New York Times Finally Admits the Truth About Its Gaza Hospital Coverage a Week Later
The New York Times built its name on integrity and honesty. Neither seem to have a place in their operations today.
A shadow of their former selves, the Times has lost its noble reputation and a great deal of its audience. Profit and market share replaced truth and rigid scrutiny over sources and stories. They’ve become common and distasteful, more of a rag than a respectable news organization.
They’ve become part of the establishment media who don’t think twice about misinforming the public. Most recently, they falsely reported the details around a recent attack on a hospital in Gaza City that killed nearly 500 people.
All too quick to believe Hamas government officials who blamed the Israel Defense Forces for the air strike that resulted in additional casualties, they failed to accurately substantiate the truth of the matter.
Instead, the Times ran with the false report and put it out to the public, introduced by a bold headline taking up space at the top of their website.
They did what they now do best, scribble words that inflame a very hostile situation, slap a sexy title on it, and throw the meat into the cage. They admitted to their failing through an explanation in the editor’s note Monday that revealed their heavy reliance on claims by Hamas.
“However, the early versions of the coverage — and the prominence it received in a headline, news alert and social media channels — relied too heavily on claims by Hamas, and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified.”
“The report left readers with an incorrect impression about what was known and how credible the account was,” the note added.
By way of this, they demonstrated just how little they care for readers or the tense state of our nation currently.
Then, as the actual facts unfolded that proved their story wrong, they slowly addressed the error by stealthily updating the article. They finally recanted the original piece altogether through an editor’s note that found its way to light a week later.
What took so long, one might ask? In news, a week is an eternity as events unfold like lightspeed presently.
“Editors should have taken more care with the initial presentation,” the Times has finally admitted. The outlet got the fix that they wanted, while legally covering their butts by simply publishing the editor’s note that they did.
Had they remained the legitimate news organization that they started out as, they would have aggressively walked back their mistake in the form of a story accurately portraying what did happen, as verified by American and other international officials.
They would have then published that story with the same boldly-lettered headline they used in their mistake and coupled that with equal placement. None of this happened.
Instead, they chose to walk their reporting of the event backward at a snail’s clip.
No one is under the impression that news organizations will get it right every time. Readers accept mistakes, especially from reputable news organizations.
News was never meant to be subjective. No adjectives are required in writing it.
Emotions and leanings should also be kept out of it. News is simply the regurgitation of verified facts. There are also rules to news, one of the most important ones being, “when mistakes happen, you owe it to readers to stand up, sound the alarm, and set things right.”
The New York Times knows to do better. It just chooses not to — the result of this decision being that they do more harm than good. They should be ashamed.
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
