Some journalists with The New York Times took issue with the newspaper attributing the Gaza hospital attack last week to “Israeli airstrikes”, according to a recent report by Vanity Fair.
Vanity Fair accessed Slack messages sent between senior editors, a junior reporter in Israel, and an international editor over NYT’s coverage of the hospital attack earlier this week.
According to the report, a senior news editor said, “I think we can be a bit more direct in the lead: At least 500 people were killed on Tuesday by an Israel airstrike at a hospital in Gaza City, the Palestinian authorities said.”
The junior reporter suggested they “hedge” it, but the senior editor overruled saying the headline had been “attributed”. This back and forth continued, with an international editor chipping in that the headline “goes way too far” and that “we can’t just hang the attribution of something so big on one source without having tried to verify it”.
NYT subsequently issued an editor’s note on how its initial coverage “relied too heavily on claims by Hamas, and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified”.
“Israel subsequently denied being at fault and blamed an errant rocket launch by the Palestinian faction group Islamic Jihad, which has in turn denied responsibility. American and other international officials have said their evidence indicates that the rocket came from Palestinian fighter positions,” the editor’s note said. “...Given the sensitive nature of the news during a widening conflict, and the prominent promotion it received, Times editors should have taken more care with the initial presentation...”
The strikes on the Gaza hospital took place on October 17, killing nearly 500 people. Gaza’s health ministry said an “Israeli airstrike” was behind the devastation while Israel blamed “misfired Palestinian rockets”, even though some have expressed doubts over these claims.
On Tuesday, NYT published an analysis of a missile video “widely cited as evidence” by the US and Israeli officials to blame the hospital blast on the purported misfiring of a Palestinian rocket. The newspaper said the video showing two explosions was “unrelated” to the Gaza hospital explosions.
It said a “detailed” visual analysis of the video clip of an explosion in the air over Gaza and another on the ground – taken from Al Jazeera livestream – shows “something else” and “does not shed light on what happened”.
“The missile seen in the video is most likely not what caused the explosion at the hospital. It actually detonated in the sky roughly two miles away,” the NYT report said, adding that its findings “does not answer” what caused the blast.
But Israel’s account has been backed by other leading media outlets in the West. Earlier this week, BBC correspondent Jon Donnison reported live on the hospital attack, saying that it was “hard to see what else this could be, really, given the size of the explosion, other than an Israeli air strike or several air strikes”.
BBC soon issued a correction saying it was “wrong to speculate”.
Meanwhile, 23 journalists have been killed so far in the recent flare-up between Israel and Palestine. Many of them were trying to make audiences across the world aware of the horrors of war despite obstacles to their work. Read about them here.
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