David Frum, a senior editor at The Atlantic, ghostwrote a speech for the Israeli U.N. ambassador in 2014—at the same time as he profiled the ambassador for the magazine.
Frum’s galling, undisclosed conflict of interest was exposed via the ambassador’s hacked emails, first reported by Ryan Grim and Murtaza Hussain for Drop Site.
In 2014, Israel was in the midst of waging war in Gaza, ultimately killing over 2,200 Palestinians and wounding over 11,000. It was Israel’s most devastating campaign against the Palestinians since the 1967 war, according to UNRWA. As the country faced criticism for its conduct, allies like Frum reached out to Israeli government officials to offer their support in spinning the narrative, according to Drop Site.
In Frum’s case, he could offer more to the Israeli cause than just money or positive news coverage: Before coming to The Atlantic, he had been a speechwriter for George W. Bush.
Frum contacted Ambassador Ron Prosor on July 31, 2014, during the height of the war, in an email titled, “an earlier draft of that speech I sent you.” The speech, seemingly meant to be delivered to the U.N. Security Council, described the war as “the most tenacious challenge to the free world in decades,” and asked Americans to continue to support Israel.
Only one day before, Frum had contacted Prosor from a different email address, with a different request: to interview him for The Atlantic. The ensuing profile praised Prosor for his “toughness” and painted a sympathetic portrait of Israel as unfairly maligned on the global stage. “In many ways, and on many days, it feels as if the whole UN system is concerned with the monitoring and critiquing of one small member nation,” Frum wrote.
It’s not known whether Prosor delivered Frum’s speech at the U.N. (Frum was competing with British journalist Douglass Murray for the honor, the leak also reveals). But to secretly draft a speech for a foreign government official, all the while rapturously profiling him from a place of presumed journalistic objectivity, is an egregious ethical breach.
Frum is still at The Atlantic, where he recently published a piece arguing against recognizing Palestine as a state.
Always interesting to get an insight like this, how the machinery works. This Frum person is greedy and disgusting and arguably just as bad as those perpetrating the genocide.
Thanks for the reveal.
Of course he did.
I hope they fire him but neither Frum nor the Atlantic are isolated cases or outliers, unfortunately.
Moreso than any actual scandal about Frum himself, the most interesting thing to me is the implication behind this information.
It’s not just that he was a journalist who wrote a speech for and therefore maybe had questionable ethics for also writing such a glowing interview.
The ambassador could have hired or requested just about any talented speechwriter to ghost write his speech.
But during the height of the worst conflict between Israel and Palestine in decades, the ambassador used a speechwriter who had previously written speeches for an administration that also relied heavily on narrative spin and hyper patriotism to drag Americans into one of the most unethical, pointless, and drawn out conflicts in our history.
We can’t really know if a single speech with a familiar narrative spin helped sway U.S. support in the conflict or had any impact on the Israeli support back in the ambassador’s home. However, combined with an extra glowing and reality distorting interview, you start to see how the small pieces of narrative spin could really come together to build large scale public manipulation. Especially because you’re right. He is just one of many who did something like this.
I really like the Atlantic, and it’s disappointing to learn that this happened. It’s also a good reminder that you should always maintain some level of skepticism with any journalism exactly because this kind of thing happens so often.
It’s not necessarily that this means the Atlantic in now an untrustworthy news source, but like everything else, it’s only as good as the people controlling it. There’s a reason you shouldn’t put anything on a pedestal. It’s also a good reminder that normalizing this kind of thing as just something that happens everywhere from time to time, is a really slippery slope.
If we hadn’t normalized it so often in the past, would we be seeing so many previously trusted publications so obviously caving to pressure from the Trump administration, and normalizing manipulative authoritarian narrative spins in 2025?
…how the machinery works