Why the New York Times Gets it Wrong
What if journalistic inaccuracy wasn't intentional, but cultural?
Nobody gets up in the morning intending to get a story wrong.
So why is it so difficult for some news organizations to get military stories right? Based on the data, I believe that military accuracy may have a direct correlation with the number of veterans on staff.
Data
The data and collection methods for the table above is available for download here.
Timeline
The original New York Times Tweet.
Intelligence Probability Estimation Methods
ICD 203 can be downloaded here.
LinkedIn Data
(Note, results may change over time)
Individual LinkedIn Pages
Collective staff count
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) At the New York Times
New York Times DEI Call To Action Report
Diversity in the Hell’s Angels
Nazi Emblems of “Way Outs” are No Symbols of Hate
The M4 “Machine Gun” Mistake.
U.S. Military Returns to the Jungle, Training for a Very Different Threat
The Technical manual for the M4 Carbine:
I feel like the issue here isn't military expertise but the fundamental nature of journalism and journalistic practice. It's the same issue that caused problems reporting on global warming.
Journalists are **appropriately** trained to only report information collected from sources. They might use their knowledge of science or law to decide who to talk to, and how to explain it but they aren't supposed to go out and speculate. They are also trained to present both sides on a controversial topic.
Ok, so now you have some kind of Israeli strike in Gaza. You want to report on it and Israel is being responsible and not giving an estimated death toll when they don't have information. The only authority in Gaza is claiming some huge number of casualties.
It's news so you need to report it, as a journalist you're trained not to personally opine or take sides so you're reluctant to say "Hamas claims X killed but they lie" and you aren't being informative if you don't at least include what Hamas claimed. That's how you end up with true but misleading titles like Hamas claims X killed in airstrike.
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Now maybe your inclined to say, well they know one side lies and they are being misleading by not conveying that fact.
And to some extent I agree, but it's hard because I think we've seen that even when media have done similar things for valid reasons as in global warming it does create a situation where reporters are more vulnerable to injecting their own ideological preferences and bias in ways that can prevent real important news from being reported (Hunter Biden laptop issue...not very significant imo but treating it as fake news was pretty clearly incorrect).
Great analysis Ryan, as always. I hope this gets shared with the right folks and gets the awareness it deserves. I don’t frequently consume major network news, but occasionally will tune in to different sources for particular events. I will say that I have on many occasions seen CNN use retired generals for on-air analysis (Ret Gen Wesley Clark, as just one example jumps out, but I know there are others). Fox does the same in my experience. A couple interesting things jump out: 1. why are these folks not listed in the public sources you looked at and 2. Are these veterans even being used by the networks to fact check stories or are they just talking heads that are stuck talking about stories that are wrong without really being empowered to second guess the story.
Again, thanks for highlighting this issue. It’s so important as part of a broader need to get smarter as a society about the misinformation being used to manipulate all of us on so many different topics. We need well-informed sources of info we can trust more than ever.
And we need folks like you educating us so we can all get smarter to combat it. Keep up the great work!