Two weeks ago, I noticed something strange: the same emaciated toddler in Gaza that The New York Times had put on its front page had also appeared in nearly every mainstream outlet. Different news organizations, different photographers, same boy. So I did something no one else bothered to do: I ran the children’s names through Google Translate and combed Arabic media. What @TanyaLukyanova_ and I found is that nearly every image told the same story: these were kids with cystic fibrosis, rickets, or other serious ailments used by mainstream media to give the false impression of a famine.
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