October 22, 2023

Islamist butchers, and their media and academic buddies, failed in their latest rerun of the war against Israel. In the days before online media, particularly Elon Musk’s X, the storyline was a familiar one. Israel would be attacked and the mainstream media would be flooded with accounts from local reporters and photographers and embedded compromised national reporters of civilian injuries and deaths during any response. The emotional response would follow: a call would come for Israel to pull back before taking effective charge of the enemy, and the United States would force its hand.

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Not this time. This time, we could see accounts from both sides, from the pictures and bios of the murdered, injured, and kidnapped civilians, who hailed from countries around the world. This time we could see the videos of the Israeli response. This time we could see the pictures of the bloodshed and hear the accounts of among others, the forensic scientists who examined the butchered bodies of the victims.

This time we could hear the voices of, not only Jews, but Bedouins, Moslems, and Druze in Israel and Moslems in neighboring countries as anti-Hamas as you can find anywhere. This time we could see who was supporting this butchery in the West. This time, those who spread the blood libel are fully exposed.

On X Steven Sinofsky explains the revolution in reporting.

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Much like proprietary software, the flagship media outlets view news gathering through the lens of proprietary source, only in this case the source generally means access to people, information, data that is not available to laypeople… Conversely, these established sources and experts rely on these relationships to spoon out information and views in an effort to shape a narrative. This is a routine/process/game that has only become more institutionalized [snip] In the past before open source, stories would run, information would be provided by “sources close to” whatever was happening in the world, and then that was the established narrative. In today’s world it is not just that everyone anywhere can post their thoughts, personal experiences, videos/photos, or anything that may or may not contribute. It is also that there is a community of people willing to test the veracity of that information… It becomes essentially impossible for the news to be defined by a private conversation between a “well-placed source” and a reporter… Finally add to this that often there are true experts on events that are no longer bound by organizations involved who are willing to lend their opinions. It isn’t simply the domain knowledge or access to the data, but the checks and balances, and the debate (vigorous as it is) across all those bits and pieces. And it is also the speed at which that system works. The participants are available around the clock, in every language, in every time zone. No newsroom has that no matter how big. [snip] Events like yesterday clearly demonstrate just how disruptive the open-source news model is to events compared to the proprietary source model of the past. It also explains why there is a perception that news is far more opinion than it used to be — opinions can be branded and made proprietary far easier than trying to staff a team to compete with a community devoted to geoverification, for example. Some long for the days of the 6pm newscast. This is most certainly a rose-colored view of the past. Those who recall this era remember being soothed by the packaging of the news. In hindsight, what we were watching was not a careful synthesis of fact-checked news but the opinions and interpretations of a small number of people with very limited expertise and even more limited information.[snip] Misinformation is when actors deliberately falsify what is going on. Sharing something and having an opinion as just a random person isn’t that. It is misinformation for institutions that trade on trust and truthfulness to put forth information that has not been vetted by a community or has not used all available sources.

I’d add that as media revenue declines, the staffing only gets thinner and more ignorant.

Truth and Consequences

The Blood Libel that Israel had deliberately targeted a hospital in Gaza, resulting in 500 civilian deaths, was published by, to my knowledge, every major domestic press and television channel. Its source was AP, whose sole source was apparently Hamas. Huge anti-Israel and anti-Jewish demonstrations followed all around the globe. An ancient synagogue was demolished in Tunisa, another was attacked in Spanish Melilla, and Jews and their schools and houses of worship were under threat almost everywhere.

But this time, almost immediately as the charges were bruited by people who had reason to doubt them, but chose instead to rely on their usual suspect sources they were met with videos of the scene before and after, showing beyond reasonable doubt that the hospital was not hit, the explosion came from a misfired rocket which landed in a nearby car park and damage to civilians was minimal. Most of the press has not yet apologized, nor have the Democrats’ Squad, which promoted the account days after it was proved false, and used it to gin up a crowd which surrounded and invaded the Capitol resulting in a reported 300 arrests. (It remains to be seen if any of these will receive anything like the outrageous treatment handed out to even grandmas who walked peacefully on January 6 through open doors and between friendly police lines.)

This is not to say that all the media lacked bias. Some, like the BBC, CBC and notably the New York Times and LA Times, clearly are prejudiced. The NYT, for example, merely kept toning down updated headers and has just “re-enlisted a Hitler-praising Hamas propagandist as part of its team covering the war.”