By Kevin
D. Williamson
Thursday,
October 19, 2023
I have a
theory that the people who own the New York Times are going to
make a lot more money on their investment than they had expected. The only
thing in their way is the people who work at the New York Times.
Allow me
to explain.
The
recent controversy about coverage of the explosion at the Gaza hospital—in
which the Times and others took a culpably credulous position toward Hamas’ unsubstantiated
claims that the blast was the result of an Israeli airstrike and that it killed
nearly 500 people—offers only the faintest prefiguration of where the
disinformation project is headed. There are five distinct relevant factors at
play, none of which has reached its full maturity:
1.
The
growth in scope and quality of professional, well-funded disinformation
programs; everything from troll farms to more sophisticated creators of
counterfeit news.
2.
The
complementary growth of unpaid, freelance activist disinformation operatives
motivated by commercial interests, ideology, racism, religious hatred, and/or
nihilism.
3.
Social
media’s ability to successfully bend critical institutions—ranging from
national newspapers to major political parties—in the direction of servicing
their most immediately profitable customers by feeding their appetites for
cathartic, performative rage.
4.
The
generational shift in attitudes among younger staffers at media outlets such as
the Times, who believe that their own narrow—and often
hysterical—conception of social justice, rather than journalism, is
the true fundamental mission of the institution. This is an attitude they are
taking with them as they rise through the org charts.
5.
The
fact that all of these destructive and warping trends are going to be
supercharged as radically more sophisticated generative-AI disinformation
operations create a tsunami of lies and bespoke fever dreams that will be large
enough to simply overwhelm legitimate journalism and other forms of
intellectually honest information-gathering and analysis if allowed to go
unchecked.
Media
outlets such as the New York Times—and The Dispatch—will
have the opportunity to play a critical role in the emerging communication
environment by offering a service that hasn’t really been fashionable to speak
about in technological and media circles since the 1990s: curation.
As we discussed on a recent episode of Dispatch
Live, the Times does
great reporting on any number of important subjects, but it also has real
problems when it comes to a handful of very big issues: Israel and the Middle
East, the so-called social issues in domestic politics (notably sexuality and
guns), and religion—especially in traditional, conservative, orthodox forms.
The Times knows this. When he was executive editor, Dean
Baquet observed that the paper, and its New York- and
Washington-based peers, simply “don’t get religion. We don’t get the role of
religion in people’s lives.”
But even
where their points of view warp their analysis and disfigure their reporting, institutions
like the Times perform an irreplaceable service simply by
confirming that particular events either did or did not happen. If a suspect
dies in the custody of the New York Police Department, the Times may
cover that event in a way that is informed by certain biases, but readers would
be shocked to learn that the event simply never happened, that the story was
made up for propaganda purposes or just because it was a slow news day. That
isn’t how media bias works, and it isn’t how media sensationalism works.
The
ability to simply confirm that a certain purported fact is a fact and to do so
authoritatively is already enormously valuable, and it is going to get more
valuable every day. The Times, having as it does the most famous
and most prestigious brand in American newspaper journalism, is the company
best positioned to play that curatorial role when it comes to the biggest
stories, the ones that only the major news organizations really have the
resources to cover. The news organization that ultimately wins the credibility race
will end up, I suspect, being one of the most valuable media companies in the
world. That isn’t some high-minded, idealistic dream—you can sell prestige,
which is why even now so much of the Times’ class-war commentary is
underwritten by advertisements from luxury-goods firms such as Cartier. But
doing all that takes some real work—and some real honesty.
The Times’
account of the Gaza hospital explosion was headlined, “Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in
Hospital, Palestinians Say.” The truncated version that initially appeared on Google News and in
many social media posts even omitted “Palestinians say.” But “Palestinians say”
isn’t the kind of cover the Times editors seem to think it is.
For one thing, it may very well be the case that there was no Israeli strike
and no hundreds dead, and you need more than a “sources say” to hang an
airstrike on. “Please note it did not read ‘Missile Strike Kills Hundreds at
Hospital; Investigation Ongoing,’” Commentary’s John
Podhoretz wrote. “The formulation of the headline sentence was
designed to make Israel the motive actor, even if the final clause acknowledges
it as a Palestinian claim.”
The
formulation also raises the question of which Palestinians? In
this case, the source was a health ministry in Gaza controlled by Hamas, a terrorist
organization that is not exactly known for being scrupulous with the truth.
The Times headline appeared over a photo of a wrecked building
that most readers would conclude was the hospital in question—but it wasn’t.
The actual site of the explosion seems to have been the parking lot at the
hospital, and experts looking at the evidence have cast doubt both on the claim
that the damage was the result of an Israeli bomb or missile strike and the
claim that nearly 500 people were killed.
The Wall Street Journal offered this headline, later updated: “U.S.,
Experts Cast Doubt on Palestinian Claims of Israeli Strike on Hospital;
analysts say deadly explosion was more likely due to misfire by local militant
group, but anger in Middle East builds.”
Every
newspaper—and every reporter—makes mistakes. If you aren’t running regular
corrections, you probably aren’t doing enough work. But genuine errors are
random. When the errors follow a particular pattern, generally run in the same
way, and almost always serve the political interests of one of the involved
parties in the controversy being covered, that is bias. And if it
seems to you like the Times’ Israel-Hamas coverage takes a
distinctly sympathetic view of Hamas and a distinctly hostile posture toward
Israel—especially when Israel is being governed by a right-wing government led
by Benjamin Netanyahu—then there’s a reason for that.
As
others have noted, one of the Times reporters named in the
byline of the story being discussed here is Hiba Yazbek, who is, by any
reasonable account, deeply anti-Israel. She is a former intern for progressive
Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan who is vocally and vindictively anti-Israel.
Yazbek describes herself as being personally a victim of Israeli policy
(“mental occupation”), has referred to the killing of senior Hamas commander
Saber Suleiman by the Israeli military as a “murder,” declared herself “livid”
over the Hamas commander’s death, things of that nature. She probably didn’t write the
headline—reporters don’t normally do that—but she exemplifies the kind of
internal culture that informs how the newspaper covers Israel.
People
interested in journalism tend to be interested in politics and have views about
public issues. That isn’t necessarily a problem, though it can be a problem for
reporters who cannot set aside their personal biases enough to do their
jobs. But this is an asymmetrical phenomenon: You are not going to find a
lot of New York Times coverage of the Middle East written by
former Ted Cruz staffers who are members of the Zionist Organization of
America. Avi Mayer, editor of the Jerusalem Post, noted yesterday that Israeli media was
reporting on a supposed IDF recording of a “conversation between Islamic Jihad
terrorists confirming that they launched the rocket that hit the Gaza
hospital.” That recording may or may not settle the
issue definitively—but you can be sure that the New York Times will
not report on it with the kind of credulousness that it did Hamas’ (probably
untrue) assertions about the hospital explosion. Obviously, what’s needed isn’t
more credulousness all the way around—not a fairer distribution of
credulousness—but less credulousness. You won’t get less credulousness from
people who simply want to believe what Hamas is telling them.
Rush
Limbaugh used to say that he’d read something interesting in the New
York Times and say, “Huh, that’s interesting. I wonder if that really
happened?” That is, generally speaking, hyperbole, a very considerable
overstatement of the actual bias problem at the Times and
similar institutions. But was there, in fact, an Israeli airstrike on a Gaza
hospital? Maybe, maybe not. Was there any airstrike? Maybe, maybe not. Were
nearly 500 people killed? Maybe, maybe not. We don’t really know. What we know
is that there was an explosion and that Hamas has made certain claims about
that explosion, which are disputed by Israeli authorities (as one might expect)
and also by high-ranking American officials, including the president of the United States.
Sometimes,
“Hamas claims x” really is news all on its own; sometimes, it
isn’t. But surely claims from Hamas deserve to be treated with the same level
of skepticism as claims from, say, Donald Trump, Jerry Falwell Jr., or other
members of the Liars’ Hall of Fame. Treating these liars with skepticism comes
naturally to Times writers and editors—it feels good, and,
more important, it feels right. Doing the same with Hamas doesn’t,
for some reason. But consider, for a moment, that a university scientist doing
peer-reviewed climate research after receiving a grant from an oil company
would be treated with a great deal more skepticism by the New York
Times than a group of avowedly genocidal terrorists. That is a weird
place to be, intellectually. And not because we should have more faith in the
good intentions of oil companies.
If
the Times gets so easily wrongfooted by this kind of
amateur-level disinformation—similar claims of official atrocities while at war
have been a staple of martial propaganda for centuries—how is it
going to deal with the avalanche of radically more sophisticated and voluminous
disinformation that is headed its way? I am a Times subscriber,
and, like many other readers, I do not count on the Times for a neutral
or unbiased account of hot-button issues, but I do count on being able to
assume that events I read about underneath that big blackletter “T” are things
that actually happened. That is not the same as things Hamas claims
have happened. This matters, because the Times does enjoy
that prestige I mentioned above, and for that reason, it has real power to
shape readers’ understanding of public events—well beyond its own pages.
Add a
little bit of intellectual laziness and ideologically motivated analysis into
the mix, for example, and you get this statement from Sen. Bernie Sanders in
which he writes “the bombing of a Palestinian hospital is an unspeakable
crime.” We don’t know for a fact that there actually was a
bombing of a Palestinian hospital at all, but Sanders—and many others—write and
speak as though this were an established fact, thanks in part to the credulous
headline writers and social media editors at the Times and elsewhere.
Sanders may think he is being clever by omitting explicit blame for Israel from
that sentence, but that is just intellectual cowardice. I wouldn’t put anything
past Hamas, but nobody is seriously suggesting at this time that there was,
intentionally at least, a Palestinian bombing of a Palestinian hospital; to
claim, as Sen. Sanders does, that there was a bombing of a hospital makes the
anti-Israel case without going to the trouble of naming Israel.
Some of
what Sanders is indulging here is just laziness and stupidity, but some of it
is malice. And when the Times’ headline writers do get pushed into
acknowledging the news, the verbal contortions that result are damned well positively
hilarious: “Biden Affirms Evidence Backing Israel’s Denial of Causing Hospital
Blast.”
We can
already feel the lack of an authoritative and trustworthy news media in the
current environment. That environment is about to get a lot more challenging.
One hopes that if the Times cannot rise to the challenge that another
outlet can. But there’s a lot to stack up to: The Times is as
widely known as any newspaper in the world, it currently has two dozen overseas
bureaus and employs some 1,700 journalists—and it was founded when there was a
Whig in the White House. The arbiter of credibility cannot be a state actor,
and the big tech companies—Alphabet, Meta, etc.—have even worse internal
cultural and personnel problems than the Times does. Among newspapers,
the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post have
names that mean (with apologies to my friends at both papers) almost as
much as that of the New York Times, and there are a few non-U.S.
players that have something like the necessary standing, the Financial
Times and the Economist prominent among them. And, of
course, ultimately the work will fall to more than one
institution—specialization will be necessary and desirable. But we need
somebody to do what the New York Times pretends to do,
promises to do, and, more often than critics might admit, actually does. Like
Congress, the New York Times suffers from an excess of
self-importance and a deficit of self-respect, both of which undermine its
ability to do its job. And the job needs doing.
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