> Because it was written in the New York Times and every other major media outlet. Not because it was on social media.
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?
Devil's advocate here. I have a family member who works for a national news organization. When they write a story, there's a script of which every single fact-dependent line has to be footnoted with two sources. They spend 10 hours fact checking a dozen facts sometimes. They assiduously call people, track down official statistics and reports, and nix lines all the time that are definitely true but don't meet this spec. And no, another news report doesn't count as a source; the the idea that a bunch of publications just reference from the seed of a half truth seems generally far fetched to me. Maybe this org has higher standards than others, but I'm skeptical. I mean, this author's "source" that they didn't have any is that spokespeople didn't reply to him (evidence of absence is not absence of evidence) And that he found a source that COULD be the originator. He very well could be right on this fact, but I feel that the fact-checking effort is underappreciated and distorted by people who love to bash the media
> this author's "source" that they didn't have any is that spokespeople didn't reply to him
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.
So a logical question would be: Did the Al Jazeera English account simply use a translation tool and publish without a native speaker listening/reading? If two professional translators said it couldn’t be interpreted that way, they either used a tool when most readers would believe they understand the language natively, or they intentionally misled. For a news outlet, you’d think owning up to the former would be preferable to readers believing the latter.
> Did the Al Jazeera English account simply use a translation tool and publish without a native speaker listening/reading? If two professional translators said it couldn’t be interpreted that way, they either used a tool when most readers would believe they understand the language natively, or they intentionally misled. For a news outlet, you’d think owning up to the former would be preferable to readers believing the latter.
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.
Even between native English speakers, confusion between 'casualties' and 'fatalities' is common. However if anybody should be able to get this right, it should be journalists. They take a lot of English writing classes in university, don't they? What's their excuse? Knowing how to write is literally their job.
Can someone please disentangle the motives behind the deep state actors behind such poor journalistic standards? Or can we attribute all of these to mere lethargy and a particular ideological momentum/bias?
Newspapers are competing with social media's rumor mill. There is intense pressure for speed to capture attention (and ad revenue). Sometimes inaccuracy make it through fast editorial reviews. This isn't the first or last error, and they do occur "in favor" of both sides.
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"
Lethargy certainly plays some role as well, see the willingness of reporters to republish press releases from companies with little to no editing that are basically just thinky veiled ads or PR puff pieces.
Do you want to unpack it with unzip —-geopolitical or —-realpolitik? And which moral framework shall we init? Consequentialism or Duty-based Ethics or Moral Relativism or Rights-based Ethics. I suggest for your own well-being that you find a way to look at it that doesn’t cause any cognitive dissonance with any beliefs you have about your own goodness.
I would like to know too. For example why there were so many impactful pictures of the destruction and the suffering of Ukrainians, the expulsion of people and now the journalists are spending their time discussing about themselves while thousands are being killed and kicked out of their home.
4D chess where even supposed enemy are doing exactly what Israel wants them to do. Israel plants fake stories in enemy camp which shows Israel in bad light. The enemy camp is caught with pants down and it's Israel that gets blamed.
I think news articles lacking citations is one of more backwards parts of modern news. How is it that Wikipedia is more reliable and neutral than journalists and news?
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.
News stories do contain citations, they just don’t follow the same format as Wikipedia. Whenever a news story says “according to a Gaza health ministry spokesman”, that’s a citation. Does it give you an original statement or document published by that spokesman? No, because traditionally these spokesmen don’t speak to the public; they speak to journalists. In some cases this isn’t true; you can watch or read transcripts of White House press conferences and it turns out clips of these press conferences are great for television, but the expectation is for journalists to intermediate between whats happening and the public.
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.
I think in the internet age we can do better than "according to a Gaza health ministry spokesman". Linking to original sources should be the standard. Almost everything is online. I think exceptions for things like anonymous sources is reasonable, but then explicitly saying "from an anonymous source" is best.
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 think in the internet age we can do better than "according to a Gaza health ministry spokesman". Linking to original sources should be the standard. Almost everything is online. I think exceptions for things like anonymous sources is reasonable, but then explicitly saying "from an anonymous source" is best.
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.
Entire families are being killed. Everybody is focused on the hospital, but what about the fact that already 40% of homes are destroyed? 1.6 million people, 60% of people are forcibly displaced?
Adjusted for population it's like 25000 Israelis being killed. This is just not ok.
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.
I actually found non MSM more likely to link to the original source. That is why I prefer new media over old.
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.
This quickly reached the front-page of HN (a few minutes after posting) and was within a couple of minutes flagged to death. Nice to see it was vouched back to life.
Yet it is not even anti-Israel, it perhaps paints Hamas in a better light ("Such a bunch of liars! Oh, actually lazy journalists"), but really, must the pro-Israel flagger contingent degrade public discourse so?
Most journalists have to write 10+ articles per day these days. They just copy paste the original tweet, add a little from wikipedia, DM a few people to see if they can get an 'exclusive comment', and maybe a sentence or two of opinion and hit publish.
There is no time to cite sources or worry about accuracy.
10+ a day? If that's legit, it explains entirely what's become of reporting quality. Do you have any links that go into more detail on how the day of a journalist has changed?
This entire piece rests on the assumption that news outlets would disclose their sources even in normal circumstances, let alone under circumstances where those outlets were made fools of. I think the author here is drawing too many conclusions from having his cold emails ignored or blown off when that’s probably just the usual fate of cold emails.
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.
I would like to know the reasoning of anybody flagging this submission after having read the posted article. The article supports neither political side of this conflict, but it appears to me that people are still unhappy about such content.
We're discouraged by moderation here from arguing about why things are flagged. If you think something is flagged erroneously, the thing to do is to mail hn@ycombinator.com and tell them; they'll look at who's flagging and what the story is, and sometimes remove the flag weights.
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.)
I don't think stories like this have much of a chance on the front page regardless. There's more than one force pushing them down: they're political, which attracts flags, they're not technical, which (usually unreasonably) attracts flags, and they're volatile, which sets off the flame-war detector. The big thing though is you can't stage a debate about flags on the thread itself; whatever you think of those flags, debating them publicly works against your goal.
I flagged it because debating the number of people killed isn't the point. We know it's in the thousands since Israel started bombing Gaza. Thousands more have been killed since this hospital was bombed. It's a sidetrack (and dare I say engineered distraction) to what's going on.
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!
I'm not saying that innocent people dying is okay (it's obviously not) but the article isn't about that. It's about the apparent callousness of media companies in a topic that is already politically fraught/sensitive. Such topics require higher levels of correctness/ethical reporting, which is highlighted by the posted article.
Even if this number is incorrect, it's not even a scratch on the surface of unethical reporting around this conflict and Israel in general. The MSM in the west is a propaganda outlet for the US/Israel.
This particular issue is being litigated to death and is causing a lot of noise that's drowning out current events. I understand your point, but that's my reason for flagging it.
> The MSM in the west is a propaganda outlet for the US/Israel.
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.
The single-minded insistence in the article that various news outlets should "link to the video they are citing" is completely wrong. They talked to Hamas directly, they aren't just repeating what they saw on Twitter. (at least some of the outlets should be expected to do so.)
So of course the journalists aren't talking to some random crazy guy.
Except that the first outlet not only linked to the video, but posted the video itself, and every subsequent outlet to cover the story was in fact just repeating what it saw on Twitter.
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?