The Free Press Called Out "Incomplete" Reporting on Gaza's Starving Children. Here's the Complete Story.

GAZA CITY—In August, The Free Press (FP), a news organization acquired Monday by Paramount for roughly $150 million, announced that it had conducted an investigation into the cases of a dozen Palestinians whose photographs were published in mainstream U.S. media outlets as examples of starvation and malnutrition in Gaza. That investigation, which the FP used as evidence the famine in Gaza is overblown, was woefully incomplete.

On Monday, FP founding editor Bari Weiss was named editor in chief of CBS News, and pledged in an email to staff to bring a sense of journalistic rigor to the newsroom. In an unusual setup, Weiss will be reporting directly to Paramount Skydance chairman and CEO David Ellison rather than up through the news division. If the FP probe into the dozen Palestinians is any indication of what’s to come, the editorial standards at CBS News may be about to collapse.

The Free Press claimed dereliction on the part of the mainstream media. “We did something so simple it’s shocking that no other journalist bothered to do it,” announced FP reporter Olivia Reingold, describing how she and her colleague Tanya Lukyanova used Google to search for news articles and interviews about the children featured in photographs. “[I]n every instance, they were already facing grave situations because of their health, irrespective of any third-party action,” the outlet reported.