journalist. His posts expose him as a Hamas mouthpiece, at best, or a serviceman affiliated with a proscribed terror group, at worst.
Honest Reporting also called on several state-level attorneys general, who had earlier warned news networks about hiring journalists with terror links, to investigate CNN for what it said was the latest example of the phenomenon.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.