Why are a bunch of journalists concerned with how fast they can send out a push notification?? is the world that creates that incentive healthy? What can we do to remove the incentive that led to people having this kind of a discussion on a slack channel while one dude is at a doctors appointment?
This seems like an utter failure of the editorial process in this case. Also the English language (and parentheticals) are hard!
And journalists fight over that - it’s going to be hard to countermand as long as we want “news” and not “olds”.
Anyway they definitely messed up big time with that rocket story but if the chats are to be believed it seems like an honest mistake. I agree with you that this isn't how things should be done but in practice there's always been pressure to break stories as fast as possible. It's just the way the industry works and I'd at least partly blame this on the readers as well. People should prioritize quality and truth over speed but that's not how it works. Social media needs its news and it needs it now. If you wait hours or even a day until the situation is clear, at that point the discussions have already moved on.
Turns out the author is an AP journalist, but works for CNN and has a long history of misrepresenting and omitting the facts about this topic.
I agree AP is on the down slope.
Fortunately many people have recently been inoculated with a very healthy distrust of corporate media, so most people I know were pretty sure this story was hogwash from the beginning.
I think this may be a case of attributing malice to incompetence.
Delete the internet, then return to newspapers published once a day. Short of that, it's hopeless. With continuous 24/7 publishing, journalists race to beat each other.
I think it's important to remember that NATO isn't an unthinking machine that executes mechanistically. Supposing Russia had been responsible for those missiles, I sincerely doubt that would have been the start of WW3. Nobody really wants that outcome, so the humans in the loop would bend over backwards to find a way to prevent that. This might mean pretending to not notice the missile strikes, or asserting they were accidents. I think both Russia and NATO would prefer Russia admitting to an accident and paying out some reparations to a full blown WW3.
WW3 happens if there's really no other choice, as perceived by NATO and/or Russian leadership.