Did The New York Times deceive readers into needlessly despairing over the welfare of Gaza’s children? Or did the Paper of Record fail readers by sowing doubt into its own reporting on those children, with a needless update to an important article?
For many, the answer seems contingent on which social media site they prefer—X or Bluesky.
The precise, bizarro-world opposition of the two reactions reveals a lot about how a public narrative takes hold in 2025’s wildly fractured info environment.
Just over a decade ago, BuzzFeed ignited a raging debate online with a post about The Dress. Some observers were sure that the garment in question was white and gold; others swore it was blue and black. Both sides argued endlessly.
It was the ideal introduction to an era in which everyone could look at the exact same image and see something completely different.
Now, Americans are so ideologically polarized, our competing realities each have their own bespoke microblogging platforms. Both reacted strongly to an update issued by The Times on July 29. The update was to a July 25 article with the headline: “Gazans Are Dying of Starvation.”
In its delicate approach to perhaps the world’s most divisive issue, the article soberly described the claims and counter-claims around the dearth of food and medical aid in Gaza, but it left no ambiguity around severe malnourishment in the devastated region—especially among children.
The article arrived at a critical moment, when even some of Israel’s fiercest advocates, including journalist Bari Weiss and President Donald Trump, have expressed concern over the starvation crisis.
Then came the editor’s note.
A controversial update
The article’s conclusion now carries a postscript about one of the many children depicted in it: an 18-month-old boy whose spinal column is horrifyingly visible through his back.
“This article has been updated to include information about Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, a child in Gaza suffering from severe malnutrition,” the announcement begins. “After publication of the article, The Times learned from his doctor that Mohammed also had preexisting health problems.”
Those health issues are never precisely named, though the text of the article now mentions that the problems “affect[ed] his brain and his muscle development.” The updated version still clearly states, though, that the toddler’s “health deteriorated rapidly in recent months as it became increasingly difficult to find food and medical care,” and that “the medical clinic that treated him said he suffers from severe malnutrition.”
In other words, nothing about the update contradicts the thrust of the article in any way.
However, the update arrived following a PR pressure campaign about the article, culminating in a July 27 item in the New York Post with this headline: “Viral images of starving Gaza boy don’t tell the whole story because he suffers from genetic disorders, critics say.”
In response to the Post tweeting that item, popular X account StopAntisemitism, known for doxing people who express pro-Palestinian views and agitating to get them fired, posted an image of a healthier-looking child standing near the malnourished toddler in question and accused The New York Times of cropping him out. The Times editors now found themselves in a defensive position.
Issuing an editor’s note or an update is no light matter, as either runs the risk of being conflated with a correction. While the former typically involves added context or even a mere clarification on a story, the latter is an acknowledgment that something in the story was wrong and has been corrected. Even though the purpose of a correction is to be transparent with readers about factual errors, corrections are often seen by observers as an admission of wrongdoing on the part of news organizations
Whatever internal deliberations at The Times ultimately led to the update, its effects were quickly seen in two very different responses.
A tale of two Twitters
Although The New York Times PR account on Bluesky never posted about the update, the one on X did, and screenshots of the tweet quickly migrated to the other site, where thousands of accounts began circulating and condemning it. Mileage may vary depending on who one follows on Bluesky, but posts about The Times’ update were practically inescapable among the site’s politics and media contingent.
Some called out the cruelty of treating a child’s preexisting condition as some kind of gotcha—as though children with health issues are more easily malnourished or that including them to indicate devastation is journalistic malpractice. They pointed out how, on the other hand, nutrition is even more important for such children.
Others drew attention to how the update’s wording mirrored those who had dismissed the severity of COVID on the basis that many who died from it had preexisting conditions.
Meanwhile, the reaction on X was a photo negative of the one on Bluesky.
Although plenty of X users shared the same concerns as those on the other site, an abundance of X’s more visible residents—the algorithm-boosted premium subscribers—were just as outraged as their counterparts, only for inverse reasons.
The general tone among many responding to the update was fury that The New York Times had apparently manufactured sympathy by withholding information.
Here, the editor’s note primarily seemed to be received as a correction—and a nefarious one at that. It was as though the omission of one child’s questionably relevant medical condition had invalidated the article’s description of “Hollow-eyed, skeletal children languish[ing] on hospital beds or [being] cared for by parents, who gaze helplessly at protruding ribs and shoulder blades, and emaciated limbs resembling brittle sticks.”
Several X users demanded a retraction or firings and parroted StopAntisemitism’s claims that The Times had strategically cropped out a healthier child from the offending photo.
It was a dark mirroring of the reaction on the other platform, reflecting the fullness of our coexisting realities. But which one would be absorbed into the broader narrative?
The loudest voice wins
The Times article arrived at a tipping point in U.S. attitudes about the Israel-Hamas war. As of July 29, according to Gallup, only 32% of Americans support Israel’s military action in Gaza—a new low since the company started polling the issue in November 2023.
The more the focus remains on famine and starving children, the more pressure there is on the U.S. government to address in a meaningful way a humanitarian crisis it has helped perpetuate.
By issuing an update to what may be the most significant article on the malnutrition epidemic, The Times has now given that 32% a cudgel against rising sympathy toward Gazans: the whiff of a “media hoax.”
Because X has magnitudes more users than its competitor, it’s still considered closer to the mainstream, with Bluesky cast as the scrappy woke fringe—MSNBC to X’s Fox News. And since the loudest voice tends to win these days, the actual Fox News is already echoing the X position that The Times deceived the world about what is happening in Gaza.
It’s a cynical way to treat a literal matter of life and death for so many—and unlike an article in the Paper of Record, there can be no mitigating update for dying from starvation.
