It's easy to screw up on breaking news but you have to admit when you do
natesilver.net
natesilver.net
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/20/briefing/gaza-hospital.ht...
The headline is:
Gaza and the Trudeau Problem
It begins with an inexplicable few paragraphs about Canada and India before taking a sharp left back to the Gaza explosion. It then presents “both sides of the issue” straight-faced, in a manner that appears to be asking the reader to decide — but of course one side is “Hamas said so” and the other is significant visual evidence, like the fact that the hospital is still standing, and there is video of a rocket misfiring, and voice recordings of Islamic Jihad admitting it was their rocket.
The article then concludes on a note of “I guess we will never know what happened because we won’t ever see all of the evidence”. It is maddening and just very, very strange.
The natural progression of that is a cyclical squeezing of the middle classes via revenue extraction and of the working poor by cutting services.
I used to advocate for doubling all tax brackets. A friend ran the numbers: the result is volatility. The middle class has stable earnings in a way the wealthy do not. That doesn’t mean we can’t tax them more. But there is a trade off.
It's not like the top echelons of earners have a bad year and GDP plummets or anything; I'm not sure what "volatility" means in this context as far as tax revenues but I can't imagine it results in huge variability or uncertainty.
Which, looping around, is precisely why the ultra-wealthy want to prevent anyone getting the idea of taxing the upper-middle class: that's what they mostly disguise themselves as for tax purposes.
Anyway, I agree that "Hamas said so" is one side, and it's weak. And on the other side you have the still-standing hospital. You also have Biden's statement, which I'm sure is based on the latest evidence he has access to.
But I do want to point out, that two pieces of the evidence you mention: the misfiring rocket video and the voice recordings, if they're what I think you're referring to, were both released by the Israeli government and have been disputed as well. The video had the wrong timestamps, as pointed out by a NYTimes journalist, and the voice recordings were alleged to be faked, by a mainstream UK-based news agency.
It's quite a mess.
[0] https://www.readtangle.com/the-explosion-at-a-gaza-hospital/
There was live stream from Al-Jazeera showing the failed rocket at the correct timestamp.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/18/al-ahli-arab-h...
> and the voice recordings were alleged to be faked
By who? The article just leads to a tweet with no citations from any experts.
https://twitter.com/jacksonhinklle/status/171499970410093403...
And initially I thought it was probably Israel, but the evidence is fairly overwhelming to support that it is a failed Jihad rocket.
But instead of providing nameless fake experts to try and dispute the recording content they should just say it's impossible to verify so not acceptable as evidence in either direction.
Although I wouldn't mind interviews with actual experts, but saying "independent journalists" with no names or anything definitely turns on red flags.
But ignoring the recording I still find the evidence strong enough to assume this was in all likelihood a failed jihad rocket.
- The IDF often attacks hospitals
- The IDF warned people to evacuate the hospital repeatedly in the days leading up to the attack
- IDF affiliates initially claimed credit for the attack
- The IDF posted video “proving” it was a failed rocket launch, then removed the video without acknowledging it when people pointed out that the timestamps didn’t line up
- The IDF released an inculpatory recording of Hamas that has since been widely discredited
- To the extent that they are able to investigate, many independent organizations have not found evidence supporting the IDF’s claims
- The US is resisting calls to allow independent investigations
- The IDF has targeted other hospitals since the air strike
Here's another piece of evidence to consider (although you'll probably disqualify it since it's from the IDF), a video that shows just high the hamas/jihad rocket failure rate is:
https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/17d7wa6/flir...
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/10/21/middleeast/cnn-investigat...
and the canadian government came to the same conclusion:
https://www.thestar.com/politics/canada-has-high-degree-of-c...
"Hamas said so", that's who.
I'm gonna start using this phrase as an idiom, whenever a citation is missing.
Also see: BBC building 7 collapsed before it exploded.
A newsletter published today should not be “both sides”-ing the issue.
The way it was written makes that conclusion far more persusasive than any article less "fair" to Hamas or the PIJ.
This is so, so untrue, and it makes me sad to read this. Your dog is the one dying of self-inflicted wounds, and everyone would be better off if it would stop. Everyone benefits when reliable information sources exist, they report on a wide portfolio of events under that reliable letterhead, and we know where to find them. The decay of institutions that do these things is the decay of modern society itself.
not to pressure OP, it's an understandable point of view. but it's time for reasonable people to speak up.
That’s not to say that we should jump to conclusions but the initial assumption that Hamas’ claim was truthful is ridiculous. NYT would not publish any claim Trump makes with so little scrutiny.
It’s really a tragedy that both sides of the media spectrum have now been captured by politics.
If this is not narrative, I don't what is.
And I quote the word "progressive" because I don't think that's real progressive. Progressives care about truths, and don't jump to conclusions that fit their belief.
> If this is not narrative, I don't what is.
A mistake. Note that basically all the wire services made the same mistake. Reputable services corrected the mistake. Disreputable ones didn't. That's what the original article is about.
> And I quote the word "progressive"
And I changed the word to "far-left" for much the same reason. It's not terribly accurate either, but shrug.
Two parts of Nate's post really stuck out to me as reflective of my experience that day:
>When a newsroom misreports a breaking story, does that reveal its editorial biases? Again, the obvious answer is “yes”, but I’d qualify that by saying it reflects the thought processes of the particular people who were on hand to make decisions at that particular moment.
This was quite literally true, as people entered and left the room throughout the meeting, and certain people were conferenced in while others were on vacation.
> In this account, the Times frames itself as an innocent, passive actor, one that’s merely reporting on the existence of the lava — neglecting its role in trying to steer it. That’s complete bullshit, because the Times is extremely and often somewhat proudly self-conscious of this role. “We set the agenda for the country” is literally the prevailing attitude in the building.
It was interesting to see how obviously you could predict which way an editor would try to steer a story, based on the way they presented their socioeconomic affiliations through their attire and behavior. There was also a slightly ridiculous moment, at the end of the meeting, where I was presented with a printout of the headlines for the following morning's papers as if it was a top-secret document.
Anyway, I mostly get my news from twitter nowadays. At least there, I find it a bit easier to make sense of who is misleading me and why.
Reminds me of the "We are the media elite" speech in The Newsroom.
Pretty funny that this comment comes hours after New York Times lost their verification badge on X.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/10/19/x-twitt...
Though I should add that I find twitter to be most helpful when you follow individuals, rather than company accounts.
Is this normal? So when they were reporting on tobacco cancer and deciding if it went on the front page there would be like a silent Philip Morris employee in the room staring them down and sitting with the sales team? Or was there one-way glass or something?
My imperfect recollection is that guests were briefly introduced by their chaperone to the room so that editors could speak up if there was a potential conflict.
For all of their faults, there certainly was nothing resembling outright impropriety. Just structural challenges.
Large advertisers may not have full control over stories that affect them, but their ad spend definitely can have an influence. A negative but not all that newsworthy might get buried a bit, and a positive but not newsworthy might gain some prominence. A negative but big story would probably not influenced.
How does that make it easier to make sense of who is misleading you? Don't people on twitter have a source whose bias is unknown to you? It would be difficult to only read first person accounts of events by sources you discovered yourself. Not to mention knowing enough about those first person reporters to understand if they are misleading you or not. And if you're relying on other people (or an algorithm) to provide you sources, it feels like you'd just be adding another layer of people who can mislead you.
Easier doesn't mean perfect – there is no such thing as perfect here – but users on Twitter tend to tell a larger story about themselves, more so than the typical newsroom reporter, and from that you have more information to gauge their thought processes.
It's not that any one tweet is more accurate, it's that the collection of tweets that provide info and insight eventually steers us closer to the truth.
We don't need fact-checkers or disinformation checks. It's more useful to remove duplicate posts, low-quality posts (e.g. "Israel should bomb Gaza!!") to give us more signal to noise.
Original, conclusory title captured by a Reddit bot: "Russian Missile Strike Leaves Scene of Carnage at Market in Ukraine"
https://old.reddit.com/r/NYTauto/comments/16c4o2j/world_russ...
Updated correction: "Evidence Suggests Ukrainian Missile Caused Market Tragedy"
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/18/world/europe/ukraine-miss...
It is trying to get story out as soon as possible in order to get the most clicks and as such the most money.
When party A is causing a lot of explosions in general in land controlled by party B, and party B is broadly not trying to cause explosions in its own land, when an explosion happens in land controlled by party B you should have a strong prior that the most likely culprit is party A.
Journalists should be allowed to assume you will read more than the headline. Good journalists do the work to attribute claims to sources and they report that in their writing.
That's what Silver's complaining about in the OP: not that the NYT got it wrong, but how in particular they got it wrong, making claims of confidence and certainty that weren't supported by what they had.
> Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinian Officials Say
The problem isn't that they presented an unverified claim as fact - they told us that this was a claim by an official.
The problem is one of framing and headline crafting. All people took away from the headline was the "fact", because the headline did not adequately stress the providence of the information or the fact that the claim was unverified.
If you want people to come away with "X claims Y" rather than "X happened", you need to in some way stress the fact that it's an unverified claim.
I'd honestly chalk this up less to malice or journalistic malpractice in the hunt for clicks, but to simple bad writing. I'm amazed it got past the editors.
People who claim ‘they write the headline to get you to click’ are onto something. You’re meant to click on the headline and read the story.
A heck of a lot of news reports take this form, and all it takes to read them accurately is basic media literacy:
CLAIM, PARTY SAYS
Claim was made today by party.
More detail about claim, and how newspaper came to be aware of claim.
But counterclaim, according to other party.
Opinion on trustworthiness of parties, according to expert, with credentials.
The way that the NYT reported on this isn't technically incorrect or *obviously wrong ("Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinian Officials Say") - they basically said "Hoofbeats from horses, party A says". But it stresses the account rather than the source, despite it being fraught to take claims from either side at face value. All people took in was "Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital" despite that claim being far from confirmed.
Journalists can absolutely publish what officials with a vested interest say - but if you're going to frame it in a way that suggests that their claims are more than unverified chatter you'd better make sure that the preponderance of evidence supports that claim.
No.
If they hear hoof beats, but don't know the animals involved, I want them to write "I heard hoof beats".
If they manage to collect enough evidence to be confident of the animals involved, then I want them to say "The hoof beats were those of the lesser Siberian Elk" (or whatever it was).
If they are unable to collect enough evidence to be confident (and they should have a high bar for this), I want them to say "It appears difficult or impossible to identify the creatures that made the hoof beats".
These do not all need to be a part of the same report or appear on the same day.
The problem is that this is how a lot of people are thinking about things, and that every single event becomes attached to this framework and used to justify or further entrench events. And there are powerful actors who profit directly from this continued perspective. Hamas, obviously, but Netanyahu as well. Any attempt to produce an objective or neutral narrative is undermined by them, deliberately. It's not surprising that media gets caught up in this game.
My observation was that responsible news organizations in general attempted to report the tragedy first, and attribute cause as probably conjectures after. At least the ones (Guardian, mostly) I was looking at. I'm sure they faulted the IDF, but that wasn't the emphasis. I have screenshots of the initial event, and the IDF as cause is not mentioned. But the tragedy as they first saw it, was.
Reality is always more complex than two battling "teams" or "sides" and this mentality to reduce it this way betrays a barbaric emotional immaturity that is preventing the cessation of hostilities.
It doesn't matter to the dead people whose rocket it was. They're dead, and the conflict persists so more will die.
The story would look the same no matter who did it.
Do this. A lesson from air crash investigations: wait a week. Until then, discount everything.
> story would look the same no matter who did it
This is not true. Too many countries with disparate motivations had eyes on the area. We haven’t had time for intelligence to be scrubbed for public release. Again, give it a week. In the meantime, observe the meta story; who concludes what with high confidence.
I’m not sure what your second comment means exactly, can you elaborate?
One, the people who think before speaking will start talking. Two, intelligence will start being released.
The hardest part is that we are all that way, and we naturally love to see things that confirm our knowledge, biases, suspicions, etc; and hate to be challenged.
I mean, I agree with you. But from 10,000ft, it's going to be mostly the same voices, going one way or the other. Conflicting views will remain prominent. The information war is crazy.
U.S. (and other third party nations) intelligence services may or may not have legitimate knowledge and may or may not be truthful about it and that’s unlikely to change in a week.
What usually happens in these situations is a week later the stories are the same and we still don’t really know what happened.
But the prevailing view is that the Palestinian Islamic Jihad accidentally blew up a hospital -- not Hamas, not the IDF.
Week later, still don’t know anything.
I suppose if there’s an admission against interest I’d be more inclined to believe it, such as if Jordan says Hamas did it. But I don’t imagine they’d do that.
If the runup to our invasion of Iraq taught me anything, it’s that intelligence can be incorrect or misrepresented to the public for quite some time.
Unless you want to make money in prediction markets - then help out humanity by reading as much information as possible and moving the price so that people who don't have time to do that can have better information.
A week is a long time in a fast moving conflict, and the ambiguity favours the defenders if it slows down any attack.
An explosion at a hospital doesn't need a golden rule of 100% discount rate for 1 week. That's insane. Anyone telling you 100% of anything is incorrect because the world doesn't work like that.
Presumably people in your proposed situation have an idea on what's believable haha.
I think it's pretty clear where the smart money is on who is lying at every stage here lol.
He says wait a week. I actually used to wait a month - at the beginning of the month I would catch up on all the news. Compared to when I would follow things on a daily basis, I got more accuracy, and less haze. When you go through your RSS feed all at once for a month, you'll see how crazy often things are inaccurate in the first few days - something I didn't notice until I looked at it from on high.
The truth of some things may never get clear. Those are in the minority. For most events, it does by a large margin.
You may also enjoy browsing old microfiches.
Thankfully, I've rid myself of the "must follow news" curse. But yeah, looking at decades old newspapers it's fun to see the stuff there.
Your advice is really easy to give when you have no dog in the race, as a commenter said. I'm confident that once you have a problem with something and you felt you are not being heard, you're going to be caught with your pants down, rooting for the narrative that gives your grievance some space.
Let me share a story when I didn't wait. This is meant to be a stylized comment.
Months ago, a programmer got murdered in San Francisco, by what most people jumped to conclude was a homeless guy.
My best friend, personally, made national news by being murdered by a homeless person.
So in light of the facts shortly after the murder and my personal experience, I wrote the city supervisor and asked, what has to happen? Can you do something about "this?"
It turns out that this programmer was murdered by a person known to him. Why? The news suggests something about the victim's relationship with the perpetrator's sister, which people don't get murdered over all the time, instead of the far more idiosyncratic and too-many-coincidences fact that the victim developed a huge pump and dump cryptocurrency called MOB that affected a lot of powerful people, that funny enough I was also a victim of. That's another tale though.
I jumped to conclusions because I had a legitimate grievance. My government officials are much more responsive to social-media-viral outrage, perhaps rationally so because of its impact on voting, than something scientific, secular or wonky.
While I disagree with their primary grievance, I sympathize with social media users who read the hospital violence story and reacted to it aligned with their primary grievance.
We are replaying the circumstances behind Obama's comments here, which I found very striking: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/us/obama-says-movements-l...
> [Obama:] "The value of social movements and activism is to get you at the table, get you in the room..." When some activists at that meeting said they felt that their voices were not being heard, Mr. Obama replied, “You are sitting in the Oval Office, talking to the president of the United States.”
The people you're telling to "wait a week" haven't had their meeting with the president yet. It's the same energy as complaining about people blocking highways. My dude, they fucking get in the news, it works! So what do you want? How do people with legitimate grievances but are simply not numerous enough to matter politically in their communities, how do they get at the table exactly?
https://x.com/dimitrilascaris/status/1715137246431449451?s=2...
There are multiple videos showing a volley of rockets were launched from within Gaza (not from Bellingcat, but other OSINT groups -- Bellingcat not ready to make a final conclusion here). One of the rockets appeared to fail while it was rising - it swerved wildly and then went dark. Then the explosion happened very nearby. Of course, there's a chance the videos are fake in some way, but that's what we've seen so far.
edit: Al Jazeera believes that the rocket did not fail, but was destroyed by Iron Dome defenses, and still believes that the explosion is an Israeli airstrike. They haven't really provided any evidence of the latter, only the former. Personally I'm thinking it's possible that the explosion in the courtyard was still caused by this event even if AJ is correct that Iron Dome shot the missile down. No other major news source seems to be following up on the "iron dome" angle.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/19/what-hit-ahli-hosp...
Bellingcat has photos of the impact crater - it's small, much too small for Israeli airstrike weapons.
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2023/10/18/identifying-possi...
So what it sounds like is that there was an encampment of Palestinians who were taking refuge in the parking-lot/courtyard of this hospital, the rocket failed, and some or all of its explosives and fuel fell into this courtyard and killed a large number of people.
And yes, this is fundamentally the expected outcome of waging a war in an area the size of Montreal or Pittsburgh with even higher population density. Especially since the nearest major targets are north of Gaza, and Gaza's densest area is the northern-half of the strip.
These are weapons maintained and often built in the blockaded open-air prison of Gaza, they're not exactly Raytheon products -- a certain number of failures is to be expected and failures with offensive rockets are going to be incredibly dangerous to bystanders. I wouldn't be surprised if those rockets have killed more of their own people than Israelis.
I oppose the occupation and oppression of the Palestinians, but the facts are the facts.
edit2: My opinion is that this was almost certainly an accident. Either a Palistinian rocket failed, or possibly if AJ is telling the truth the Iron Dome accidentally caused the explosion (either directly or indirectly) when attempting to shoot down the rocket volley.
Do you have a link to their findings?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/18/al-ahli-arab-h...
Headline" "AP Visual Analysis: Rocket from Gaza appeared to go astray, likely caused deadly hospital explosion"
https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-war-hos...
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2023/10/18/identifying-possi...
Plus, if you've seen iron dome interception videos you know that you can visually see the interceptors flying up, which you don't see in this case.
So seems very unlikely to be an iron dome interception.
Well, the notable part, which the press has not really admitted goofing, is that the hospital didn't blow up.
Something explosive landed on the parking lot outside the hospital and burned a bunch of cars and civilians without leaving a crater!
How about the fact this very hospital is still standing with walls intact? Does that change anything in your view? How do we know its still there and we arent being fed lies? Hamas, the so called "other side" uploaded videos after the fact showing this undamaged hospital building and burned cars in parking lot around small crater consistent with other Hamas rocket strike sites.
Same story with two day old news headlines about "collapsed Church", its also still standing. https://nitter.net/Osinttechnical/status/1715367751135441031
One thing that I respect about the initial Israeli response was that they weren't quick to assign blame. In a press conference soon after the event, the military spokesperson said that they are aware something happened and are looking into it and will update when they know.
To me, that's a more honest approach than just assigning blame. There's fog of war, a lot of things happening simultaneously, and it takes time to gather information. I trust people more when they acknowledge that they don't know everything and sometimes make mistakes than when they immediately have all the answers.
> The story would look the same no matter who did it.
Maybe, but I think the US government would distance themselves from the story if it was an Israeli attack. Biden told a reporter that his conclusion that it was not Israeli is based on data from his Defense Department. Is he trustworthy? I guess this is subjective, to me he's more credible than Hamas but I'm biased.
That's not very respectable if you are guilty.
> Maybe, but I think the US government would distance themselves from the story if it was an Israeli attack.
Do you really think that anything can change US support to Israel? If you realize nothing would stop it, it makes more sense that the US doesn't care that it was Israel. They joined the lie.
“Hamas and Putin represent different threats, but they share this in common: they both want to completely annihilate a neighboring democracy — completely annihilate it,” Biden claimed.
How does Israel invading Gaza is the same as Ukraine getting invaded by Russia?
What’s this based on? Vibes? People are upset about this because it, in fact, does matter. Intentionally destroying a hospital is an atrocity; in the context of a war, it’s a war crime.
This kind of false, lofty even-handedness doesn’t really work when the matter in dispute is human rights violations.
It doesn't matter to me who hit the hospital because I don't believe it was intentional. That's not to say the deaths don't matter, they do, and we should mourn them. And that's not to say that blame for the overall war doesn't matter, it does, I don't mean to say that we can't know anything and I'm not offering some bland hope for a ceasefire and end of suffering for all sides.
I'm saying that I don't believe figuring out whose errant projectile is responsible for this particular tragedy materially changes how I feel about the war[0].
Can I prove that it wasn't intentional? No, I can't. But I consider it much more likely than the claim that it was intentional. The Israeli claim is that it was an Islamic Jihad mistake, they're not arguing it was intentional. I don't know if Hamas claims Israeli did it intentionally or by accident, but it is entirely against Israel's interest to hit it intentionally and I see no reason they'd kick the ball into their own goal so spectacularly. Mistakes happen. War is terrible. And yes, this war includes a lot of war crimes.
[0] If eventually we find actual evidence that this was an intentional strike by the Israeli military, I will retract my position and express shock and horror at my government. I already express my anger at my more extreme, fundamentalist countrymen for their actions and statements that I consider to be immoral. The fact that they're on my team does not spare them from my wrath, on the contrary, I get more angry at them for the damage they do than I do at the extremists on the other side.
I disagree with any assertions that it’s likely an accident, or that Israel would not want to bomb a hospital. Several high profile Israeli officials have stated over and over that they don’t consider Palestinians as human beings. Yoav Gallant has said “we are fighting human animals” and I’m not inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt that he really only meant that to apply to Hamas when in the same statement he talked about cutting off all good, water and electricity to Gaza. And now there’s news that St Porphyrius Church was struck by a “blast”. Am I to also believe this was an accident? Another case where a Hamas rocket somehow caused an order of magnitude more damage than has ever been been recorded when striking Israel?
0. "Human animals" bothers me - I disapprove of the extreme language I'm hearing in public discourse in Israel these days, after the events of Oct 7 there's been a shift in public discourse that normalizes this kind of language. I think it's wrong and harmful. I wish it would stop.
1. If you or anyone close to you is currently in Gaza (or the West Bank, or Israel, for that matter) - I truly hope they will be safe and come out the other end of this war ok, or as ok as is possible given the circumstances. From what I'm hearing on the news here in Israel, sounds like things are going to get worse before they get better. All I can do is hope that we see better days soon.
As you said, regular people can only speak for ourselves, I’d never expect you to answer on behalf of your entire country. I hope you and yours stay safe and we both get to see a just peace someday, hopefully soon.
Confounding factor: Hamas puts military bases in civilian areas so they can claim things like this even if the target was military.
The commenter you quoted was likely thinking something along the lines of "neither side has a strong motive to intentionally bomb Ahli Arab, so the most likely reason for the bombing is an accidental strike. Assuming that the accident isn't part of a trend of accidents, the unfortunate reality of war is that accidents happen on all sides. Thus, it doesn't really matter if it was an Israeli accident or a Hamas accident."
Should we investigate and determine if the strike really was an accident? Yes, of course. But we can also predict that the result of that investigation will be "it was an accident", and start to make preliminary conclusions predicated on that.
Its like “we didn't target the public utility full of civilians this time” okay. Apply this to any party in this conflict.
There is still no appeals process even during times of peace. Countries we respect have that feature because we don't actually trust them. But here we are supposed to take sides and everything at face value based on…… the most profound meme we saw on our timeline? most of us just don’t want to catch the ire of our employer in finance/entertainment/tech/education and I’m extremely relieved that its less suffocating to voice nuanced perceptions now than over the last two decades.
its validating that everyone was watching the whole time and just keeping mum so they could stay employable but were never comfortable with the consensus reality. people are trying to get others to have simplistic conclusions and its failing, I love that for the us. People are trying to say that any crack in agreement is advocacy for rounding up their entire ethnic group, what a leap of logic and nobody’s buying it!
but would any resolution of that massacre resolve anything? are people just going to retreat from the unrest at US embassies like “oh okay, actually you guys are alright”
noooope. this disaster just has people expressing what they already felt and doing what they already wanted to do. and there will be more massacres in this conflict.
In this case though, it's not about what to believe about the story. But, it's about how much caution or verification NYT should have done before publishing anything. They used the wrong image for the hospital, they changed the headline multiple times without telling anyone, they still haven't admitted they got the first draft wrong. You see an opinion piece from them talking about both sides as if anyone could have made those mistakes.
I personally think they should have exercised caution or atleast acknowledged how things change with flux. If you read something on twitter, you are likely to gravitate towards posts which share your opinion, you would rarely change your mind. With NYT and the credibility/influence they have, they have the power to change and shape opinions. That should carry somewhat extra caution. Probably better if they are late but can verify whatever they are publishing.
Nothing they said was factually incorrect, and the changing narrative could just be blamed on "changing news"; as if the objective truth of a matter is unknowable or worse, based on what you choose to believe at any given moment.
Mission accomplished.
First, live footage from Al Jazeera at the time showed rockets firing from a location in Gaza toward Israel. One rocket appeared to malfunction in mid-air and within a few seconds, an explosion happened on the ground approximately where the hospital is. The lean-too shape of the hospital roof can even be seen in the light from the explosion.
Second, daytime footage after the explosion showed that the hospital was still standing, with burned out cars in the parking lot. Several palm trees nearby were standing and unscathed (it was hard to tell if there were even scorch marks). The parking lot had a small crater maybe a meter in diameter with very little penetration into the ground. Israel's weapons have much stronger explosives, which would likely have completely destroyed the parking lot and wreaked havoc on adjacent buildings.
IMO, those two pieces of evidence strongly indicate to me that the Palestinians fired this rocket and it accidentally caused an explosion in the hospital parking lot.
One confusing aspect of the story to me is the death toll given in a matter of minutes after the explosion. It seems extremely improbable to me that anyone could confidently say 500 people died so quickly unless they were spreading propaganda.
EDIT: To be clear, I think the leaked call was authentic, but I don't think it's persuasive evidence because of its provenance. I fully think PIJ did this in support of Hamas, and then immediately blamed Israel to an enchanted Western press who can't see past an oppressor-oppressed narrative structure. But all of this is my opinion and not verifiable fact.
https://www.channel4.com/news/who-was-behind-the-gaza-hospit...
But what I have seen is: Israel bomb UNRWA schools; issue evacuation orders for a bunch of hospitals, including this one in question; provide a number of inconsistent explanations and equivocations in the hours and days since; bomb the southern half of Gaza after demanding everyone evacuate the north. So I’m going with the most obvious explanation that Israel bombed this hospital, and it’s allies in the West plus a bunch of stooges like “the OSINT community” are muddying the waters and desperately trying to do damage control.
[0]https://media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com/image/upload/t_fit-760w,f...
1. IDF warns hospital director to evacuate hospital.
2. Israel bombs hosptial in question causing major damage and injuring four doctors.
3. IDF calls hospital director asking why hospital still hasn’t been evacuated and demands imminent evacuation. Director says it’s impossible due to patient needing intensive care.
4. Hospital gets bombed. 400+ people die. Hamas-affiliated group did it.
They bombed this same hospital on October 14th, three days before the more fatal bombing occurred.
According to the WHO, they have documented 48 attacks on healthcare facilities in Gaza since October 7. Take that with a grain of salt, but I don't see how it's "not like Israel" to bomb hospitals.
In addition to the problems Nate mentions with this wording a reasonable person could think that these "health officials" are a disinterested party, rather than what they are, an appendage of the Hamas run government.
Most people looking at that headline will take away that a hospital exploded, and the clear implications from it. Reading the article won't really dissuade you from that.
I don't even really thing it's entirely malicious (which is part of the problem), it's the absolute desire to get the "scoop" in a world where everything is broadcast live on Xitter.
I find it funny (as long as you ignore that these events involve dead people) that Silver here is up in arms for an alleged misattribution when it happens otherwise every day and nobody is bothered.
A novel thought: maybe stop bombing civilians and the chance of you unjustly being accused of bombing civilians goes dramatically down.
When Israeli military officials say "this was certainly a Palistinian attack", the news media should be noting cases where they lied about that in the past (eg the death of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh).
Likewise when Gaza officials say the reverse, the same should happen.
I get that journalism will have bias, both personally and based on past actions because they're human and because of basic pattern recognition. But when discussing the facts of an event, it's important to separate what we know (an explosion happened at a hospital in Gaza) and what we're getting from dubious sources (that it was an Israeli airstrike or an Islamic Jihad rocket failure).
In the end, it looks very likely that it was, in fact, the Islamic Jihad rocket. But on day one? No journalistic source should be repeating assertions of blame from untrustworthy and extremely interested parties without the appropriate caveats.
Example:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/canadian-killed-a...
https://legionmagazine.com/one-martyr-down-the-untold-story-...
IDF fired on a UN post and killed neutral UN observers, including a Canadian citizen. They've never admitted it was deliberate... but they did it because of the specific neutrality interventions of that UN post... as a signal to STFU ... and everybody knows it. And because of alliances with Israel even the Canadian gov't wouldn't raise protest.
"The question of how and why it [UN base] was on their targeting list has never been legally resolved. The Israelis claim it was a data-entry error—put on their target list by mistake. But they have prevented any organization or government from verifying that claim; including both the UN and the Canadian government."
It's not like anybody is forcing you to think in terms where there's only Hamas or IDF to choose from. That's a mental framework you're choosing for yourself. It's not a football game.
Hamas, meanwhile, has been caught lying multiple times over the years with actual evidence of those lies. Objectively one of these is far more reliable than the others in their relationship to the truth.
JFC, you're in a mental prison. Hate.
1. Hamas is proudly on the record that they want their people to die as human shields.
2. Hamas is proudly on the record that they seek the genocide against the jews.
3. Isreal does not typically lie and say it wasn't their missile when they fire them.
4. Isreal's munitions are very effective and Hamas is using homemade rockets made from water pipes and are much more consistent with the type of damage caused in the hospital parking lot.
To your broader point, yes just ignore the problem and everything will go away. That has worked so well.
The folks calling for an unconditional surrender of Hamas are not wrong. That's the only way to end this bloodshed, that, yes, includes civilians on both sides. Only one side is doing it with the primary intent to kill civilians though.
So you believed a Church was bombed today when in fact it was a building next to it and Church is fine. What does that tell you about sources you use for news?
> maybe stop bombing civilians
There are missile barrages incoming from Gaza daily, civilians dont shoot rockets. Civilian buildings dont experience secondary explosions when collapsing.
> A Greek Orthodox church in the Gaza Strip which was sheltering hundreds of displaced Palestinians was hit overnight by an Israeli air strike, the Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem said, and Palestinian health officials said 16 people were killed.
> There was no word from the Church on a death toll.
> The Israeli military said a part of the church was damaged in a strike on a militant command centre and it was reviewing the incident.
I do not read anything with a name referencing osint, nor other astroturfers.
There are missiles coming into Gaza also daily. I think it should all stop. Do you agree?
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/orthodox-church-says-it-was-hi...
https://twitter.com/greekcitytimes/status/171550351226695719...
In no shape or form was it anywhere implied that the church no longer exists, just that it was bombed. The quote from a non-hamas source in a respectable news source confirms it was hit. That you're poorly attempting to make some kind of an argument that never was tells me you have no leg to stand on.
"Hey, someone burned down my car last night! Its standing over there, the one with minor smoke damage two cars over from the wreck of actually burned car."
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/israel-hamas-war-gaza-strip...
I guess you will need to go spread doubt in another case. Until then.
1. There was Israeli bombing near the Church. Nobody was ever disputing that.
2. Church wasnt hit by the bomb.
3. Church is still standing.
Whoever is now claiming Church was hit/bombed/destroyed is the one lying, with clear multi party corroborated photographic/video evidence. You might argue Israel has no right to bomb Gaza, international law says otherwise. Geneva Convention Article 28 https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gciv-1949/art... Treatment II. Danger zones
"The presence of a protected person may not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations."
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gciv-1949/art...
"Consequently, the presence of civilians must never be used to render immune from military operations objectives which are liable to be attacked."
"The Israeli military said that a blast Thursday night on the St. Porphyrius Greek Orthodox Church campus in Gaza City was the result of its airstrike."
And if you still are not sure, I'd go to a doctor to get it checked out. Take care.
"a destructive wave of highly compressed air spreading outward from an explosion."
What kind of post truth are we living in when you can calmly believe in a building being bombed when that building is still standing the next day and there is footage of a bomb striking two buildings away?
"News" media isnt helping by spreading lies like NBCs "collapse of Gaza’s oldest church" immediat repost from Hamas sources without any verification https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp-video/mmvo196026949728
“says Palestinian Officials”.
It is no better a disclaimer than the "Palestinian officials say" clause
That yelling fire in a theater is dangerous and that is quite literally what the NYT and NPR did.
The falsehoods they repeated caused immediate panic and rioting in many Muslim communities and countries, they’ve burned down synagogues and Israeli embassies over a false story.
I’m Jewish, and I’m exceedingly sensitive to the volatility of the situation. My relatives’ lives depend on it. I do not find NPR’s language particularly objectionable.
In this case one has to ask whether there would have been a NYT subscriber news alert had the first reports been that it was an errant Hamas rocket.
News organisations can't be expected to verify every claim. And so all they can do is report the claims of what should be trusted sources i.e. governments, NGOs etc. And to be fair every country spins the truth so it's not like this incident is without precedent.
So you get to choose. Either you have breaking news or you don't. But you can't ask for breaking news and have them verify each claim. It's just not possible.
I thought this was the defining characteristic, that set them apart from gossipmongers and fools.
Yes, I not only can expect that, I think I should.
But when you are asking a journalist to report on an event minutes to hours after it happened then obviously they will have limited time to validate a claim. Especially in a war-zone where their ability to operate is limited.
It's not really possible to be fast and thorough at the same time.
The ask was that retractions happen, and that journalists own up to being wrong.
There's evidence provided to show that NYT is very reluctant to backtrack.
I don't ask this. Some push that stuff hard, because it gets ratings, or whatever the equivalent is now that we're a few decades post-broadcast-tv.
Of course, it doesn't get ratings so much as it draws from a bank of integrity that journalism squirreled away through great effort and frustration for over a century, and once they've spent all that, there will be nothing left. Hell, the account's probably been overdrawn for awhile now. And it's as if no one even noticed.
Nate is complaining about the headlines in the Breaking News section not some article.
I choose "don't". I give everything the 48 hour rule. I won't even talk about events with other people if the events are less than 48 hours old. As far as I'm concerned, it's all just speculation that muddies the waters.
They 100% should've made it clear what was and wasn't verified.
There's a big difference between: "A hospital was detsroyed in an explosion, many dead" and "Israeli forces blew up a hospital, many dead".
You can have breaking news, you just need to convey the uncertainty.
If a literal terrorist organization tells you something happened, and you run with it with zero independent confirmation, you are not a news organization. You are a glorified mouth piece of, again, a literal terrorist organization that murdered over a thousand civilians in cold blood including children the week before. Just shrugging off this insane breakdown of the most basic tenants of journalism from The New York times is insane to me.
At least that used to be the standard. At this point they’re just like everyone else, after clicks no matter how much damage they do.
Their was a time not too long ago when they had some journalistic integrity.
This is a false dichotomy. You can have breaking news that covers the verifiable facts (an explosion happened in Gaza near a hospital) without uncritically reporting salacious claims by extremely biased parties.
Imagine if on 9/11 the press had within minutes come out and said, "Twin tower attacks ordered by Saddam Hussein kill 20,000, intelligence sources say." That didn't happen because the press at the time exercised some caution, yet they still covered the event.
That didn't happen because no intelligence sources said that.
The death toll is definitely estimated in the hundreds. Below is a Guardian link citing US officials vs Nate's link citing a... Twitter thread.
In any case, I think the answer here is, until there is conclusive evidence from an reputable, independent third party (not a "forensic expert" on Twitter, not Israel or the US which fully supports it, not Hamas)... wait and see... but focus on the broader conflict and patterns.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/20/al-ahli-arab-h...
The Times headline is accurate, but, because its a headline, misleading as it doesn't convey – as the text of the story itself did – the fact that nothing was verified yet, and things were in dispute.
But the story laid out that nuance. If you'd read the story, and not scrolled past it, you'd have walked away with a better sense of the context and doubt around the story. I had to correct several friends when they brought it up as a point of outrage.
Had the Times ran a headline without blaming a party, "Hospital blast in Gaza, hundreds dead", any person, reading it, and having a passing understanding of the context, probably would have thought, "Israel did that".
It's a no win situation.
But, Nate's right that the problem isn't the initial headline, but the follow-up.
For me there's only one meaning of that: NYT chose a side in this conflict, and that side is of Hamas, terrorist organization. Why NYT doing this - I have not a slightest idea, but judging by their actions I have no other explanation.
Normally, people have been wrong so many times in their life that they learn to admit it, learn, and move on. Only if you are highly insulated from objective reality can you maintain some idea that being "right" is one of your qualities.
Where is such insulation from reality happening? College is the most obvious answer. Rather than being a place to be challenged intellectually, it has become a place to learn the current politically-correct perspectives and have them reinforced constantly.
I have no idea why someone at the NYT was not more skeptical of an official from one of the parties involved in the conflict. But once the headline goes out, they are "right" and that will never change.
1. Israel had struck the hospital 3 days earlier [1];
2. Israel ordered an evacuation of these hospitals becamse of impending military action [2];
3. The only direct video evidence showed a large explosion that was inconsistent with a misfire or any explosive capability by any group in Gaza. This occurred at night. At day, it was shown that was no large crater consistent with a high-yield explosion (eg as delivered by JDAM) and the explosion occurred in a car park, not the hospital itself. There are now several theories but an Israeli airstrike hasn't been ruled out; and
4. Israel and the IDF lie all the time. In this war we've had videos posted by official Israeli and IDF channels only to be deleted. Same with statements. We saw the same thing with the assassination by Israeli snipers of Palestinian journalist and American citizen Shireen Abu-Akleh [3]. Israel initially attempted to blame this on stray fire from militants but these lies were quickly debunked.
Traditional media bends over backwards here. I mean look at headlines like "Reuters journalist killed in Lebanon in missile fire from direction of Israel" [4].
We saw this in the Hamas attack too with unsubstantiated stories about "beheaded babies" [5], a story that the President repeated, claiming to see evidence of this but then having to walk it back [6].
I don't know the answer to this but here's my question: does Nate Silver have this same level of skepticism for anything Israel or the IDF says? I hope so.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ahli_Arab_Hospital#Rocket_s...
[2]: https://www.who.int/news/item/14-10-2023-evacuation-orders-b...
[3]: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/5/22/lies-investigat...
[4]: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/reuters-videograph...
[5]: https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/12/middleeast/israel-hamas-behea...
[6]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/12/white-house-walks-...
State the known facts, then describe the information provided by extremely biased and known-dishonest interested parties, with the context of their personal biases.
But front-loading it with reverse-passive voice gives credulence to parties who did not deserve it. IDF officials are extremely dishonest, but Palestinian government ones are not better.
The NYT headline was "Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinian Officials Say." which puts the dubious source after the claims. That could've been phrased "Explosion Kills Hundreds in Gaza Hospital, Palestinian Officials blame Israeli Strike". Slightly longer but would put the facts separate from the claims.
Meanwhile, the Politico headline (which came out slightly later after the Israeli statement had been released):
"Blast kills hundreds at Gaza hospital; Hamas and Israel trade blame"
There was a story just last week about a man who lost multiple family members and was injured when they struck his house instead of their target a few hundred meters away.
The impact crater that was identified (it's clearly visible in the same HAMAS videos of the aftermath) is approx 1 meter wide and 30 cm deep - in the context of glide bombs that's "not a crater", as it's far too small for a GBU-39/B sized bomb.
While we definitely will need to wait to know the whole truth, there is already sufficient information to come to at least some conclusions (e.g. that Gaza health officials definitely lied about the casualties).
And the primary reason for "too much confusion" IMHO is people disseminating hypotheses that are already disproven by the evidence that we do already have, such as the GBU-39/B suggestion.
Yes, this is the problem, and you see it in many of the comments here. There is plenty of compelling technical evidence, but people come in with a cursory read of the topic and listen to some "expert" who says "oh it whistled like a bomb". And given how incredibly badly some people want to pin it on Israel, incredibly moronic* analyses keep getting shared.
* like the people claiming that Iron Dome intercepted a rocket 6 seconds after launch. It's a terminal intercepter! that literally can't happen!
1. Hamas is extremely willing to sacrifice their own people in pursuit of their goals.
2. Hamas was making homemade rockets out of water pipe. Far less reliable than Israeli munitions.
3. Isreal has demonstrated over and over that they will bend over backwards to minimize civilian casualties despite Hamas literally using them as human shields.
4. Israel is not shy about taking credit for bombings even if civilians were causualties when they have credible evidence of Hamas presence.
5. Hamas are documented liars in the region and even their Arab neighbors don't trust them.
Balance of evidence makes it far more credible that Hamas is trying to use their own failure to gin up support.
Do you have real and credible evidence to the contrary?
First, you'll notice I never actually said this.
>1. Hamas is extremely willing to sacrifice their own people in pursuit of their goals.
Not even Israel claims it was Hamas intentionally bombing the parking lot.
>2. Hamas was making homemade rockets out of water pipe. Far less reliable than Israeli munitions.
Sure, but not sure the relevance of this, yes, it could be an accidental misfire Hamas munition. It could also be a purposeful firing of Israeli munition.
>3. Isreal has demonstrated over and over that they will bend over backwards to minimize civilian casualties
I do not believe this is true.
>4. Israel is not shy about taking credit for bombings even if civilians were causualties when they have credible evidence of Hamas presence.
Israel is pretty shy about taking credit for things that get them in hot water in the foreign press. For example, when IDF soldiers deliberately targeted, shot, and then denied medical aid (killing) to American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, the Israeli government blamed her death on Palestinians for months.
>5. Hamas are documented liars in the region and even their Arab neighbors don't trust them.
As noted, Israel are also documented liars.
Anyways, I liked this reporting from the UK which does a pretty good job of laying out the uncertainty one way or the other: https://www.channel4.com/news/who-was-behind-the-gaza-hospit...
> I do not believe this is true.
You must be living in a bubble. Roof knocks, pamphlets, phone calls etc. They do everything they can to remove civilians before their strikes. Additionally, use your common sense, what is the benefit to the IDF of civilians dying vs the benefit to Hamas.
1. IDF warns hospital director to evacuate hospital.
2. Israel bombs hosptial in question causing major damage and injuring four doctors.
3. IDF calls hospital director asking why hospital still hasn’t been evacuated and demands imminent evacuation. Director says it’s impossible due to patient needing intensive care.
4. Hospital gets bombed. 400+ people die.
Israel says Hamas-affiliated group did it?
These same people claimed to have seen pictures of 40 beheaded babies last week and had to immediately walk that back. The IDF also claimed not to have assassinated journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, but months later admitted to it. This is a well know IDF playbook, they are not a credible source.
But I'm seeing a lot of vociferous blow-back on the Gaza hospital thing -- maybe rightfully so -- but so much less on the other "side." When concerns were brought up about the beheading things, and other claims of veracity it was treated as callous quibbling.
This is not whataboutism: The fundamental reality is it doesn't in the grand scheme of things matter who caused the casualties in the specific instance in the hospital. What matters is that a cessation of conflict is not being considered, and that civilians are being murdered by political actors as a result.
Any ethical grown-up in charge would be working to de-escalate.
Then what?
For instance, fear is a major driver of violence: attack "them" to reduce their ability to attack "us". A ceasefire is a good solution here, because it develops a mutual trust that you'll leave each other alone.
But if there are other reasons for attack, e.g. one party is unhappy with the status quo and sees something to be gained by violence, a ceasefire doesn't work. They will just wait for the next opportunity and strike again, regardless of how peaceful the situation is.
I'm not making a moral statement here, just a practical one. A ceasefire today would not magically make everyone content to leave each other alone.
Question: It is also a well-known Hamas playbook, they are also not a credible source, so why blindly take _either_ at face value? Why blindly take anything at face value without verifying facts?
"So-and-so says" isn't news, it's gossipmongering.
Aside, the doctors at the hospital said Israel bombed them, they are not Hamas.
How on earth would they know who bombed them?
Nonetheless I don't see how doctors at the hospital would know who bombed the hospital
The tally of multiple hundreds of civilians murdered is easily verifiable - for about 400 civilians, names have been published [1].
One reason for the considerable delay in victim identification has been the burnt and fragmentary state of recovered human remains. This has been reported by dozens of forensic workers, including Dr. Chen Kugel, head of Israel's Institute for Forensic Medicine. [2]
A piece by a social worker published a day ago at Haaretz casually mentions a meat truck filled with children's bodies at the triage site, in particular mentioning the remains of a fetus. [3]
[1] https://www.haaretz.co.il/news/2023-10-12/ty-article-magazin...
[2] https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/israel-at-war/1697531028-they...
[3] https://www.haaretz.co.il/opinions/2023-10-19/ty-article-opi...
[1] https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2023/10/20/wait-that...
The graph of decline in trust in the media over time is interesting. I'm not sure it's necessarily because the media is less trustworthy, although that's probably the case given increased partisanship about every subject nowadays. But like "yellow journalism" is a term from the 19th century; this isn't a new phenomenon. I think a better explanation for the decrease in trust in the media is an increase in information enabled by the internet. Sometimes this information is false and the media is reporting the truth, but people are more willing to believe what lines up with their narrative so seeing the media disagree with their belief decreases their trust in the media. Sometimes information from outside the media is true and the media is reporting falsehoods; this also damages people's trust in the media's credibility. This is a feedback loop then where instances of false reporting cause doubts on instances of thurthful reporting, and instances of truthful reporting that don't align with a group's biases are attacked as possibly false.
Back when there was only one real source of truth, the media, any alternative sources of information were so few in number that their combined efforts couldn't induce any doubt in the media's veracity. At that point the feedback loop couldn't get started, so it didn't matter if what the media reported turned out to be true or not. We romanticize that time period by assuming that journalists of the time were more trustworthy; that may or may not be true, but I have a hard time believing that human proclivities -like twisting the story to fit the journalist's biases or to hide stories that go against the narrative- have changed significantly for the worse since then. Journalists of the time probably did many of the same things as modern media is accused of doing, but without anyone else to point it out there was no decrease in trust.
The media has mostly responded by trying to insist that they're always trustworthy. This probably isn't the best move. It definitely increases partisanship as it moved people into one of two camps: believers of everything the media says or disbelievers of anything the media says. I don't know what a new agency that somehow emphasizes that it's not totally trustworthy or that its articles may be flawed looks like, but it'd probably get too much flak from both camps to survive currently. So I think that "fixing" the media involves a decrease in partisanship first.
(In my opinion the biggest thing we could do to decrease partisanship would be to revamp the political system to favor smaller parties that have to compromise and form a coalition to govern. The current US voting system, first past the post, mathematically favors two parties only (https://ncase.me/ballot/), so the first step would be to reform the voting system to something that allows third and fourth and fifth parties.)
If everyone (ie all new agencies) screw it up then it's a systemic problem. Just blaming the New York Times or whoever is myopic. You fundamentally need some different model of "slow journalism". Probably something more like Wiki where people need to site sources and things are updated and edited as they come together
It's hard enough to estimate the caliber and distance of a single pistol or rifle shot (with training you can get pretty good), let alone the difference between a smaller mortar and a larger JDAM.
Journalism always craves information, and interesting information from a well-known source will always succeed. Note that I said "interesting" and "well-known", not "verifiable" and "credible". I've been learning a bit about the Nixon era and it seems like this has always been a problem. Newspapers are trivially easy for dishonest VIPs and organizations to weaponize.
This credulousness is a problem. It helped usher Trump into the white house. By putting the lie first and the analysis second (or not at all) it signal-boosts the lie.
Once somebody is a proven liar, it's malpractice to quote them without necessary caveats first. Yes, headlines need to be short and punchy. Still malpractice.
What we knew was that there was an explosion at a Gaza hospital. Anything more detailed should have been couched with "this is who says what and all of these groups have a substantial motivation for and history of being dishonest about this stuff so don't take any of this as gospel until the facts are in". And yes, this applies to the Israeli sources as well - they, too, have been caught in many lies about actions they've taken against Palestinians. They were telling the truth this time, but they're still in the red on that subject.
Day 1 headline could've been "Explosion at Gaza hospital; Palestinian and Israeli officials accuse other side of causing it". And new article posts as it develops and more hard facts are known.
Edit: Note that this was exactly Politico's angle on this on day 1 of this story:
> Blast kills hundreds at Gaza hospital; Hamas and Israel trade blame
> KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip — A massive blast rocked a Gaza City hospital packed with wounded and other Palestinians seeking shelter Tuesday, killing hundreds of people, the Hamas-run Health Ministry said. Hamas blamed an Israeli airstrike, while the Israeli military said the hospital was hit by a rocket misfired by Palestinian militants.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/17/deadliest-israeli-a...
Anyhow this is not going to get easier. News media has been hollowed out, and the kind of resources it takes to fact-check are no longer there... but still, just approaching these stories with a proper order of operations of
"This is what we know. This is who we're talking to. This is how credible they are. This is what they say" in that order, including in headlines would do a lot for this.
I think Republicans and Independents (my kind of people) got it right. I am astounded that 58% of Democrats have, as the caption indicates, a "great deal/fair amount of trust and confidence in mass media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly".
Fully.
Accurately.
Fairly.
Are you kidding me? Either this chart is a joke, the Democrats they polled are morons or something else is wrong.
Nobody reports news fully. That's just a fact. It would be too time consuming and expensive.
Nobody reports news accurately. Again, very time consuming. In some cases you might have to wait weeks or more before all the data and evidence is available to be able to achieve a reasonable degree of accuracy.
It reminds me of a story. A black church was set ablaze one week before the 2016 presidential election. The words "Vote Trump" were painted on the side.
Now, being a thinking person, my first thought was: Only an absolute moron would think that doing this one week before the election would somehow benefit Trump. In other words, my mental "bullshit" alarm went up immediately. This, as it was reported, did not make sense at all.
The reporting, of course, was just as hot as the fire that burned down the church. It was an angry finger-pointing indignation fire-fest from nearly every angle. Politicians jumped on the stories and took to the streets to deliver equally furious speeches denouncing half the nation's voters for the racist thugs they obviously were. Etc.
Judge. Jury. Executioner.
Headlines, of course, delivered conclusions. They told you what you had to think:
https://www.salon.com/2016/11/02/vote-trump-spray-painted-on...
The FBI investigated.
The truth, as it turned out, was that no Trump voter was involved in this at all. Not even close. It was a disgruntled (black) church member.
https://apnews.com/article/52296e1ac72b4c699f5d2d1cad71461a
For these media organizations, "accurately" isn't in the dictionary. If it bleeds, it leads. Shock and awe. Whatever. They could not care less if what they reported was a complete lie.
Do you think they devoted the same effort and air time to let their audience know the truth? No! Of course not! It didn't fit the favored narrative at all.
Was this election interference or manipulation?
Of course it was! What's more powerful than a mindless racist thug Trump voter burning down a black church and adding a cherry on top in the form of "Vote Trump!" graffiti on the wall? It is hard to think of something more powerful than that one week before people are supposed to cast their votes. Nearly every media outlet pounded this news for days and delivered the conclusion into tens of millions of minds.
And they were lying. 100%. They lied for as long as they covered that story. And they could not care less.
Which brings me to "Fairly".
No, that does not exist at all. And to think that 58% of Democrats actually believe news is reported fairly is disturbing.
At least us independents are in the 30% range. That's probably healthy. Frankly, I am somewhere between that and the 11% quoted for Republicans. All news these days is politically-motivated propaganda. Has been for decades, but the race for clicks has made it worse. Much, much worse. Newsrooms have lost contact with the people of this nation. They live in a bubble where confirmation bias rules decision-making, and decisions are made along political party lines.
The end result: They are not news organizations, they are politically-focused creative lie dissemination organizations. They have political objectives. They pick a side and support that side. Reporting "fully, accurately and fairly" be damned.
I don't think the first amendment of the US Constitution was intended to protect a lying, manipulative, politically activist press. I have trouble believing that was the intent. It's almost like it need to be modified to only protect the delivery of verifiable truthful news. If you cannot verify what you are going to print, don't print it. Nobody needs fake news.
If you are in that 58%, you need to wake up to reality. You are being shown shadows on the wall within the cave you have been chained to. Take a walk. Go outside. See reality. It isn't easy. It takes work. And, yes, it's worth it. Otherwise, you might just end-up being led by the nose to have you think and believe what they want you to think and believe. Which is sad.
This excellent article, from 2017, really opened my eyes as to the root causes behind aspects of this issue:
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-bub...
Here's just one example off the top of my head. When the last Democratic primary began, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders held a meeting. The New York Times reported on it, and said that it was cordial[1]. A year later during the heat of the primary, Warren's poll numbers started dropping and Sanders' started rising, and her campaign suddenly claimed that Sanders' had said during the meeting that a woman couldn't be president. The New York Times was happy to report her claims[2], and didn't even mention that their reporting of the meeting when it happened showed no evidence of this.
There are plenty of other examples where the New York Times and other members of the media have either made an article about unverified accusations, or made fairly misleading reporting that would lead readers astray.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/13/us/politics/elizabeth-war... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/13/us/politics/bernie-sander...
The article does mention the earlier story and links to it in the paragraph:
> The existence of the meeting has been public since shortly after it happened in December 2018. The New York Times reported shortly after the meeting took place that Ms. Warren had sought it “as a courtesy,” and that neither party had tried to gain the other’s support or discourage the other from running. But the two senators were the only people in the room, and all reports of what was said had been secondhand.
Later edit: It might have helped if the author or the article had included his ethnicity at the start of the article, that way the stupid Gaza comparison and the futile attempts to white-wash the IDF would have made more sense.
Since the IDF is known for hospital bombings everyone on all sides (including Israel) just assumed that they did it.
The fact that it wasn't the IDF is quite a surprise for all parties involved.