A series of Slack messages obtained from Vanity Fair shows that inside the New York Times there was immediate concern about how to deal with the bombing of the hospital in Gaza. The senior editors appear to have rejected suggestions from an international editor and a young reporter based in Israel who contributes to the newspaper’s war coverage that they not take too many risks in framing events.
Several news outlets are under scrutiny for their initial coverage of the explosion. Among these the Times, which published a rare editors’ note on Monday admitting that the newspaper «relied too one-sidedly on Hamas claims and did not make it clear that these claims could not be immediately verified» in the initial coverage of the explosion. Internal messages open a window into the decision-making process of Times and reveal how some journalists have urged caution in the early moments of a tragedy.
On the afternoon of October 17 – shortly after the first version of the story, with the headline, was published in the newspaper «Israeli attack kills hundreds of people in hospital, Palestinian officials say» – a senior editor tagged two colleagues from the Live team and wrote: «I think we could be a little more direct on the front page: Palestinian authorities say at least 500 people were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a hospital on Tuesday of Gaza City.”
One of Tagged Live’s editors responded: “Wouldn’t it be better to be careful?”
A young editor, covering the conflict for the Times from Jerusalem, he added: “Better not to risk it.”
The senior editor replied: “We are checking.”
The exchange took place on a Slack channel of the Times called #israel-briefings, to which hundreds of journalists have access. Vanity Fair did not disclose the names of his colleagues Times involved in the exchange. The Times declined to comment on the Slack messages.
A few minutes later, a senior editor from the international desk wrote on the same Slack channel: “The [titolo] on the [home page] it goes too far.”
A second senior editor asked, “How is this different from the blog title,” referring to a headline in the newspaper’s live-blog format: “Both say that, according to Palestinian sources, Israel is to blame for the massacre.”
“I think we cannot attribute such serious responsibility on the basis of a single source, without having first carried out checks”insisted the director of the international desk, «and then slam it at the opening of the [home page]. Citing a single source does not protect us from criticism and errors.”
A second senior editor from the Live team also responded by underlining the need to discuss the issue in a larger meeting.
As he reported Joshua Benton by NiemanLab, the phrase “Israeli attack” was not removed from the main headline until 4:01 pm that day.
Monday, nearly a week after the hospital attack and the Slack messages in question, the Times published the aforementioned Editors’ Note, the first since the Executive Director Joe Kahn took over the helm of the newspaper 16 months ago. «Given the delicate nature of the news in the context of a conflict that is spreading like wildfire and the great publicity that has been given to it, the editors of Times they should have taken more care in their initial coverage and been more explicit about what information could be verified.”it read.
Kahn also spoke about this note in ainterview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro on one of the podcasts of Times, The Headlines: War Briefing. “I believe That we needed not so much to reflect on the process of gathering news, which happens continuously”, he explained, “but rather to on the moment in which a given information is verifiedwhether or not it is complete enough to be placed very prominently in a title very, very high up, in what I call the banner title, and to get the extra promotion and attention that that kind of title warrants.”
«Considering the role in this story of Hamas, an organization that had just attacked and killed hundreds of Israelis, mostly civilians, I wondered if it wouldn’t be easier to err on the side of caution,” Garcia-Navarro noted. «I mean this wasn’t a scoop of the Times. If there was any doubt about responsibilities, given the importance of what was at stake, wouldn’t it have been easier to refrain from taking a position on the matter and remain in a sort of limbo? Why the Times he did not?”.
When asked about his personal involvement in the decision to publish that title, Kahn responded: «We were all aware of and discussed the developments of the attack or the hospital explosion. The words of the title were discussed by a group of people who regularly deal with it. I wasn’t directly involved, but I followed the coverage of that story very closely.”
Doubts remain over last week’s deadly explosion in a Gaza hospital. Hamas government officials say the massacre was the result of an Israeli air strike, but Israel has denied any responsibility, saying it was caused by a faulty rocket fired by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another armed group based in Gaza. Last week the White House said a Defense Department assessment, “based on analysis of overhead imagery, wiretaps and open source information,” showed Israel was “not responsible” for the hospital explosion, but that the collection of information had not yet been completed. Independent forensic analysislike the one conducted by CNNthey also suggest that the hospital explosion was caused by a rocket fired from inside Gaza and not by an Israeli airstrike. US intelligence agencies now estimate that between 100 and 300 people died in the explosion, while Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry has revised its previous death toll of 500 to 471.
The hospital explosion sparked anti-Israel protests across the Middle East and North Africa, with the leaders of several Arab countries issuing statements blaming Israel for the massacre and Jordan canceling a planned president’s summit Joe Biden with Arab leaders. The way news outlets covered this event, which had a global impact, is understandably under scrutiny.
Also there BBC he issued a mea culpa for his coverage immediately after the explosion. A correspondent of the channel, with long experience as a reporter in Gaza, while stressing that he had not yet verified who was behind the explosion, suggested that he was “It’s difficult to imagine what else it could have been, given the size of the explosion, other than one or several Israeli air strikes”. “We recognize that, although this is a rapidly evolving situation, it was wrong to speculate in this way on the possible causes and we apologize for this, even if our correspondent never reported that it was an Israeli attack,” he declared in a statement from the BBC last week. Oliver Darcy from the CNN he reported Monday evening that other outlets that gave credence to Hamas’s version of events remained silent (Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera, Associated Press) or have not acknowledged any fault in the cover-up of the explosion (CNN, Reuters).
The commentator of Times, Thomas Friedman, ha said his newspaper made the wrong decision in a podcast last week: “Islamic Jihad may have scored its biggest public relations victory in this world by blowing up its own hospital – by the way, unintentionally. Apparently, they launched a barrage of missiles at Israel and, as often happens, one of them was defective and landed in the parking lot of that hospital,” said Friedman, who is among the most authoritative voices in the US media on the Middle Oriente, in the newspaper’s podcast Matter of Opinion last Friday. «The news immediately went around the world, earning headlines everywhere – Israel attacks a hospital – including a newspaper we know very well. And even before the truth finally came out, the news had already inflamed the entire Arab world.”
Source: Vanity Fair
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