NYT Photographer Gets Pulitzer for Hoax Photo

This is the perfect metaphor for the state of prestige journalism today. 

The NYT and the photographer Saher Alghorra were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for a photograph purporting to show a Gazan child who was starving to death due to Israeli sanctions. 

The photograph did not show that. Instead, it showed a child in Gaza who was suffering from a genetic disease. The NYT had to retract the story and admit the photos they printed did not show what they purported to. 

You literally cannot make this up

The photojournalist of this front page NYT piece Saher Alghorra just won a Pulitzer Prize

NYT had to issue a retraction because the entire story was fake

So you can win a pulitzer now after fabricating an entire hoax story 🤡

Unreal pic.twitter.com/BgWufhZIBo

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) May 7, 2026

You literally cannot make this up

The photojournalist of this front page NYT piece Saher Alghorra just won a Pulitzer Prize

NYT had to issue a retraction because the entire story was fake

So you can win a pulitzer now after fabricating an entire hoax story 🤡

Unreal

The Times, which still proudly retains its Pulitzer for the false reporting by Walter Duranty that covered up the Holodomor, in which millions of Ukrainians were starved to death by Stalin, is defending their photographer and insisting that they had taken many photographs of starving children. It's just that they chose to publish hoax photos for some reason. 

The New York Times is scrambling to defend the integrity of its Gaza-based photographer, Saher Alghorra, who won a Pulitzer Prize on Monday for work that included a photo of a “starving” Gazan child and another of Hamas terrorists carrying the remains of an Israeli hostage.

The… pic.twitter.com/afZ8cIn8Hr

— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) May 6, 2026

The New York Times is scrambling to defend the integrity of its Gaza-based photographer, Saher Alghorra, who won a Pulitzer Prize on Monday for work that included a photo of a “starving” Gazan child and another of Hamas terrorists carrying the remains of an Israeli hostage. 

The watchdog group Honest Reporting said Alghorra’s Pulitzer is “a prize built on staged scenes, a manufactured ‘famine’ narrative, and intimate access to Hamas terrorists.” 

The Times pushed back on X, saying Alghorra “has documented hundreds of starving and malnourished children in Gaza, conducting intrepid photojournalism at personal risk” and describing the “attack on his work” as “baseless.” 

As I wrote at the time that this controversy first erupted, the editors at the Times actually KNEW that they were publishing hoax photos that didn't show what they purported to, and that there were internal objections to publishing them. 

full post: the sky isn't falling, the narrative is https://t.co/z7OzP4PB8b

— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) August 4, 2025

Semaphore reported on the internal controversy. 

According to Semafor, the Times‘ managing editor Marc Lacey asked why they would use a misleading picture “when there is presumably no shortage of images of children who were not malnourished before the war and currently are?” Executive editor Joe Kahn, per internal communications seen by Semafor, put it simply: “The story isn’t framed around people with special needs and the lead art really should not do that, either.”

Yet, now that they have won the Pulitzer for what is, in fact, a remarkable if deceptive photo, the Times is quite happy to defend the process they used. 

This whole affair is a microcosm of prestige media thinking. From the start, everybody knew that they were manipulating reality to create a narrative that they wanted pushed, and they decided to do it anyway. The Pulitzer committee, in deciding to award this photo, knew all about the controversy and chose this particular photo because it is such a great piece of propaganda. 

At no point did the standard of "Is this an accurate depiction of the truth?" come into play. It was briefly brought up, and summarily dismissed as irrelevant. 

That is the state of journalism today, in a nutshell. 

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