It's all looking like pretty standard news stuff to me.
And I don't know about you, but I see "controversial, disputed, or downright false claims that were reported uncritically as facts" all the time even in mainstream US publications.
So I'd need to see some evidence here that Al Jazeera is particularly worse.
Your second claim seems to being mistaking their role as telling absolute truth. The very first sentence makes it clear that they are reporting an official government statement, and the next that Israel disputes it and says the PLJ was responsible. This seems very normal for war reporting and I note that they’re very careful to attribute each claim so the reader can decide how much to trust it.
Edit: your first source is a pro-Israeli advocacy group run by a former AIPAC employee, which has marked its coverage of the war with things like baselessly claiming reporters were in on the October 7th attacks:
Given that in this case they ran a report by a witness, and then publicly updated that to say that a Hamas investigation had called her credibility into question, it’s interesting to note how carefully the “Honest Reporting” writer relies on uncited insinuation or tries to distract your attention to statements by people who are not part of al Jazeera. Again, it’s not great that they ran a story by someone who lied but that’s a hazard of breaking news coverage and it’s hardly unique in the field.
> then publicly updated that to say that a Hamas investigation had called her credibility into question
I don't think there's much of a question, the claims were just fabricated, according to Hamas themselves.
By "publicly updated", do you just mean quietly deleting the articles with false information? As far as I know, they never acknowledged the error and published a retraction, which calls into question their legitimacy as a news organization.
I was referring to the lead in that “Honest Reporting” article which was about one of their employees doing the opposite of this claim by correcting the record:
Now, I do think they should have put out an official statement pointing out the unreliability of the interviewee rather than simply yanking the video but a single unreliable witness interviewed in a tumultuous event which is promptly dropped seems to fall well short of establishing a lie. All news organizations interview people who turn out to be wrong or misleading, so we’d want to see more than a single interview to establish whether there’s a pattern of poor vetting or running a story after evidence has come forth that the witness is unreliable. The public has rather strongly expressed a desire for immediate news coverage rather than waiting for lengthy review and corroboration.
I don't really take issue with publishing the allegation (it's credibility might have been lacking, but that's difficult to judge), just quietly yanking the false information. Wouldn't any legitimate news agency do some form of retraction, such as adding a prominent note at the top of the original article?
To be clear, I think they should have updated their liveblog to add a link to the subsequent Hamas statement calling its accuracy into question. That said, I think some of this comes into questions about the format - this wasn’t a specific story but one of many breaking news details in a tumultuous event, and it’s far from unprecedented within the industry.
As a good example of how messy this can be, consider this story:
None of that is mentioned on that story and the only correction is a minor detail.
Now, to be clear, I am not saying that it’s okay for Al Jazeera to be sloppy if the NYT is sloppy but rather that we should be consistent in our standards and they should probably be higher for everyone. The public and especially people covered in these stories deserve better.
I've been following the Screams Without Words story and I don't think it's really comparable to something that was basically confirmed to be false. The NYT stands behind the report
> We remain confident in the accuracy of our reporting and stand by the team’s investigation which was rigorously reported, sourced and edited.
A lot of the "debunking" seems fairly weak in my opinion. E.g. Gal Abdush's brother in law made a rather baseless statement that "the media invented" Gal's rape. Really the article was reporting what Israeli police believed, mainly based on (non-public) video evidence which the Times reporters also reviewed.
I think it would be comparable if Israeli police retracted their claims and stated that Gal was not raped. Then surely the NYT would make some kind of clear correction/retraction, rather than quietly deleting (part of) the report.
Specifically, that is the position of the intelligence agencies of the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and Canada, and also the conclusion of investigations by the Associated Press, CNN, The Economist, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal. That's really the best we know about it.
I have no idea how all those newspapers could manage >>independent<< investigations, as the Israeli army banned journalists. The first time [that I saw] CNN reported on something they actually filmed was The Israeli army pointing at tunnels.
The "Summary" is clearly biased and absolutely not "The best we know" depending on who is "we"
I have no idea about the reasons of the explosion, but contesting the palestinian dead toll without [credible] sources is politics.
I dare say United Nations might have a more balanced approach, and they cite the enclave health authorities when they say that as of April 22th there are 34,000 deaths. No other source is cited for some reason.
I have no idea how all those newspapers could manage >>independent<< investigations, as the Israeli army banned journalists. The first time [that I saw] CNN reported on something they actually filmed was The Israeli army pointing at tunnels.
BTW, CNN is now much less biased towards the israeli narrative. During 2023 [Latam] CNN seemed a Netanyahu's outlet more that anything. France24 and DW >>seem<< neutral right now. Spain outlets have mediocre coverange, and Latinamerican outlets are only citing random news from other outlets.
The Wikipedia "Summary" is clearly biased and absolutely not "The best we know" depending on who is "we"
I dare say United Nations might have a more balanced approach, and they cite the enclave health authorities when they say that as of April 22th there are 34,000 deaths. No other source is cited for some reason.
You're giving a ton of weasel words here: most likely (but not certainly). All that word salad of wishy washy makes it clear that the fog of war is still present regarding those events.
Describing the report as credible is not accurate. Given that many news outlets retracted their initial claims and the official statements, it is very likely that there is enough evidence that Israel did not bomb the hospital and that the reported number of casualties is inaccurate. You using the "fog of war" argument to dismiss his claim—which was honest enough to say "not certainly"—is irrelevant. You could say this about almost every other reported event in Gaza.
If you include the surrounding context, that al Ahli had been targeted before, and since, and that other hospitals had also been not only targeted but actively sieged for days, at is in fact credible that the Israeli military targeted and hit the Hospital.
Now remote forensics on the site makes it implausible that the initial reports of an Israeli airstrike were true, however we still haven’t ruled out other types of munitions by the Israeli military.
Note that the initial reports of those supportive of Israel were also false. They claimed that they captured the rockets which they claimed hit the hospital on camera. It turned out this footage was of an unrelated rocket which got completely destroyed in air. Al Jazeera was actually one of few media outlets which correctly hypothesized that this rocket was unrelated to the incident.
The fact is, we still don’t know what happened, all we know is that many of the initial reports were false. There was a lot of lying involved to win the narrative (especially by Israeli officials), and there are at least two very credible hypotheses on what happened.
It’s not worse at all. Actually probably the opposite, I learn some crazy stuff watching Al Jazeera and sometimes don’t believe it and go off researching it … and wow it’s very concerning. It seems almost certain to me there has to be some conspiracy amongst US publications to conceal certain information around Israeli-Palestinian conflict and history. As one example, read up on Ben Gvir, current National Security Minister … it’s totally crazy.
Unfortunately, whenever anything is being posted on this topic, we get to see so many comments such as this.
> It seems almost certain to me there has to be some conspiracy amongst US publications to conceal certain information around Israeli-Palestinian conflict and history
No evidence was provided, just another unfounded conspiracy theory. What can we take away from this?
It’s hard to provide proof of such a conspiracy due to the nature of the conspiracy is to omit information. It’s really only an impression I have when watching France 24 and AJ amongst other non-US news sources and then comparing to US sources.
For examples of stories or topics that appear to be dramatically underreported in the US:
- extremist positions of Israeli cabinet members. Including associations with Zionist terrorists, obviously very anti-Muslim/Arab but also including anti-Christian positions
- Israeli settlers expansions and history of aggressive actions
- famine conditions in Gaza
- and most simply the very high levels of casualties in Gaza, including children and women in huge numbers.
I really don’t ever hear any of those items mentioned even in left leaning US media. Now you might say well France and Qatar are biased due to more Arab listeners. Maybe a bit yeah because I think I hear less on Hamas atrocities perhaps than in US media.
Every media is biased.
Now per my other comment, once you criticize either side then you get automatically labeled as on the other side, our instinct is to use Hero-Villain frameworks, not Villain-Villain. Once you break out of that both leadership and politics on both side look really bad and weighing evil is not a good approach.
As far as worse, I'm not conducting a longitudinal study or anything so I can't compare their rate of "fake news" compared to Fox News or MSNBC or whatever your control group is.
Anecdotally I've noticed the biggest delta between their English and Arabic reporting in the immediate aftermath of major events. For example after the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion, the English version of their reporting was along the lines of "According to a Gaza Ministry of Health spokesperson, 500+ people were killed. A Hamas spokesperson said that the explosion was caused by an Israeli airstrike, launched via an F-16 or F-35." They made sure to hedge and make clear that their sources might be biased.
This[1] seems like the sort of Arabic coverage I remember seeing in the past, a much more definitive statement just saying that the occupiers massacred 500+ martyrs.
Unfortunately Google Translate doesn't play nicely with the wayback machine so it's tedious to build up a library of concrete examples.
I'm looking at the Google Translate version of their Arabic site right now:
https://www-aljazeera-net.translate.goog/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_t...
It's all looking like pretty standard news stuff to me.
And I don't know about you, but I see "controversial, disputed, or downright false claims that were reported uncritically as facts" all the time even in mainstream US publications.
So I'd need to see some evidence here that Al Jazeera is particularly worse.