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I just find this all so pointless. News organisations can't be expected to verify every claim. And so all they can do is report the claims of what should be tr

I just find this all so pointless. News organisations can't be expected to verify every claim. And so all they can do is report the claims of what should be trusted sources i.e. governments, NGOs etc. And to be fair every country spins the truth so it's not like this incident is without precedent. So you get to choose. Either you have breaking news or you don't. But you can't ask for breaking news and have them verify each claim. It's just not possible.

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
> News organisations can't be expected to verify every claim. I thought this was the defining characteristic, that set them apart from gossipmongers and fools. Yes, I not only can expect that, I think I should.
- threeseed 3y ago
  You should expect that. For non-breaking news. But when you are asking a journalist to report on an event minutes to hours after it happened then obviously they will have limited time to validate a claim. Especially in a war-zone where their ability to operate is limited. It's not really possible to be fast and thorough at the same time.
  - throwaway237289 3y ago
    You're creating a strawman that doesn't exist from the article. There's no ask to be fast and perfect. The ask was that retractions happen, and that journalists own up to being wrong. There's evidence provided to show that NYT is very reluctant to backtrack.
  - Tarq0n 3y ago
    Is there value to most breaking news? It's simply a facet of competition between news outlets, most news actually benefits from some delay.
    - mindslight 3y ago
      Exactly. I got the "breaking news" from Nitter. Like so many things it seems NYT reporters have leaned into destroying their own profession, by choosing the easy "thin" path of generating news articles by rephrasing tweets and shirking the harder work of analysis of sorting through the firehose. It feels like the Innovator's Dilemma where NYT doesn't want to miss out on being part of people's procrastination/relax loops, and it's cannibalizing their actual value.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    > But when you are asking a journalist to report on an event minutes to hours after it happened I don't ask this. Some push that stuff hard, because it gets ratings, or whatever the equivalent is now that we're a few decades post-broadcast-tv. Of course, it doesn't get ratings so much as it draws from a bank of integrity that journalism squirreled away through great effort and frustration for over a century, and once they've spent all that, there will be nothing left. Hell, the account's probably been overdrawn for awhile now. And it's as if no one even noticed.
jwond 3y ago
They could still report breaking news and unverified claims, but they should at least do so in a slightly more responsible way, e.g. by limiting the headline to only what is actually verified at that time. If they want to include unverified claims in the body of the article, at least there they have more space to make it more explicitly clear what is and is not verified.
- threeseed 3y ago
  That's literally what New York Times did though. Nate is complaining about the headlines in the Breaking News section not some article.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
stronglikedan 3y ago
> Either you have breaking news or you don't. I choose "don't". I give everything the 48 hour rule. I won't even talk about events with other people if the events are less than 48 hours old. As far as I'm concerned, it's all just speculation that muddies the waters.
mupuff1234 3y ago
This wasn't a "cat stuck on a tree" type story - this was a breaking news headliner. They 100% should've made it clear what was and wasn't verified.
itsoktocry 3y ago
>Either you have breaking news or you don't. There's a big difference between: "A hospital was detsroyed in an explosion, many dead" and "Israeli forces blew up a hospital, many dead". You can have breaking news, you just need to convey the uncertainty.
- macintux 3y ago
  Worse, “A parking structure adjacent to a hospital was destroyed, unknown numbers dead” is the more accurate headline.
hersko 3y ago
> News organisations can't be expected to verify every claim If a literal terrorist organization tells you something happened, and you run with it with zero independent confirmation, you are not a news organization. You are a glorified mouth piece of, again, a literal terrorist organization that murdered over a thousand civilians in cold blood including children the week before. Just shrugging off this insane breakdown of the most basic tenants of journalism from The New York times is insane to me.
jraby3 3y ago
A news organization like The NY Times is absolutely expected to verify its facts before reporting. This isn’t a random blog or buzz feed. At least that used to be the standard. At this point they’re just like everyone else, after clicks no matter how much damage they do. Their was a time not too long ago when they had some journalistic integrity.
baryphonic 3y ago
> So you get to choose. Either you have breaking news or you don't. But you can't ask for breaking news and have them verify each claim. It's just not possible. This is a false dichotomy. You can have breaking news that covers the verifiable facts (an explosion happened in Gaza near a hospital) without uncritically reporting salacious claims by extremely biased parties. Imagine if on 9/11 the press had within minutes come out and said, "Twin tower attacks ordered by Saddam Hussein kill 20,000, intelligence sources say." That didn't happen because the press at the time exercised some caution, yet they still covered the event.
- tzs 3y ago
  > Imagine if on 9/11 the press had within minutes come out and said, "Twin tower attacks ordered by Saddam Hussein kill 20,000, intelligence sources say." That didn't happen because the press at the time exercised some caution, yet they still covered the event. That didn't happen because no intelligence sources said that.
dgudkov 3y ago
It's not about verifying every claim. It's about trusted sources, as you correctly noticed. The question is: is HAMAS a trusted source for NYT? Because, it looks very much like that.

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago

> News organisations can't be expected to verify every claim. I thought this was the defining characteristic, that set them apart from gossipmongers and fools. Yes, I not only can expect that, I think I should.

threeseed 3y ago
You should expect that. For non-breaking news. But when you are asking a journalist to report on an event minutes to hours after it happened then obviously they will have limited time to validate a claim. Especially in a war-zone where their ability to operate is limited. It's not really possible to be fast and thorough at the same time.
- throwaway237289 3y ago
  You're creating a strawman that doesn't exist from the article. There's no ask to be fast and perfect. The ask was that retractions happen, and that journalists own up to being wrong. There's evidence provided to show that NYT is very reluctant to backtrack.
- Tarq0n 3y ago
  Is there value to most breaking news? It's simply a facet of competition between news outlets, most news actually benefits from some delay.
  - mindslight 3y ago
    Exactly. I got the "breaking news" from Nitter. Like so many things it seems NYT reporters have leaned into destroying their own profession, by choosing the easy "thin" path of generating news articles by rephrasing tweets and shirking the harder work of analysis of sorting through the firehose. It feels like the Innovator's Dilemma where NYT doesn't want to miss out on being part of people's procrastination/relax loops, and it's cannibalizing their actual value.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  > But when you are asking a journalist to report on an event minutes to hours after it happened I don't ask this. Some push that stuff hard, because it gets ratings, or whatever the equivalent is now that we're a few decades post-broadcast-tv. Of course, it doesn't get ratings so much as it draws from a bank of integrity that journalism squirreled away through great effort and frustration for over a century, and once they've spent all that, there will be nothing left. Hell, the account's probably been overdrawn for awhile now. And it's as if no one even noticed.

jwond 3y ago

They could still report breaking news and unverified claims, but they should at least do so in a slightly more responsible way, e.g. by limiting the headline to only what is actually verified at that time. If they want to include unverified claims in the body of the article, at least there they have more space to make it more explicitly clear what is and is not verified.

threeseed 3y ago
That's literally what New York Times did though. Nate is complaining about the headlines in the Breaking News section not some article.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

stronglikedan 3y ago

> Either you have breaking news or you don't. I choose "don't". I give everything the 48 hour rule. I won't even talk about events with other people if the events are less than 48 hours old. As far as I'm concerned, it's all just speculation that muddies the waters.

mupuff1234 3y ago

This wasn't a "cat stuck on a tree" type story - this was a breaking news headliner. They 100% should've made it clear what was and wasn't verified.

itsoktocry 3y ago

>Either you have breaking news or you don't. There's a big difference between: "A hospital was detsroyed in an explosion, many dead" and "Israeli forces blew up a hospital, many dead". You can have breaking news, you just need to convey the uncertainty.

macintux 3y ago
Worse, “A parking structure adjacent to a hospital was destroyed, unknown numbers dead” is the more accurate headline.

hersko 3y ago

> News organisations can't be expected to verify every claim If a literal terrorist organization tells you something happened, and you run with it with zero independent confirmation, you are not a news organization. You are a glorified mouth piece of, again, a literal terrorist organization that murdered over a thousand civilians in cold blood including children the week before. Just shrugging off this insane breakdown of the most basic tenants of journalism from The New York times is insane to me.

jraby3 3y ago

A news organization like The NY Times is absolutely expected to verify its facts before reporting. This isn’t a random blog or buzz feed. At least that used to be the standard. At this point they’re just like everyone else, after clicks no matter how much damage they do. Their was a time not too long ago when they had some journalistic integrity.

baryphonic 3y ago

> So you get to choose. Either you have breaking news or you don't. But you can't ask for breaking news and have them verify each claim. It's just not possible. This is a false dichotomy. You can have breaking news that covers the verifiable facts (an explosion happened in Gaza near a hospital) without uncritically reporting salacious claims by extremely biased parties. Imagine if on 9/11 the press had within minutes come out and said, "Twin tower attacks ordered by Saddam Hussein kill 20,000, intelligence sources say." That didn't happen because the press at the time exercised some caution, yet they still covered the event.

tzs 3y ago
> Imagine if on 9/11 the press had within minutes come out and said, "Twin tower attacks ordered by Saddam Hussein kill 20,000, intelligence sources say." That didn't happen because the press at the time exercised some caution, yet they still covered the event. That didn't happen because no intelligence sources said that.

dgudkov 3y ago

It's not about verifying every claim. It's about trusted sources, as you correctly noticed. The question is: is HAMAS a trusted source for NYT? Because, it looks very much like that.