Did the entire media industry misquote a Hamas spokesperson?
silentlunch.net
silentlunch.net
That's how it always worked. Major news outlets are there to pick and choose which news are important to report on, and how to report on them. They set the framing and then everyone copies and pastes the same thing.
It's great if they are ideological, because it changes public opinion on a topic, or ignores topics which shouldn't be talked about. It's good for profit too, as they're the first to get credit, views, clicks, etc.
Reporting the truth has no short term profit or benefit associated with it. However, over a longer period of time people start to notice that even major news outlets are just as full of bullshit as anyone else. It erodes credibility and trust.
What is suspicious is that they didn't reply when pressed to explain what the source was. Wonder, do they ever reply to those? In other words is it because they are embarrassed about this particular story that it was manipulated or that they never reply to those requests anyway. The author is a writer for the Atlantic and New Yorker. If I wrote an email to NYT or AP to ask for an explanation, pretty sure I won't get a response. Do they feel like answering someone like David Zweig is should be a higher priority?
He only reached out because no sources were listed in the articles in the first place. That, combined with the fact that the statement IS WRONG, is objective evidence that something in the process does not work.
Maybe what you say usually happens, but what you say is not relevant in this case because they all pulled a Wagatha Christie.
But for Al Jazeera English, "we misquoted an Arabic-speaking spokesman because we can't do Arabic-to-English translation in house" is not a plausible statement.
This article is a great demonstration. Al Jazeera seems to be the source that rephrased "victims" as "dead". They are typically a trustworthy information source. However, this is a very politically sensitive topic for Al Jazeera - the lesson would have been exercising more editorial review (or at least citing them as the source).
Individual incompetence or systemic failures are always more likely than "deep state actors"
I think there needs to be a journalistic standard put in place, and all news articles need to be held to that standard. Sort of like passing or failing a health inspection. It should at least include:
1. Citations to other media should be presented inline, like wikipeia, for every claim and every number.
2. Any media (photo, video, etc) should always be presented with metadata about date, place, location, and photographer.
Here’s an example of that sort of thing from the other side of the conflict. During the initial October 7 attacks, Hamas fighters captured a lot of video of what they were doing and some clips were posted to Twitter. Most of the clips were removed from Twitter for content moderation purposes, which is probably for the best because there are certain things I will never unsee. Israel managed to compile some of this footage and recently screened it for journalists. They’re not going to release the footage to the public, and while in principle I disagree with that, they have understandable reasons. Hamas was capturing and in some cases live streaming this footage to their own radicalized audiences with the purpose of radicalizing them even further, and making the footage public serves that goal. It also serves the purpose of literally spreading terror, just like beheading videos.
Now, sometimes these citations get very interesting. If you ever see the phrase, “according to sources within <x>”, these are anonymous sources. And you’re right, there’s absolutely no way to verify these anonymous sources. Supposedly, news sources will vet anonymous sources and agree to protect their identities, but to the cynical news reader, “according to sources within” doesn’t actually mean anything more than “just trust me bro”, and YMMV on whether or not you do, in fact, trust them, bro.
> I think there needs to be a journalistic standard put in place, and all news articles need to be held to that standard. Sort of like passing or failing a health inspection.
Any sort of government “health inspection” that could shut down a newspaper could easily be applied in an uneven and biased fashion, and would undermine the inherently adversarial relationship between a free press and the government. In some countries you could get away with it, and there would be no free press. In the United States we have the First Amendment.
Yes, the news media is backwards and untrustworthy, and they always have been. If you do a really good job at journalism, you get a prize named after a guy who published propaganda to incite the Spanish-American War. But the alternatives are even worse.
Agreed it probably shouldn't be governement based, there's too much of a potential conflict of interest. But since the standards can be externally validated (don't require going into the org like with health inspections), I think it can be an independent third party.
I wouldn't go so far as to say news organizations are inherently untrustworthy. I'm sure many are and there are a lot of competing motivations, but many are genuinely trying to provide good information. It's a difficult problem of balancing those motivations, and I think the new motivation of "the way we make money is by having articles that go viral so ads get more eye balls" has introduced a new dent into that balance. Having a set of standards and then "rating" news organizations should help give organisations a path to improve their services, as well as help readers evaluate how much they should trust a paper.
I agree with you! Unfortunately, original primary sources aren’t always available to the public even when they aren’t anonymous. It’s not just the fault of the journalists but of the organizations that the journalists cover. It’s much easier to have a PR team that deals with journalists than to post everything for public consumption. Among other things, journalists at least used to be really good about “on the record” versus “off the record”—there are infamous instances where Lyndon Johnson would literally whip out his penis in front of journalists and nobody ever reported on it. Which is not a great state of affairs in general but you can see why governments would rather communicate through journalists willing to put up with that sort of thing instead of massaging every piece of information into a formal public statement.
For Hamas it’s even harder. They probably can’t set up official social media accounts because they’re a designated terrorist organization, and if they hosted their own website, they still probably couldn’t use anything like AWS or Cloudflare, and they would struggle to stay online in the face of DDoS attacks which would go completely unpunished, just like Kiwifarms. It’s much easier to just talk to journalists instead.
So you’re not just asking the journalists to do more work here; you’re also asking everyone else to do half the journalist’s job. At which point they might as well cut out the middleman and just talk to the public directly, which is an increasingly popular strategy in the tech industry. In those cases it’s worth the extra work because you get to tell your side of the story, but people only resort to that strategy when the press burns them enough times. If the press is still willing to pretend your terrorist group is a legitimate health ministry or that you didn’t just whip out your penis in front of them because you lost your temper, why would you bother doing that extra work? Likewise, the press goes along with this stuff in exchange for access.
> But since the standards can be externally validated (don't require going into the org like with health inspections), I think it can be an independent third party.
Agreed.
> I wouldn't go so far as to say news organizations are inherently untrustworthy. I'm sure many are and there are a lot of competing motivations, but many are genuinely trying to provide good information.
It’s weird because I’m simultaneously trying to give you a devils advocate argument for why the press does what they do, but also I feel I’m more cynical about them than you are. For what it’s worth, I agree in principle. Journalists are not the spawn of Satan, they’re simply ordinary people responding to incentives.
> It's a difficult problem of balancing those motivations, and I think the new motivation of "the way we make money is by having articles that go viral so ads get more eye balls" has introduced a new dent into that balance.
Except that’s not actually the governing incentive these days. Social media and ad revenue aren’t the business model, paywalls and subscriptions are. The problem with subscription revenue is that it creates a sort of audience capture, where the NYT will only want to publish stuff that doesn’t upset their subscribers. Add in market segmentation by political leaning and you end up in the situation we have today.
> Having a set of standards and then "rating" news organizations should help give organisations a path to improve their services, as well as help readers evaluate how much they should trust a paper.
The problem with that is that setting up and evaluating these standards is a reputation-based business. If you buy electrical equipment that’s certified by UL, you know it’s good because you know and trust UL. Who does the public know and trust about the news? Historically this was the news media themselves, which is where the “just trust me bro” reporting practices came from in the first place.
The good news is that it’s increasingly possible to find primary sources for things, so if you apply enough research and critical thinking of your own, you can sort of self-service this function. As OP is doing here.
It's a good thing that computer systems never fail or we would look just as stupid.
Adjusted for population it's like 25000 Israelis being killed. This is just not ok.
Also: as just a casual consumer of this news, it seemed fishy at the time so why wasn't it fishy to grizzled news reporters?
The first reporting on the topic was the Al Jazeera English tweet, which used "killed". The second reporting of the topic was the Al Jazeera (Arabic) tweet which included the video and the Arabic word for victim/casualty.
We don't actually know what sources various reports actually used. I would not strongly fault a reporter who found both the AJ English and Arabic tweets and trusted the translation. This story hinges on the difference between "500 killed" and "500 casualties", which is a distinction that many native English speakers aren't good at picking up. I would absolutely believe that a reporter who passed the AJ Arabic tweet through a machine translator would assume the computer made a mistake by choosing "500 victims" when compared to an ostensibly expert-translation from a different media outlet.
As for the issue of news sites not citing their sources, I wonder why some form of copyright can't be used. I know some dictionaries add made up words to see if another dictionary copies them. I wonder if news sites could add some small false minor details to see who copies from them without citing them. Then they could sue for copyright infringement.
There is no time to cite sources or worry about accuracy.
It’s possible they were cribbing from Al-Jazeera, and we’ll circle back to that later, but it’s also possible that they have contacts inside of Hamas. News outlets are often willing to skirt ethical lines they aren’t for access. For instance, the Associated Press’s bureau office in Gaza shared an office building with Hamas and the journalists in that office observed Hamas firing rockets just outside the building and had armed Hamas men barge into their office multiple times, and reported none of this. The truth only came out after Israel bombed the building, AP publicly complained about it, and a former AP reporter blew the whistle. (https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/ho...). Stories like this aren’t uncommon, and a ton has been written about how bad actors can inflict biases on the news media simply by controlling access.
As for Al-Jazeera, they are Qatari state media. Qatar is cozy with Hamas and Iran, and shelters the senior leaders of Hamas in posh Qatari hotels rather than letting them suffer the indignity of living alongside their people. This makes their reporting heavily partial, but it also means that they are probably aligned with whatever message Hamas wants to send. Even if there was a translation issue between the claim of 500 casualties and 500 deaths, it serves their purposes to go with the bigger lie anyway.
At US request according to David Petraeus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_and_state-sponsored_terr...
I fail to understand how other unethical reporting means this article is wrong/bad/a distraction and hence should be flagged.
The article scrutinizes a specific case, and doesn't appear to be wrong, or purposely misleading.
I keep seeing this claim and I am genuinely interested as to why, and more importantly how, it could be the case? The media doesn’t seem to agree on anything.
> What not to submit: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
So an article about the actual state of the war is inappropriate for hacker news and would likely get removed.
This article is about journalistic standards in news reporting and citation management, using one recent article as a case study. It doesn't directly debate that number; it debates journalistic practices in news reporting.
I can understand why the focus on a seemingly small detail like this can be frustrating when there's so much more going on though. And I think you believe that this might influence people on the larger conflict. But I don't think that's cause for flagging according to the guidelines. And personally I think this article is more likely to have an impact on pushing for better journalistic standards (as evidenced by the majority of comments), which should be a win for everyone, but unfortunately that message is now suppressed since folks have flagged it.
Regardless, thank you for taking the time to respond; I imagine there's fear of folks dog piling on a person when they flag a post, so I appreciate you responding despite that!
There's a way to write the same comment without begging for this kind of meta-argument: just write a paragraph that doesn't talk about ranking and flagging but says what you found unexpectedly interesting or thoughtful about the article.
> We're discouraged by moderation here from arguing about why things are flagged.
Thanks for informing me, I wasn’t aware of that. I did know the part about emailing. Though, I wonder how this impacts in a fast-moving forum like HN where if a post fails to meet a critical threshold, it gets dropped.
(I am aware of the second chance queue but I don’t know if they too have similar weights of “needing upvotes steadily to survive”. I think the posted article was important for HN readers to see and hence asked in my first comment.)
So of course the journalists aren't talking to some random crazy guy.