Hacker News Reader

>I don’t have a dog in the fight and have been a long time NYT subscriber but I concur with Nate on this one.

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.

That is well said. I added that first phrase in an effort to create space for my comment to exist apart from whatever my own politics and opinion might be. But you are correct. The failure of news institutions is bad for everyone. Pretending the scales are balanced when they aren't works against the goal of collective sense-making. It seems some number of organizations and people have lost the plot, concluding that "objectivity" means "inability or unwillingness to apply judgement".

moderates / reasonable people keeping quiet is the reason we got into this collective problem in the first place.

not to pressure OP, it's an understandable point of view. but it's time for reasonable people to speak up.

It's a little too late to be mourning the loss of the New York Times as a serious journalistic institution. They switched to fake news decades ago. We'll have to find another solution.

You do realize that the linked article is actually a daily newsletter, right? That's the explanation for the mixing of unrelated news stories.

Dated today but this story was debunked on X within a few hours of the event. NYT still pushing Hamas’ false narrative.

It’s true! The video of the misfiring rocket that’s now been published by all the big media outlets was doing the rounds on X within a few hours of the event.

A newsletter published today should not be “both sides”-ing the issue.

Everybody reading that NYT article is going to come away with the conclusion that PIJ fired the rocket.

The way it was written makes that conclusion far more persusasive than any article less "fair" to Hamas or the PIJ.

Seems remarkably similar to when they print a "debate" on taxes that consists of "We need to cut food stamps to balance the budget" on one side and "We need to raise taxes on the upper-middle class, actually" on the other. One of these has clear factual arguments behind it, but the other one is the interest of the company hosting the debate, so who's to say?

Im just a simple country boy but it seems to me that you can balance a budget by reducing spending or raising revenue.

Yes, but note both suggestions omit doing anything to ultra-wealthy and continue to drive the wedge between the lower and middle classes, each being told the other is why they can't have nice things.

The working poor don't have any money for the government to take. The middle and upper-middle classes have plenty of money for the government to take, but not enough to afford expensive accountants and business formations to shield their assets, or at least not enough assets to make that cheaper than just paying taxes. The wealthy have tons of money for the government to take, but can spend tens of thousands up to millions to shield it so they can't.

The natural progression of that is a cyclical squeezing of the middle classes via revenue extraction and of the working poor by cutting services.

> wealthy have tons of money for the government to take, but can spend tens of thousands up to millions to shield it so they can't

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.

On an individual level maybe but the top two quintiles have made more money year after year regardless: https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/household-income-...

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.

I actually chose "upper-middle class" rather than "ultra-wealthy" because if we take the ultra-wealthy to be the top 1% or 0.1% or smaller, there just aren't enough actual "ultra-wealthy" people to balance any significant budget by taxing them. Whereas the top 10% or 20% are numerous enough that you can collect serious revenue from them, consistently, and there are fewer ways to dodge that kind of tax.

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.

I try to limit my intake of news, and so most of the story I only hear from my Tangle subscription[0] which has had a pretty even take on it. I've been impressed with them, so far, but of course everyone has biases and you have to take everything with a grain of salt, etc, etc.

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/

> The video had the wrong timestamps

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.

Channel 4 and plenty of other people. Y'all are inside a propaganda bubble.

https://twitter.com/jacksonhinklle/status/171499970410093403...

"Two independent Arab journalists" isn't exactly a reputable source - It most likely means they found 2 random people on Twitter.

And initially I thought it was probably Israel, but the evidence is fairly overwhelming to support that it is a failed Jihad rocket.

The IDF released the recordings in the first place. Are you claiming that they're a reputable source?

No I don't.

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.

I came to the opposite conclusion. We can probably just agree to disagree on this.

That's fine, although I would be curious to hear what made you reach the opposite conclusion.

- The IDF often lies when the truth makes them look bad, as in the case of the murder of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh: first they claimed she was shot by Palestinians, then that she was caught in crossfire, until it finally emerged that she had been killed by an Israeli sniper

- 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

Thanks! Don't want to argue, but basically seems like you made up your mind without taking most of the actual evidence into consideration, although i can fully understand being skeptical of the IDF (although of course I'm even more skeptical of Hamas)

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...

Now cnn also published their investigation also pointing in the direction of a failed rocket:

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...

> By who?

"Hamas said so", that's who.

I'm gonna start using this phrase as an idiom, whenever a citation is missing.

If you were some shadowy organisation conducting psy-ops and you were gonna go to the effort of constructing a credible fake video for something like that, would you not bother to get the friggin' timestamp right?

If you are paid to do a job but don't agree with the script that would be something you would get away with.

Also see: BBC building 7 collapsed before it exploded.

I really hope that we learn that narratives will sooner or later turn against us if we sacrifice truth for narratives. NYT and WaPo and what not may enjoy their "progressive" narratives now, but the party will not go on forever. Truth matters.

The NYT article persuasively shows the evidence that the PIJ fired the rocket. That's not the far-left narrative.

The evidence is laid out, but the narrative alongside it is “gosh with dozens of pieces of evidence supporting one version of events and zero supporting the other, it’s a close call, we’ll never know what happened!”.

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.

The initial version of NYT article parroted Hamas' statement that "Israel Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital", and also used a stock photo that had nothing to do with the hospital.

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.

But not the version that the OP linked.

> 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.