She writes for the NYT Opinion section as a contributor. She works for Slate. She helped found Gawker and ran the New York Observer. Her bio reads like somebody who is expected to know a thing or two because her job is to explain things:

ELIZABETH SPIERS is a digital media strategist and entrepreneur who was the cofounder of Gawker and later, Breaking Media. She consults to media companies, digital startups, and progressive organizations. She is currently a contributing writer to the opinion section of The New York Times, a co-host of the Slate Money podcast with Felix Salmon and Emily Peck, which covers finance news of the week, a co-author of Slate’s Paydirt column, and she teaches a class on innovation in media in the Studio 20 program led by Jay Rosen in the Graduate School of Journalism at NYU.

She was formerly the editor in chief of The New York Observer and editorial director of Observer Media Group, where she oversaw the flagship newspaper and its digital analogs, and a variety of print and digital trade and lifestyle publications.

As a journalist, she has been a columnist at Fast Company and Fortune and contributed to a variety of publications, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Daily Beast, The New York Review of Books, New York Magazine, The New Republic, and GQ. She is the co-author of Slate’s Pay Dirt column about the ethics of money.

She is a Young Leaders Forum Fellow alumna of the National Committee on United States-China Relations. She previously taught for six years in SVA’s Design Research MFA program.

So imagine my surprise when she revealed that she didn’t know that Hamas runs the Gaza Health Ministry.

This gem was dropped in the middle of an argument on Twitter between Noah Blum and Ms “I am so brilliant and wise” Elizabeth Spiers. Blum is Chief Technology Officer of Tablet, an excellent news source focused mainly on Jewish issues. Tablet, however, is alternative media, where you are required to have knowledge before you opine; The New York Times is Mainstream Media, where you don’t.

Spiers, who TEACHES AT A JOURNALISM SCHOOL and writes for THE NEW YORK TIMES didn’t know that Hamas runs the Gaza Health Ministry.

Let that sink in. She literally did not know that. She thought it was a conspiracy theory.

I don't think it. I know it because it's a known fact and is how it is presented in major media outlets as well. Here from ABC, Ha'aretz, The Washington Post, and the LA Times. Do you believe it ISN'T Hamas? Based on what? pic.twitter.com/pEd7HlyEvf

— Noam Blum 🚡 (@neontaster) November 15, 2023

It doesn’t take a lot of research to know this. It is not only widely discussed, but it has been published in just about all the publications for which she does now or has worked. The Washington Post did an entire piece defending their use of the statistics despite it being run by Hamas.

If she bothered to read anything, she would know.

Unfortunately, she has the reading habits of the average teenage TikToker who is currently getting their mind blown by how brilliant Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” is.

Spiers apparently is a special kind of stupid, which I suppose is very on-brand for somebody who writes for the Opinion section of the NYT, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, and teaches at a J-school.

Lest you think I am joking about Spiers working for the New York Times, here is a link to her columns.

She doesn’t know that Hamas is the government of Gaza. And she is spewing out opinions about the Israel-Hamas war. As a “journalist.” The New York Times and Washington Post publish her frequently. Her regular gig is writing for Slate and doing a much-listened-to podcast on money.

It blows your mind.

I admit that I regularly show contempt for the MSM, but even I didn’t expect that a “journalist” would be so utterly ignorant as to not have the most basic facts in their head–5 weeks into a story!–before spewing their own opinion onto the internet.

Many journalists are venal, but relatively few are this stupid. I thought. At least I thought that. Maybe I overestimate them. They could be wrong so often and push ridiculous propaganda because they are so stupid that they never even bother to check into a thing before they hit “Publish.”

In order to do propaganda well enough to make it into the Times or the Post you would normally have to have an IQ north of 100, but I guess the standards have dropped. Much of my contempt for these people is driven by a belief that they have the tools to know how wrong they are, but perhaps I have been overestimating them.

Perhaps they are just stupid and have editors who manage to take their mangled prose and make it sound good.

You can rest assured that none of the publications that spread her mouth-breathing opinions–she is a huge opponent of Israel and spews her bile online–will take note of just how ignorant she is. Nor will she lose her J-school job. She is a Leftist, after all.

Because in journalism these days, having even a passing knowledge of the facts is less important than having the “right” opinions and parroting them.