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It's easy to screw up on breaking news but you have to admit when you do

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Re: It's easy to screw up on breaking news but you have to admit when you do

#131

Post by gotoeleven »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #19
numlocked wrote: post #10

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.ht... The headline is: Gaza and the Trudeau Problem It begins with an inexplicable few paragraphs about Canada and India before taking a sharp l…

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?

Im just a simple country boy but it seems to me that you can balance a budget by reducing spending or raising revenue.

Re: It's easy to screw up on breaking news but you have to admit when you do

#132

Post by baryphonic »

lawgimenez wrote: post #113
baryphonic wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The visual evidence is what makes me think Palestinian militants (accidentally) caused the explosion. First, live footage from Al Jazeera at the time showed rockets firing from a location in Gaza toward Israel. One rocket appeared to malfunction in mid-air and within a few seconds, an explosion happened on the ground approximately where the hospital is. The lean-too shape of the hospital roof can even be seen in the…

You forgot the leaked intercepted call from a Hamas terrorist claiming that one of the rockets fell on the hospital.

That came from the IDF, so I'm discounting it.

EDIT: To be clear, I think the leaked call was authentic, but I don't think it's persuasive evidence because of its provenance. I fully think PIJ did this in support of Hamas, and then immediately blamed Israel to an enchanted Western press who can't see past an oppressor-oppressed narrative structure. But all of this is my opinion and not verifiable fact.

Re: It's easy to screw up on breaking news but you have to admit when you do

#133

Post by NotSuspicious »

paganel wrote: post #78

Comparing a fake image of some volcano and lava in the middle of the ocean (?!?) with the real deaths of people now dying in Gaza is peek Western journalism. It's why the West has ideologically lost its grip on the Global South, and deservedly so. Later edit: It might have helped if the author or the article had included his ethnicity at the start of the article, that way the stupid Gaza comparison and the futile att…

[flagged]

Re: It's easy to screw up on breaking news but you have to admit when you do

#134

Post by somenameforme »

colpabar wrote: post #83
throwaway237289 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If the NYT is just a business that exists to make its customers happy as you are suggesting, why do we take them seriously? Isn't that why everyone hates fox news?

Inertia. Fox kind of made fun of itself from a pretty early stage with 'fair and balanced' when they were never even pretending to be such. The NYTimes was an excellent, and at least reasonably impartial, paper for many decades. So, many people still look at them as the same as they were decades ago, even though a remotely objective look can tell you they've also long since jumped the shark, hard.

I think there's also the practical problem that there really isn't any good media anymore. It's not like I can say 'well the NYTimes sucks - go to [blah]'. There was an absolutely excellent article by Bob Kaiser (editor at WaPo for decades) - The Bad News About the News. [1] I'm really remiss to give cliff notes because the article covers so much and so eloquently, but in general - the internet has played a major role in destroying the overall quality of news.

[1] - http://csweb.brookings.edu/content/research/essays/2014/bad-...

Re: It's easy to screw up on breaking news but you have to admit when you do

#135

Post by karaterobot »

mkmk wrote: post #9

A long time ago, I worked for a brand that bought expensive advertisements in the nytimes. The sales team invited me to be a silent attendee of the 'page one meeting', a meeting during which the editors decide which stories will be on the front page of the paper and how they will be presented. By that time, they were also discussing if certain stories warranted a push notification, and how tweets would be presented.…

> Anyway, I mostly get my news from twitter nowadays. At least there, I find it a bit easier to make sense of who is misleading me and why.

How does that make it easier to make sense of who is misleading you? Don't people on twitter have a source whose bias is unknown to you? It would be difficult to only read first person accounts of events by sources you discovered yourself. Not to mention knowing enough about those first person reporters to understand if they are misleading you or not. And if you're relying on other people (or an algorithm) to provide you sources, it feels like you'd just be adding another layer of people who can mislead you.

Re: It's easy to screw up on breaking news but you have to admit when you do

#136

Post by locallost »

Pxtl wrote: post #121
locallost wrote: post #109

The reason everyone believed it was Israel is because they do it all the time. Today they bombed a church. I find it funny (as long as you ignore that these events involve dead people) that Silver here is up in arms for an alleged misattribution when it happens otherwise every day and nobody is bothered. A novel thought: maybe stop bombing civilians and the chance of you unjustly being accused of bombing civilians go…

Yes, but still the media has a responsibility to note the credibility, or lack thereof, of their sources. When Israeli military officials say "this was certainly a Palistinian attack", the news media should be noting cases where they lied about that in the past (eg the death of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh). Likewise when Gaza officials say the reverse, the same should happen. I get that journalism will have bias, bo…

I agree with that, but the more relevant "moral" story from this one is that nobody blinked when it was first reported. It's problematic that this is obviously normalized.

Re: It's easy to screw up on breaking news but you have to admit when you do

#137

Post by zaphar »

locallost wrote: post #109

The reason everyone believed it was Israel is because they do it all the time. Today they bombed a church. I find it funny (as long as you ignore that these events involve dead people) that Silver here is up in arms for an alleged misattribution when it happens otherwise every day and nobody is bothered. A novel thought: maybe stop bombing civilians and the chance of you unjustly being accused of bombing civilians go…

Both groups do it all the time. The difference is that, Isreal doesn't lie about it when they do it while Hamas lies about pretty much everything.

Re: It's easy to screw up on breaking news but you have to admit when you do

#138

Post by mupuff1234 »

Pxtl wrote: post #44
mattmaroon wrote: post #8

I’m still not sure what to believe on that story. It’s not like Israel to intentionally blow up a hospital full of civilians. It’s not unlike them to do it on accident. It’s not unlike Hamas to blow up anything (intentionally or otherwise) and Israel and the US would both probably say they did it whether they did or did not. The story would look the same no matter who did it.

The evidence from reputable OSINT orgs like Bellingcat is pretty-much showing evidence that this was an accident on the part of Palistinian fighters. There are multiple videos showing a volley of rockets were launched from within Gaza (not from Bellingcat, but other OSINT groups -- Bellingcat not ready to make a final conclusion here). One of the rockets appeared to fail while it was rising - it swerved wildly and th…

Pretty sure iron dome usually(/always?) intercepts rockets over israel.

Plus, if you've seen iron dome interception videos you know that you can visually see the interceptors flying up, which you don't see in this case.

So seems very unlikely to be an iron dome interception.

Re: It's easy to screw up on breaking news but you have to admit when you do

#139

Post by dgudkov »

threeseed wrote: post #22

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 verif…

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.

Re: It's easy to screw up on breaking news but you have to admit when you do

#140

Post by doctorpangloss »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #21
mattmaroon wrote: post #8

I’m still not sure what to believe on that story. It’s not like Israel to intentionally blow up a hospital full of civilians. It’s not unlike them to do it on accident. It’s not unlike Hamas to blow up anything (intentionally or otherwise) and Israel and the US would both probably say they did it whether they did or did not. The story would look the same no matter who did it.

> still not sure what to believe on that story Do this. A lesson from air crash investigations: wait a week. Until then, discount everything. > story would look the same no matter who did it This is not true. Too many countries with disparate motivations had eyes on the area. We haven’t had time for intelligence to be scrubbed for public release. Again, give it a week. In the meantime, observe the meta story; who con…

> wait a week. Until then, discount everything

Your advice is really easy to give when you have no dog in the race, as a commenter said. I'm confident that once you have a problem with something and you felt you are not being heard, you're going to be caught with your pants down, rooting for the narrative that gives your grievance some space.

Let me share a story when I didn't wait. This is meant to be a stylized comment.

Months ago, a programmer got murdered in San Francisco, by what most people jumped to conclude was a homeless guy.

My best friend, personally, made national news by being murdered by a homeless person.

So in light of the facts shortly after the murder and my personal experience, I wrote the city supervisor and asked, what has to happen? Can you do something about "this?"

It turns out that this programmer was murdered by a person known to him. Why? The news suggests something about the victim's relationship with the perpetrator's sister, which people don't get murdered over all the time, instead of the far more idiosyncratic and too-many-coincidences fact that the victim developed a huge pump and dump cryptocurrency called MOB that affected a lot of powerful people, that funny enough I was also a victim of. That's another tale though.

I jumped to conclusions because I had a legitimate grievance. My government officials are much more responsive to social-media-viral outrage, perhaps rationally so because of its impact on voting, than something scientific, secular or wonky.

While I disagree with their primary grievance, I sympathize with social media users who read the hospital violence story and reacted to it aligned with their primary grievance.

We are replaying the circumstances behind Obama's comments here, which I found very striking: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/us/obama-says-movements-l...

> [Obama:] "The value of social movements and activism is to get you at the table, get you in the room..." When some activists at that meeting said they felt that their voices were not being heard, Mr. Obama replied, “You are sitting in the Oval Office, talking to the president of the United States.”

The people you're telling to "wait a week" haven't had their meeting with the president yet. It's the same energy as complaining about people blocking highways. My dude, they fucking get in the news, it works! So what do you want? How do people with legitimate grievances but are simply not numerous enough to matter politically in their communities, how do they get at the table exactly?

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