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Comment by jraby3 | Hacker News Reader

Just a reminder that Aljazeera is the state sponsored news of Qatar, a county that hosts Hamas leaders and is close allies with Iran.

It’s not a valid news source.

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I hadn't watched Al Jazeera before this conflict but now I think they're heroes. You see "reporters" on CNN wearing bullet proof vests by a pool in Tel Aviv while Al Jazeera journalists are reporting on air while they find out their entire family has been killed by Israel. It's incredible stuff and I've never seen anything like it. I've lost all respect for US and western media journalism.

Is there any news source in the world that isn't in some way connected to one of the parties of this war? It has to be a news source that has significant presence in the region so that they have some topical credibility, but also is not located in a country that does any business with either the Arab world or Israel. I'll wait.

There aren't any that would have access to Gaza. If you are reporting from the Palestinian side, much of your data/facts are going to come straight from Hamas spokespeople. If you report from the Israeli side, its going to be IDF spokespeople. The fog of war prevents anything but propaganda from coming out of this conflict.

Note that it is Israel which prohibits international press from accessing Gaza - they monitor the Rafah crossing and have prohibited any journalists from contacting Palestinians via any means available or releasing reporting without going through Israeli censors first. And that there are civilian journalists on the ground who are certainly not “all hamas”

Here is an article with a bit more detail on the subject:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/12/hugely-frustra...

It seems like Israel has closed some border crossings to journalists, and Egypt has done the same on their side.

63 of them have been killed:

https://cpj.org/2023/12/journalist-casualties-in-the-israel-...

Qatar is an authoritarian monarchy. Journalists based there can't just publish what they want.

The US is connected to the Middle East, but journalists there do have freedom.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/al-jazeera/

In this summary it shows Al Jazeera as left center bias in general, but with heavily biased reporting against Israel. For this specific topic it is clearly one of the most biased news sources that are still given credibility.

That would explain the factual inaccuracies that I've noticed in their reporting since the events of October.

I assumed it was because of a religious ideology, but a state sponsor makes sense too.

Can you provide examples where they've been debunked?

Where it crystalized for me was watching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ahli_Arab_Hospital_explosio... as it happened live.

The AJ coverage: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2023/10/16/israel-ha...

From reading the AJ coverage, you would believe that Israel bombed a hospital and killed hundreds. An inexcusable atrocity, obviously, if it were true.

But on Wikipedia, you can see the actual impact of the bombing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ahli_Arab_Hospital_explosio...

The US and Israel's story of it being a jihad rocket seems consistent with the explosion. The intelligence assessment that it was dozens not hundreds dead seems much more plausible to me.

The AJ perspective seems to be to treat Hamas claims as valid by default throughout this conflict, which I find concerning.

Al Jazeera was not unique in their short-term coverage - nearly all western outlets also wrote similar articles shortly afterward, based mainly on unsupported statements from Palestinians. As soon as day broke and people saw the actual photos of the impact area it was clearer that attributing the attack to either side would be challenging; several reputable outfits in the US even wrote short postmortems to understand why they did what they did and to prevent it in the future.

AJ still claims it was Israel.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/20/what-have-open-sou...

They at least have made a strong argument for their case [1]. I don't read this as taking Hamas claims as valid by default because they backed it up with reasoning from their sources. Are they correct? Hard to say for sure, but there's more evidence for it than just "Hamas said this so we believe it."

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/19/what-hit-ahli-hosp...

They continue to make very strong arguments and propagate their story into western media (Channel4 did a story about it and so did NYT).

They even have explainer videos, like the one you linked, or this one here from a month later: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60EK-3-kGLI

Their arguments are well produced and cast doubt on the Israeli/American story in every possible way.

But isn't that also what a sophisticated propaganda campaign would look like?

As I said, I watched it unfold live, and my assessment was that they couldn't possibly know there were 800 dead on such short notice. When the sun rose, I expected to see a leveled hospital, like so many other buildings in Gaza. Instead, I saw a tiny crater in a parking lot.

It was then that I learned the "Ministry of Health (Palestine)" is actually a government agency, effectively Hamas. That was the entity that supplied the numbers that drove the headlines that caused so many more problems.

You might think "Who would exaggerate the numbers of dead to cause international outrage!? That's unthinkable!". But they are literal terrorists. This is the playbook.

In the video you linked, they don't show the impact site. They don't mention that the hospital is still very much functioning. They don't show the surrounding buildings not having been impacted. But if you were making an honest assessment of "israeli airstrike on hospital" or "stray rocket hit hospital parking lot", those details make a huge amount of difference.

When it happened, I thought we would see retractions from AJ and other Arab media after the sun rose, but they were continuing to run the "Israel bombs hospital" story while omitting key video and photo details that were widely available on Wikiepdia.

On the other hand, most western news outlets are going "Israel said this so we believe it." despite the serial lies

Aljazeera posts high quality documentaries and news articles. It has been much better than US media at publishing news about the Israel Palestine situation. Even the BBC was quite poisoned by bias on this issue. Aljazeera has been the largest news outlet that actually published a Palestinian view also.

I think of Al Jazeera like I think of the NY Times: it's the unofficial mouthpiece of the establishment. I apply my prior understanding of those establishments to adjust what I read into what i believe is a more factual understanding of the underlying reality.

This is an association fallacy. Every media outlet has an agenda, journalism has standards and you either point out the flaws or quit untrustworthiness allegations.

Respectfully, I think this is poisoning the well. For one, do you think CNN and MSNBC being private organizations clears them from charges of state manipulation, let alone bias? Al Jazeera doesn't purport to hide its biases in this war, and has had way more insightful and urgent reporting on it than any of the western outlets have had -- not least because it's been reporting from the occupied territories*, and hasn't shied away from airing images displaying the extent of the carnage and destruction.

(* edit: even when their families are killed by Israeli bombs)

"Qatar argues that some its critics misunderstand why it hosts Hamas’s political leaders – which is not so much out of ideological sympathy but because the US has asked it to."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/21/why-is-qatar-o...

One of the only sources that has journalists on the ground is not valid?

You feel suspicious that the content may be misleading because of the bias from the newsroom?

Perhaps a news source with ties to Israel then?

Very much this.

What they write in English is completely different to their main audience and internal audience. There's enough information out there to back this up. Go and do some research with this in mind and formulate your own conclusions.

Well, in that case, we should also ignore all Israeli media, US media, and all western media, since they all those countries committed countless atrocious war crimes throughout history, and killed way more people than Hamas will ever kill even if they existed for another 200 years.

But no, you probably believe anything the IDF and Israeli media says.

I think the last good news outlet was BBC before NATO invasion in Iraq. Shortly after, it became a good propaganda machine and many other news outlets adapted their strategies.

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