When We Started to Lie.

Exactly ten years ago, during an Israel-Hamas war that seemed major at the time but seems minor now, I published two essays describing my time reporting on Israel for the Associated Press. “Is there anything left to say about Israel and Gaza? Newspapers this summer have been full of little else,” I wrote at the time. “Television viewers see heaps of rubble and plumes of smoke in their sleep.” It wasn’t the volume of coverage that unsettled me in the summer of 2014. I was writing about something that had gone unreported, and which has done much to shape reality in the decade since—a change not in the news but in the newsroom.

The essays—the first for Tablet, and the second for The Atlantic — described my experience as a reporter watching from the inside as a major news organization lost its way in one of the world’s most heavily covered stories. To this day, nothing I’ve ever written has been quoted back at me more often. The essays go back into circulation every time there’s an explosion of violence here, and it happened again after the Hamas attack of October 7.