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

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

#161

Post by Rapzid » Fri, Oct 20, 2023, 3:52 PM UTC

ankit219 wrote: post #95

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.

I am with you on that one. You don't have to have an opinion so close to an event unfolding. Ideally, we should be able to wait, let the authorities investigate, and then finally get the findings to be able to make an opinion. But today's news cycles are not that long. In this case though, it's not about what to believe about the story. But, it's about how much caution or verification NYT should have done before publ…

Likely they made no mistake. They reported on a Hamas presser in a way that was designed to generate clicks by capitalizing on anti-Isreali sentiment to trigger outrage.

Nothing they said was factually incorrect, and the changing narrative could just be blamed on "changing news"; as if the objective truth of a matter is unknowable or worse, based on what you choose to believe at any given moment.

Mission accomplished.

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

#162

Post by jameshart » Fri, Oct 20, 2023, 3:53 PM UTC

perihelions wrote: post #155

jameshart wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When journalists hear hoof beats, you want them to think ‘horses’ not ‘zebras’, though, right? When party A is causing a lot of explosions in general in land controlled by party B, and party B is broadly not trying to cause explosions in its own land, when an explosion happens in land controlled by party B you should have a strong prior that the most likely culprit is party A. Journalists should be allowed to assume…

Professional journalists have the responsibility to be epistemologically correct—to accurately say "X told us Y", "our reporter observed Z", etc. You can't jump the gun and launder speculation into truth. That's what Silver's complaining about in the OP: not that the NYT got it wrong, but how in particular they got it wrong, making claims of confidence and certainty that weren't supported by what they had.

The article in question about Israel identified the sources in the headline. What more do you want them to do?

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

#163

Post by selectodude » Fri, Oct 20, 2023, 3:54 PM UTC

musiciangames wrote: post #151

mupuff1234 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OSINT, but the BBC and the guardian going over some of the evidence: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/18/al-ahli-arab-h... https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67144061

Useful links. Noteworthy that the Guardian reports 'The hospital had also been targeted last week' where I suspect 'The hospital had also been hit last week'. Or do they have evidence it was targeted?

The hospital had been targeted in that it was on a key list of locations that the IDF told people to evacuate from.

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

#164

Post by BeetleB » Fri, Oct 20, 2023, 3:56 PM UTC

abigail95 wrote: post #104

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Sure, ignore everything for a week. Unless you want to make money in prediction markets - then help out humanity by reading as much information as possible and moving the price so that people who don't have time to do that can have better information. A week is a long time in a fast moving conflict, and the ambiguity favours the defenders if it slows down any attack. An explosion at a hospital doesn't need a golden r…

Former news junkie here. The GP is correct. Unless you are making concrete decisions based on those conflicts on a day to day basis, there is little to gain following it on a day by day basis.

He says wait a week. I actually used to wait a month - at the beginning of the month I would catch up on all the news. Compared to when I would follow things on a daily basis, I got more accuracy, and less haze. When you go through your RSS feed all at once for a month, you'll see how crazy often things are inaccurate in the first few days - something I didn't notice until I looked at it from on high.

The truth of some things may never get clear. Those are in the minority. For most events, it does by a large margin.

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

#165

Post by mindslight » Fri, Oct 20, 2023, 3:56 PM UTC

Tarq0n wrote: post #63

threeseed wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is there value to most breaking news? It's simply a facet of competition between news outlets, most news actually benefits from some delay.

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.

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

#166

Post by mupuff1234 » Fri, Oct 20, 2023, 3:57 PM UTC

jakelazaroff wrote: post #160

mupuff1234 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

The IDF released the recordings in the first place. Are you claiming that they're a reputable source?

No I don't.

But instead of providing nameless fake experts to try and dispute the recording content they should just say it's impossible to verify so not acceptable as evidence in either direction.

Although I wouldn't mind interviews with actual experts, but saying "independent journalists" with no names or anything definitely turns on red flags.

But ignoring the recording I still find the evidence strong enough to assume this was in all likelihood a failed jihad rocket.

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

#167

Post by DoughnutHole » Fri, Oct 20, 2023, 3:58 PM UTC

jameshart wrote: post #147

perihelions wrote: post #117

NYT had a near-identical fact pattern a few weeks ago. The military of Ukraine accidentally bombed its own city, killing 17 people. NYT falsely and without evidence attributed it to the Russian military—just like in Silver's example with the Gaza hospital. This is a recurring issue, and IMHO suggests a systemic problem with their reporting, not limited to one topic or bureau. Original, conclusory title captured by a…

When journalists hear hoof beats, you want them to think ‘horses’ not ‘zebras’, though, right? When party A is causing a lot of explosions in general in land controlled by party B, and party B is broadly not trying to cause explosions in its own land, when an explosion happens in land controlled by party B you should have a strong prior that the most likely culprit is party A. Journalists should be allowed to assume…

Sometimes it's not horse and zebras, but horses and donkeys - both are reasonably plausible. This is generally the case in a war zone, where stuff goes wrong and friendly fire occurs all the time. If a journalist tells me that it's horses I'd hope they've done the leg work and checked that it's not donkeys first.

The way that the NYT reported on this isn't technically incorrect or *obviously wrong ("Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinian Officials Say") - they basically said "Hoofbeats from horses, party A says". But it stresses the account rather than the source, despite it being fraught to take claims from either side at face value. All people took in was "Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital" despite that claim being far from confirmed.

Journalists can absolutely publish what officials with a vested interest say - but if you're going to frame it in a way that suggests that their claims are more than unverified chatter you'd better make sure that the preponderance of evidence supports that claim.

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

#168

Post by zaphar » Fri, Oct 20, 2023, 3:59 PM UTC

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #156

zaphar wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's complete nonsense. They do it all the time, and they lie or distort at will. Just like every other government, military, or secret service. Example: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/canadian-killed-a... https://legionmagazine.com/one-martyr-down-the-untold-story-... https://www.cjpme.org/fs_033 IDF fired on a UN post and killed neutral UN observers, including a Canadian citizen. They've never admitte…

Israel did not pretend they hadn't fired the missile in that case. You may disagree with whether it was deliberate or not but you have no evidence that it was. Which fine, that's a mental framework you are choosing for yourself.

Hamas, meanwhile, has been caught lying multiple times over the years with actual evidence of those lies. Objectively one of these is far more reliable than the others in their relationship to the truth.

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

#169

Post by pc86 » Fri, Oct 20, 2023, 3:59 PM UTC

tenacious_tuna wrote: post #153

gotoeleven wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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.

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

#170

Post by deschutes » Fri, Oct 20, 2023, 4:00 PM UTC

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…

And yet this was newsworthy for the unusual number of deaths. That's pretty telling.

To your broader point, yes just ignore the problem and everything will go away. That has worked so well.

The folks calling for an unconditional surrender of Hamas are not wrong. That's the only way to end this bloodshed, that, yes, includes civilians on both sides. Only one side is doing it with the primary intent to kill civilians though.