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I don’t have a dog in the fight and have been a long time NYT subscriber but I concur with Nate on this one. The NYT coverage here has become even worse in the

I don’t have a dog in the fight and have been a long time NYT subscriber but I concur with Nate on this one. The NYT coverage here has become even worse in the last few hours. It’s truly bizarre. Here is their latest: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/20/briefing/gaza-hospital.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/20/briefing/gaza-hospital.ht... The headline is: Gaza and the Trudeau Problem It begins with an inexplicable few paragraphs about Canada and India before taking a sharp left back to the Gaza explosion. It then presents “both sides of the issue” straight-faced, in a manner that appears to be asking the reader to decide — but of course one side is “Hamas said so” and the other is significant visual evidence, like the fact that the hospital is still standing, and there is video of a rocket misfiring, and voice recordings of Islamic Jihad admitting it was their rocket. The article then concludes on a note of “I guess we will never know what happened because we won’t ever see all of the evidence”. It is maddening and just very, very strange.

eli_gottlieb 3y ago
Seems remarkably similar to when they print a "debate" on taxes that consists of "We need to cut food stamps to balance the budget" on one side and "We need to raise taxes on the upper-middle class, actually" on the other. One of these has clear factual arguments behind it, but the other one is the interest of the company hosting the debate, so who's to say?
- gotoeleven 3y ago
  Im just a simple country boy but it seems to me that you can balance a budget by reducing spending or raising revenue.
  - tenacious_tuna 3y ago
    Yes, but note both suggestions omit doing anything to ultra-wealthy and continue to drive the wedge between the lower and middle classes, each being told the other is why they can't have nice things.
    - pc86 3y ago
      The working poor don't have any money for the government to take. The middle and upper-middle classes have plenty of money for the government to take, but not enough to afford expensive accountants and business formations to shield their assets, or at least not enough assets to make that cheaper than just paying taxes. The wealthy have tons of money for the government to take, but can spend tens of thousands up to millions to shield it so they can't. The natural progression of that is a cyclical squeezing of the middle classes via revenue extraction and of the working poor by cutting services.
      - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > wealthy have tons of money for the government to take, but can spend tens of thousands up to millions to shield it so they can't I used to advocate for doubling all tax brackets. A friend ran the numbers: the result is volatility. The middle class has stable earnings in a way the wealthy do not. That doesn’t mean we can’t tax them more. But there is a trade off.
        pc86 3y ago
        On an individual level maybe but the top two quintiles have made more money year after year regardless: https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/household-income-quintiles https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/household-income-... It's not like the top echelons of earners have a bad year and GDP plummets or anything; I'm not sure what "volatility" means in this context as far as tax revenues but I can't imagine it results in huge variability or uncertainty.
    - eli_gottlieb 3y ago
      I actually chose "upper-middle class" rather than "ultra-wealthy" because if we take the ultra-wealthy to be the top 1% or 0.1% or smaller, there just aren't enough actual "ultra-wealthy" people to balance any significant budget by taxing them. Whereas the top 10% or 20% are numerous enough that you can collect serious revenue from them, consistently, and there are fewer ways to dodge that kind of tax. Which, looping around, is precisely why the ultra-wealthy want to prevent anyone getting the idea of taxing the upper-middle class: that's what they mostly disguise themselves as for tax purposes.
losvedir 3y ago
I try to limit my intake of news, and so most of the story I only hear from my Tangle subscription[0] which has had a pretty even take on it. I've been impressed with them, so far, but of course everyone has biases and you have to take everything with a grain of salt, etc, etc. Anyway, I agree that "Hamas said so" is one side, and it's weak. And on the other side you have the still-standing hospital. You also have Biden's statement, which I'm sure is based on the latest evidence he has access to. But I do want to point out, that two pieces of the evidence you mention: the misfiring rocket video and the voice recordings, if they're what I think you're referring to, were both released by the Israeli government and have been disputed as well. The video had the wrong timestamps, as pointed out by a NYTimes journalist, and the voice recordings were alleged to be faked, by a mainstream UK-based news agency. It's quite a mess. [0] https://www.readtangle.com/the-explosion-at-a-gaza-hospital/ https://www.readtangle.com/the-explosion-at-a-gaza-hospital/
- mupuff1234 3y ago
  > The video had the wrong timestamps There was live stream from Al-Jazeera showing the failed rocket at the correct timestamp. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/18/al-ahli-arab-hospital-piecing-together-what-happened-as-israel-insists-militant-rocket-to-blame https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/18/al-ahli-arab-h... > and the voice recordings were alleged to be faked By who? The article just leads to a tweet with no citations from any experts.
  - bannedbybros 3y ago
    Channel 4 and plenty of other people. Y'all are inside a propaganda bubble. https://twitter.com/jacksonhinklle/status/1714999704100934034 https://twitter.com/jacksonhinklle/status/171499970410093403...
    - mupuff1234 3y ago
      "Two independent Arab journalists" isn't exactly a reputable source - It most likely means they found 2 random people on Twitter. And initially I thought it was probably Israel, but the evidence is fairly overwhelming to support that it is a failed Jihad rocket.
bobchadwick 3y ago
You do realize that the linked article is actually a daily newsletter, right? That's the explanation for the mixing of unrelated news stories.
- hifycycyv 3y ago
  [dead]
- jahewson 3y ago
  Dated today but this story was debunked on X within a few hours of the event. NYT still pushing Hamas’ false narrative.
  - jahewson 3y ago
    It’s true! The video of the misfiring rocket that’s now been published by all the big media outlets was doing the rounds on X within a few hours of the event. A newsletter published today should not be “both sides”-ing the issue.
bryanlarsen 3y ago
Everybody reading that NYT article is going to come away with the conclusion that PIJ fired the rocket. The way it was written makes that conclusion far more persusasive than any article less "fair" to Hamas or the PIJ.
- kylebenzle 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - throwaway237289 3y ago
    HN is still a site about creating businesses, right? The NYT needs to consider its customers, and ensure they find the balance to make its customers happy. For them, there's a fine line between event reporting, "truth", and point of view. It's not political backlash. It's pissing off your subscription base. And that's really dumb.
    - FormerBandmate 3y ago
      As a customer of news, I want the fucking news. If I want people’s opinions I will go to the opinion section
      - throwaway237289 3y ago
        If you're an actual, paying customer of NYT, then I would hazard that you're welcome to tell them you don't like what they're doing by not paying them. If you're a freeloader that's just talking about generic morals and integrity, welcome to reality. Businesses get paid by giving customers what they want.
      - kylebenzle 3y ago
        Until they are saying something bad about your religion, then things change real quick.
    - 93po 3y ago
      Okay good, so we’re on the same page that NYT will lie and be dishonest for commercial purposes and isn’t an outlet of journalist integrity.
QuarterReptile 3y ago
>I don’t have a dog in the fight and have been a long time NYT subscriber but I concur with Nate on this one. This is so, so untrue, and it makes me sad to read this. Your dog is the one dying of self-inflicted wounds, and everyone would be better off if it would stop. Everyone benefits when reliable information sources exist, they report on a wide portfolio of events under that reliable letterhead, and we know where to find them. The decay of institutions that do these things is the decay of modern society itself.
- numlocked 3y ago
  That is well said. I added that first phrase in an effort to create space for my comment to exist apart from whatever my own politics and opinion might be. But you are correct. The failure of news institutions is bad for everyone. Pretending the scales are balanced when they aren't works against the goal of collective sense-making. It seems some number of organizations and people have lost the plot, concluding that "objectivity" means "inability or unwillingness to apply judgement".
  - carbine 3y ago
    moderates / reasonable people keeping quiet is the reason we got into this collective problem in the first place. not to pressure OP, it's an understandable point of view. but it's time for reasonable people to speak up.
- nradov 3y ago
  It's a little too late to be mourning the loss of the New York Times as a serious journalistic institution. They switched to fake news decades ago. We'll have to find another solution.
hintymad 3y ago
I really hope that we learn that narratives will sooner or later turn against us if we sacrifice truth for narratives. NYT and WaPo and what not may enjoy their "progressive" narratives now, but the party will not go on forever. Truth matters.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  The NYT article persuasively shows the evidence that the PIJ fired the rocket. That's not the far-left narrative.
  - jahewson 3y ago
    The evidence is laid out, but the narrative alongside it is “gosh with dozens of pieces of evidence supporting one version of events and zero supporting the other, it’s a close call, we’ll never know what happened!”. That’s not to say that we should jump to conclusions but the initial assumption that Hamas’ claim was truthful is ridiculous. NYT would not publish any claim Trump makes with so little scrutiny. It’s really a tragedy that both sides of the media spectrum have now been captured by politics.
  - hintymad 3y ago
    The initial version of NYT article parroted Hamas' statement that "Israel Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital", and also used a stock photo that had nothing to do with the hospital. If this is not narrative, I don't what is. And I quote the word "progressive" because I don't think that's real progressive. Progressives care about truths, and don't jump to conclusions that fit their belief.
    - bryanlarsen 3y ago
      But not the version that the OP linked. > If this is not narrative, I don't what is. A mistake. Note that basically all the wire services made the same mistake. Reputable services corrected the mistake. Disreputable ones didn't. That's what the original article is about. > And I quote the word "progressive" And I changed the word to "far-left" for much the same reason. It's not terribly accurate either, but shrug.

eli_gottlieb 3y ago

Seems remarkably similar to when they print a "debate" on taxes that consists of "We need to cut food stamps to balance the budget" on one side and "We need to raise taxes on the upper-middle class, actually" on the other. One of these has clear factual arguments behind it, but the other one is the interest of the company hosting the debate, so who's to say?

gotoeleven 3y ago
Im just a simple country boy but it seems to me that you can balance a budget by reducing spending or raising revenue.
- tenacious_tuna 3y ago
  Yes, but note both suggestions omit doing anything to ultra-wealthy and continue to drive the wedge between the lower and middle classes, each being told the other is why they can't have nice things.
  - pc86 3y ago
    The working poor don't have any money for the government to take. The middle and upper-middle classes have plenty of money for the government to take, but not enough to afford expensive accountants and business formations to shield their assets, or at least not enough assets to make that cheaper than just paying taxes. The wealthy have tons of money for the government to take, but can spend tens of thousands up to millions to shield it so they can't. The natural progression of that is a cyclical squeezing of the middle classes via revenue extraction and of the working poor by cutting services.
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > wealthy have tons of money for the government to take, but can spend tens of thousands up to millions to shield it so they can't I used to advocate for doubling all tax brackets. A friend ran the numbers: the result is volatility. The middle class has stable earnings in a way the wealthy do not. That doesn’t mean we can’t tax them more. But there is a trade off.
      - pc86 3y ago
        On an individual level maybe but the top two quintiles have made more money year after year regardless: https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/household-income-quintiles https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/household-income-... It's not like the top echelons of earners have a bad year and GDP plummets or anything; I'm not sure what "volatility" means in this context as far as tax revenues but I can't imagine it results in huge variability or uncertainty.
  - eli_gottlieb 3y ago
    I actually chose "upper-middle class" rather than "ultra-wealthy" because if we take the ultra-wealthy to be the top 1% or 0.1% or smaller, there just aren't enough actual "ultra-wealthy" people to balance any significant budget by taxing them. Whereas the top 10% or 20% are numerous enough that you can collect serious revenue from them, consistently, and there are fewer ways to dodge that kind of tax. Which, looping around, is precisely why the ultra-wealthy want to prevent anyone getting the idea of taxing the upper-middle class: that's what they mostly disguise themselves as for tax purposes.

losvedir 3y ago

I try to limit my intake of news, and so most of the story I only hear from my Tangle subscription[0] which has had a pretty even take on it. I've been impressed with them, so far, but of course everyone has biases and you have to take everything with a grain of salt, etc, etc. Anyway, I agree that "Hamas said so" is one side, and it's weak. And on the other side you have the still-standing hospital. You also have Biden's statement, which I'm sure is based on the latest evidence he has access to. But I do want to point out, that two pieces of the evidence you mention: the misfiring rocket video and the voice recordings, if they're what I think you're referring to, were both released by the Israeli government and have been disputed as well. The video had the wrong timestamps, as pointed out by a NYTimes journalist, and the voice recordings were alleged to be faked, by a mainstream UK-based news agency. It's quite a mess. [0] https://www.readtangle.com/the-explosion-at-a-gaza-hospital/ https://www.readtangle.com/the-explosion-at-a-gaza-hospital/

mupuff1234 3y ago
> The video had the wrong timestamps There was live stream from Al-Jazeera showing the failed rocket at the correct timestamp. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/18/al-ahli-arab-hospital-piecing-together-what-happened-as-israel-insists-militant-rocket-to-blame https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/18/al-ahli-arab-h... > and the voice recordings were alleged to be faked By who? The article just leads to a tweet with no citations from any experts.
- bannedbybros 3y ago
  Channel 4 and plenty of other people. Y'all are inside a propaganda bubble. https://twitter.com/jacksonhinklle/status/1714999704100934034 https://twitter.com/jacksonhinklle/status/171499970410093403...
  - mupuff1234 3y ago
    "Two independent Arab journalists" isn't exactly a reputable source - It most likely means they found 2 random people on Twitter. And initially I thought it was probably Israel, but the evidence is fairly overwhelming to support that it is a failed Jihad rocket.

bobchadwick 3y ago

You do realize that the linked article is actually a daily newsletter, right? That's the explanation for the mixing of unrelated news stories.

hifycycyv 3y ago
[dead]
jahewson 3y ago
Dated today but this story was debunked on X within a few hours of the event. NYT still pushing Hamas’ false narrative.
- jahewson 3y ago
  It’s true! The video of the misfiring rocket that’s now been published by all the big media outlets was doing the rounds on X within a few hours of the event. A newsletter published today should not be “both sides”-ing the issue.

bryanlarsen 3y ago

Everybody reading that NYT article is going to come away with the conclusion that PIJ fired the rocket. The way it was written makes that conclusion far more persusasive than any article less "fair" to Hamas or the PIJ.

kylebenzle 3y ago
[flagged]
- throwaway237289 3y ago
  HN is still a site about creating businesses, right? The NYT needs to consider its customers, and ensure they find the balance to make its customers happy. For them, there's a fine line between event reporting, "truth", and point of view. It's not political backlash. It's pissing off your subscription base. And that's really dumb.
  - FormerBandmate 3y ago
    As a customer of news, I want the fucking news. If I want people’s opinions I will go to the opinion section
    - throwaway237289 3y ago
      If you're an actual, paying customer of NYT, then I would hazard that you're welcome to tell them you don't like what they're doing by not paying them. If you're a freeloader that's just talking about generic morals and integrity, welcome to reality. Businesses get paid by giving customers what they want.
    - kylebenzle 3y ago
      Until they are saying something bad about your religion, then things change real quick.
  - 93po 3y ago
    Okay good, so we’re on the same page that NYT will lie and be dishonest for commercial purposes and isn’t an outlet of journalist integrity.

QuarterReptile 3y ago

>I don’t have a dog in the fight and have been a long time NYT subscriber but I concur with Nate on this one. This is so, so untrue, and it makes me sad to read this. Your dog is the one dying of self-inflicted wounds, and everyone would be better off if it would stop. Everyone benefits when reliable information sources exist, they report on a wide portfolio of events under that reliable letterhead, and we know where to find them. The decay of institutions that do these things is the decay of modern society itself.

numlocked 3y ago
That is well said. I added that first phrase in an effort to create space for my comment to exist apart from whatever my own politics and opinion might be. But you are correct. The failure of news institutions is bad for everyone. Pretending the scales are balanced when they aren't works against the goal of collective sense-making. It seems some number of organizations and people have lost the plot, concluding that "objectivity" means "inability or unwillingness to apply judgement".
- carbine 3y ago
  moderates / reasonable people keeping quiet is the reason we got into this collective problem in the first place. not to pressure OP, it's an understandable point of view. but it's time for reasonable people to speak up.
nradov 3y ago
It's a little too late to be mourning the loss of the New York Times as a serious journalistic institution. They switched to fake news decades ago. We'll have to find another solution.

hintymad 3y ago

I really hope that we learn that narratives will sooner or later turn against us if we sacrifice truth for narratives. NYT and WaPo and what not may enjoy their "progressive" narratives now, but the party will not go on forever. Truth matters.

bryanlarsen 3y ago
The NYT article persuasively shows the evidence that the PIJ fired the rocket. That's not the far-left narrative.
- jahewson 3y ago
  The evidence is laid out, but the narrative alongside it is “gosh with dozens of pieces of evidence supporting one version of events and zero supporting the other, it’s a close call, we’ll never know what happened!”. That’s not to say that we should jump to conclusions but the initial assumption that Hamas’ claim was truthful is ridiculous. NYT would not publish any claim Trump makes with so little scrutiny. It’s really a tragedy that both sides of the media spectrum have now been captured by politics.
- hintymad 3y ago
  The initial version of NYT article parroted Hamas' statement that "Israel Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital", and also used a stock photo that had nothing to do with the hospital. If this is not narrative, I don't what is. And I quote the word "progressive" because I don't think that's real progressive. Progressives care about truths, and don't jump to conclusions that fit their belief.
  - bryanlarsen 3y ago
    But not the version that the OP linked. > If this is not narrative, I don't what is. A mistake. Note that basically all the wire services made the same mistake. Reputable services corrected the mistake. Disreputable ones didn't. That's what the original article is about. > And I quote the word "progressive" And I changed the word to "far-left" for much the same reason. It's not terribly accurate either, but shrug.