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Did the entire media industry misquote a Hamas spokesperson?
- dboreham 3y agoOne conclusion: delete Twitter from the world and this wouldn't have happened. Also: as just a casual consumer of this news, it seemed fishy at the time so why wasn't it fishy to grizzled news reporters?
- ccooffee 3y agoHow is Twitter tied into this problem? 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.
- DonaldTruck 3y ago[dead]
- jjgreen 3y agoThis 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.
- passion__desire 3y agoCan 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?
- HideousKojima 3y agoLethargy 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.
- sshine 3y agoMaybe the Israelis are playing 4D chess.
- passion__desire 3y ago4D 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.
- totetsu 3y agoDo 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.
- passion__desire 3y agoJust give me plain facts without multiplying with your weight vector (aka like mixing your saliva as honey bees do to sweeten the deal).
- losteric 3y ago
- Belopolye 3y agoThe conflicts of the last couple of years have not helped improve my already-low feelings about journalism and journalists.
- giantg2 3y agoIt's all about speed these days. If you don't report it and someone else does, then you've lost customers.
- powera 3y agoThe 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.
- thaumasiotes 3y agoExcept 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.
- londons_explore 3y agoMost 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.
- EgregiousCube 3y ago10+ 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?
- odyssey7 3y agoThe book “Trust me I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator” discussed this, though focusing more on blogs than traditional news media.
- remram 3y agoStill better process than this piece of information you definitely just made up.
- beardyw 3y agoWhen it comes down to it these are fallible people just trying to do a job. It's a good thing that computer systems never fail or we would look just as stupid.
- Slava_Propanei 3y ago[dead]
- apaprocki 3y agoSo 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.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago> 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.
- Synaesthesia 3y agoEntire 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.
- foogazi 3y agoIt’s a war zone - look at Nagorno-Karabach - tide changes and people move
- Synaesthesia 3y agoMove where?
- foogazi 3y agoSouth, far away from Hamas & the tunnels
- jackconsidine 3y agoDevil'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
- remram 3y ago> 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.
- lelanthran 3y agoI think this post is way too upvoted, considering the fact that all the outlets repeated the same wrong fact. Maybe what you say usually happens, but what you say is not relevant in this case because they all pulled a Wagatha Christie.
- user_7832 3y agoI 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.
- hypeit 3y agoI 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.
- user_7832 3y agoI'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.
- hypeit 3y agoEven 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.
- user_7832 3y agoI agree that more standards and ethics are required for news and media. I fail to understand how other unethical reporting means this article is wrong/bad/a distraction and hence should be flagged. The article scrutinizes a specific case, and doesn't appear to be wrong, or purposely misleading.
- hypeit 3y ago
- rdtsc 3y ago> 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?
- cdrini 3y agoI 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.
- philwelch 3y agoNews 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.
- philwelch 3y agoThis 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/how-the-media-makes-the-israel-story/383262/ 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.
- jjgreen 3y agoQatar is cozy with Hamas and Iran, and shelters the senior leaders of Hamas in posh Qatari hotels At US request according to David Petraeus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_and_state-sponsored_terrorism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_and_state-sponsored_terr...
- mcpackieh 3y agoEven 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.
- roshin 3y agoI 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.
- Grum9 3y ago[dead]