This information turned out (a) to be completely incorrect and (b) has far reaching real consequences both in local politics and with respect to actual harm and violence directed at people.
The sources are incredibly quiet now and are saying literally nothing about this having corrected articles and erased the history.
Their irresponsible reporting caused actual harm to people.
When I contrast mainstream media to alternative media, the main difference I see is that alt media is a lot less careful with signaling confidence levels and eventual correctness. No "said X" in the title, no retractions, no requests for comment from affected parties. No journalism. The fact that you can find alt media which is biased in a way that you personally find desirable is not an indication of quality.
Can you imagine applying this standard to other professions ?
Say you doctor says "The Lab technician read your report and says you have cancer" or a scientist says "Our experiments say that global warming is real". You still hold them accountable for their claims, because THEY are the professionals. The whole point of being an authoritative source is that you don't report things until you have it on good authority. If you can't be held accountable to your claims, then that's the failure of your profession. Your role as the intermediary, is to vet the sources. If I have to do it, you have failed.
Is your claim is that : "All media is inherently untrustworthy, but some media is worse than other media"? Because that sounds like a vote in favor of rejecting the premise of authoritative sources.
I have looked at every front page of NYT over the last 48 hours. It started with outright accusing Israel strongly, and then steady reduced the degree of accusation indicated in headline over the next 48 hours. The photos and front page still hints towards Israel being the cause of the blast without saying it. The facts on the ground now strongly indicate a misfire from Gaza, that the hospital wasn't directly hit and expects the death toll to be closer to 10-100, rather than the 500 that has been parroted as truth. Have NYT/BBC/AJ reflected any of these changes in their front page headlines ? NO.
This is just from the last 48 hours and I was fortunate enough to have accumulated trustworthy 'alt sources' to identify the discrepancies on this issue. Add Gellman Amnesia into the mix, and I wonder how many 'authoritative' lies I've gobbled up from despite a decent degree of scrutiny on my part.
Sometimes you never have it on good authority for years, meanwhile the 'thing' is being spread by other sources, so they have report that in the least. Sometimes 'Israel/Hamas spokesperson claims X' is a newsworthy story by itself.
> This is just from the last 48 hours of a issue that I was fortunate enough to have accumulated trustworthy 'alt sources' to identify the discrepancies.
And what are those sources? Have you looked at their record? Do they provide retractions? Do they cover the "other side's" point of views? Would you call them authoritative?
Then why are you publishing?
In this case, most of the reliable sources are operational intelligence pages, and people who have done on-the-ground reporting near the Gaza border before.
The minute the news broke out, their reactions were that of confusion. Israeli rockets don't have large fire balls. All major Israeli strikes come with roof-knocking, this one didn't. The Hamas HQ hospital was the other one, so if they were going to lead with genocide, they'd have chosen the other hospital. They asked their audiences to wait and see because the stories weren't lining up.
I have a pretty strong set of alt-sources I trust on specific topics who get things right on issues in their field with a high degree of accuracy. Many of these are PhDs and professionals in the field. They are alt-sources in so far as they don't work for media houses. But, they are certified experts in their area of choice.
Just write that crap like a research paper and I’d be totally cool with that.
I very much doubt their journalistic integrity when they publish Gaza Ministry of Health (Hamas) talking points without question.
We now know the hospital was not bombed ([1] it hit the parking lot), there is no way there were 500 casualties as was so breathlessly reported by those agencies "that takes accuracy seriously." The consensus also seems to be it was a Palestinian misfire that hit the parking lot, not an Israeli missile as was reported, at the time, as a fact.
[1] https://www.nowtheendbegins.com/al-ahli-baptist-hospital-in-...
If I recall those headlines correctly, they all included with "said Palestinian officials" or similar, which makes the reporting factual no matter who actually bombed the hospital. They were reporting on official statements, not making claims about what happened.
Similar things happen all the time. "State department officials say X" and similar isn't AP or Reuters making claims about X being true or not, they're just reporting statements.
People around the world trust them, like OP over here. They have a responsibility to do even basic verification work before posting something that they know will ignite riots around the world. The IDF seems very open about the strikes they make, were they reached out to for comment? Should the reporter have thought to themselves, "hey, does it make sense that Israel would bomb a hospital packed with civilians right as the US president is about to visit? Would Israel so blatantly destroy the relatively high global goodwill and backing they currently have? What do they have to gain?" It makes no sense if you think about it for half a second, yet these "reputable news sources" sent push notifications to millions of people to spew a complete lie form Hamas when THEY HAD NO KNOWLEDGE OF THE ACTUAL EVENT SINCE IT NEVER ACTUALLY HAPPENED.
Yes. The very first articles say the IDF hadn't yet commented. Later articles included their comments. "Later," in this case, means "one hour later".
>hey, does it make sense that Israel would bomb a hospital packed with civilians right as the US president is about to visit? Would Israel so blatantly destroy the relatively high global goodwill and backing they currently have? What do they have to gain?
Israeli bombardment has hit hospitals before.
Israeli damaged hospitals in 2021, perhaps unintentionally.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/17/israeli-strike...
This is a stub of an article and the origin of the claims isn't clear to me, but it seems Israeli artillery hit the very same hospital we're discussing on the 14th.
https://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/news/news-and-stateme...
In the 2014 war Israel admitted to deliberately attacking a hospital, claiming that it contained a weapons cache.
https://www.cnn.com/2014/07/21/world/meast/gaza-hospital-att...
It is not, on its face, implausible that Israel would attack a hospital. It is also quite plausible that they would hit a hospital by mistake. They have done both of these things before.
>THEY HAD NO KNOWLEDGE OF THE ACTUAL EVENT SINCE IT NEVER ACTUALLY HAPPENED.
The event happened. There was an explosion at a hospital that killed hundreds of people. This is not in dispute.
There is no evidence that hundreds of people were killed. The EU believes the death toll to be between 10-50.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/19/world/middleeast/gaza-hos...
I can't find the EU number, but I'll take your word for it.
It's entirely possible the death toll is lower. I don't claim that we know anything for certain.
Looking at the crater left behind by the missile and the damage radius I find it very hard to believe that hundreds of people died.
Yes, I'm sure they verified exactly what Palestinian officials said. What they didn't verify (and what the articles were not about) is if the "facts" the Palestinian officials gave them were correct or not. The articles are not investigative articles that strive to report only the truth and facts, but more informal articles that gives you what various people had said.
In the text it was less clear, but the damage was done. I lost all respect for Reuters because of this.
I know, because I was arguing on Reddit(person has since deleted their comments, because they were spreading FAKE NEWS) while it was happening.
This is the earliest version of that story I could find from Reuters.
https://web.archive.org/web/20231017192141/https://www.reute...
But you could definitely argue that that article repeats the claims from Gaza too uncritically, which is why it was updated within seven minutes of publication to make it clearer the reports were unsubstantiated.
https://web.archive.org/web/20231017195440/https://www.reute...
But that still gives a one-sided story. They say that the Israeli government has yet to comment. Which is why the story was updated again to include information from the Israeli military, arriving at this version within an hour:
https://web.archive.org/web/20231017202059/https://www.reute...
The fog of war isn't just in video games. As usual, the New York Times has a good article on this subject.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/18/business/media/hospital-b...
You might argue (and I would argue) that it is irresponsible to publish any story at all when things are so uncertain. That's why I don't read breaking news.
P.S. There were "around 500" deaths. 200-300 is "around 500" when picking through rubble in a war zone.
- Reuters leads by saying the reports come from "health officials", "Gaza health authorities", and "Palestinian health authorities", as if these are reliable third party agencies. These are all Hamas, an internationally recognized terrorist organization that last week went on a killing spree murdering and brutalizing over a thousand civilians including the elderly and children. Reporting what they say without any actual verification is heinous and absolutely destroys their credibility.
> As usual, the New York Times has a good article on this subject
The New York times was one of the most egregious actors regarding what happened. They had a front page story about the hospital showing a completely different bombed building from the other side of Gaza as if that was the hospital that was destroyed [1]. I genuinely don't understand how people are not being fired over this.
> There were "around 500" deaths. 200-300 is "around 500" when picking through rubble in a war zone.
That's just it. There was no rubble. There was no 200-300 hundred deaths. Look at the photo. It was a parking lot that was set on fire with rocket fuel. The building was practically undamaged. People still act like the death toll numbers coming from Gaza are accurate when they are clearly not.
[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F8uNSAbXoAABhR0?format=jpg&name=...
Hamas is the government of the Gaza strip. Anyone following the story should know that. Unfortunately, they're the most reliable source we have for much of this information.
I will admit that it could be made clearer. There are readers who are starting from a place of ignorance. A story should be written such that a 12 year old child could understand it. Also, there are two Palestinian governments and it's not always clear which is being referred to.
But the problem here is, I think, simply that writing is hard.
>They had a front page story about the hospital showing a completely different bombed building from the other side of Gaza as if that was the hospital that was destroyed [1].
The way you are framing this is inaccurate. The same picture had been on the front page for hours before the story of the explosion was published. It was not a part of that story. Here's a capture from hours before the story broke:
https://web.archive.org/web/20231017154440/https://www.nytim...
The caption for the picture also states that it is of a different city entirely.
I won't dispute that the design could be confusing. Also, I don't think such a picture belongs in a newspaper at all. It's useless and voyeuristic, serving more to shock than to inform. But this is clearly not a problem of dishonesty.
Besides, why would they lie? The actual pictures of the aftermath don't look any prettier.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/18/world/middleeast/gaza-hos...
I did not know this, wow. I appreciate you pointing this out to me since i took the front page image at face value. Having said that, that perhaps slightly lessens the blame, as they should understand how it looks and should have updated the image accordingly.
I guess we agree that the story should have been covered better, as a trusted source of news should be take extra precautions before posting news stories like this.
My main take away from this entire situation is that i was better (and more accurately) informed by scrolling through twitter than a NY times or Reuters reader would have been. That's not a good thing and shows that their is something deeply wrong with our MSM.
They didn't issue a correction, but they did edit the photo caption to reflect reality.
I would definitely prefer the AP over many other sources.
So TV again.
The Russiagate hoax (ie, "Trump is a Russian agent") should have called for widespread reform of the entire media. I can't believe there is a single person who can take CNN/NY Times/LA Times/etc seriously at this point. But when it is 95 percent of the group committing the same outrage, I doubt any of them feel particularly guilty.
Years before was the even-worse "Weapons of Mass Destruction" propaganda campaign. Maybe you're too young to remember it, but that was a whopper.
That is, just because something was reported truthfully doesn't mean we got the full story, or even the most important part of the story. Narratives are crafted with what they don't say as much as what they do.
This works well because it's very hard to point a finger at what isn't there. It's even more effective when so much is consumed so passively (read: no questions asked).
For example, when the AP caught reporter Christopher Newton fabricating sources, they fired him and immediately conduced a review of everything he had written for them, issuing retractions or corrections as appropriate.