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.
