On September 8, 2025, a tweet, soundtracked by Antonio Vivaldi’s “Spring,” went viral. In it, we’re shown a seemingly random collection of titles from Columbia University’s bookstore: Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks; a kids’ book about the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg; Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law; Robert A. Dahl’s How Democratic Is the American Constitution?; and, among others, the Quran. The caption reads, “Went to the Columbia University bookstore — these are some of the books students are reading this semester. A bookstore employee told me the Qur’an is required reading for all freshman [sic].” That tweet’s author is the Free Press’s Olivia Reingold, a staff writer who is among the masthead’s most prolific. If you don’t frequently visit the Free Press website, you may have come across Reingold in her influencer-style Instagram reels, often delivered in a tone mixed of scorn, trepidation, and rage. These clips are mostly in defense of Israel and the GOP and screeds against New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and critics of Israel.

After October 7, Israel’s massacre of Gaza, and ensuing record negative views of Israel among the US public, new influencer opportunities have emerged for those who seek to do hasbara. Literally translated from Hebrew as “explanation,” hasbara basically entails doing pro-Israel public relations in the public sphere, no matter how horrific Israel’s crimes and often with a less-than-complete regard for the full truth. In this respect, Reingold has joined the ranks of other stateside, right-of-center, pro-Israel influencers: Fox News frequents Debra Lea and Emily Austin, Upper East Side cringe mom Lizzy Savetsky, and PragerU personalities like Xavier DuRousseau and Shabbos Kestenbaum, to name a few. Reingold, however, calls herself a “truth teller” on her personal website, who believes that “there is nothing more valuable than integrity.”

Indeed, unlike these other purveyors of hasbara, Reingold claims to be a journalist and a reporter. Looking at her work, far from seeing “integrity,” it’s hard to tell where the hasbara ends and the reporting begins.