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.
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.
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.
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.
They 100% should've made it clear what was and wasn't verified.
Nate is complaining about the headlines in the Breaking News section not some article.
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.
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.
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.