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).
So why do they refer to every armoured vehicle as a 'tank'? Why do they say AK16 and M47? Calling an M4 a 'machine gun? Calling rifles 'guns' even? And how about every edged weapon over a foot long is automatically a 'samurai sword'? Ignorance of the nomenclature; nothing to do with the 'fundamental nature of journalism' and everything to do with simply not having a clue.
Ask any veteran how they react when they watch movies showing behaviour between officers, NCOs and men that would simply NEVER happen. I remember my first experiences on working with US Navy, Marines and Army and how we all commented on how they weren't like in the movies. Their discipline was strict! I know, it is often done for literary reasons to move the story along but it twists our Wa. Saluting without hats, talking back and insubordination, physical abuse, ridiculous tactics and such is all down to ignorance. Movies hire advisers like Capt. Dale Dye (Band of Brothers etc) and still get it wrong... print and TV don't even hire many vets, it seems.
Even if a vet is hired their copy is edited, usually by someone worried about the boss kicking their butt, the advertisers, the stock holders and the legal department and they know sod all about the details and don't care so they wield the red pen. Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do... or what they write about. It just gets a tad tiresome. Great work as always Ryan, I got's me five bucks worth agin!
As I remarked in another comment I absolutely agree that not hiring vets causes the kind of errors you mention. It's just not the primary issue causing them to repeat pro-Palestinian propoganda in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
It's just like with science reporting. They don't have scientists on staff so they make all kinds of little errors when they try and translate what whatever expert they spoke to said -- but that usually comes up in things like naming the equipment, using wrong terminology etc but that's not the big thing going on with the coverage of Gaza. An they absolutely should hire more veterans (and people with experience in science for that matter) but that will fix all the kinds of issues you mention not the fact that they publish a bunch of headlines that say: Hamas claims X killed in Israeli attack. The problem there isn't that they are unaware that Hamas lies or haven't talked to anyone who raises this concern so having vets on staff won't solve it.
There are two issues here and while hiring veterans fixes one it doesn't fix the problems that give Hamas the upper hand in the information war.
Spot on. The real issue is why do they knowingly mislead? Is there someone behind the scenes orchestrating this? I don't believe in that kind of conspiracy simply because it is too big and too widespread. Is it a case of GroupThink? You get enough people in a room with similar mindsets and they multiply the canon generically. Look at how people in Communist countries quickly developed a style of report writing that ticked the boxes and kept them from the Gulags.Islamic extremists all talk the same way, forever saying Inshallah and throwing in the required epithets and we see it with the PC Left and their rewriting of the language. what do others think?
They knowingly mislead because they are not unbiased. This is not surprising. The NYT is 110% pro-israel, but they have to make concessions sometimes to maintain their reputation.
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!
Well, I had to use a baseline - and that common baseline was the webpages that the major news organizations list as reporters and contributors. I couldn't pick and choose which data to show and everything I do has to be repeatable.
Unfortunately, channels don't list their "talking head" experts. I've been a talking head expert on NEWSMAX and we are just there to provide color commentary for an answer that they already have.
I think this is an excellent point. Traditional journalism has a strong seperation between the reporters themselves and the experts and analysts they rely on.
I agree that it doesn't solve the problem of journalists not being personally familiar (Ryan is discovering the same problem scientists have been complaining about for years) but the way the errors tend to materialize is things like mangling basic terms or concepts when they try to translate their expert's viewpoint (calling a carbine a machine gun) not in top level headlines. The issue with Israel is a different problem.
This is why I am so happy to be a paid subscriber!!! Thank you, Ryan. I do not always agree with you or what you cover, but you are exactly what I think a journalist should be.
When it comes to New York Times (NYT), the issue is that they lack professional military expertise. They could always find sufficient expertise if they really wanted to. The fundamental problem with NYT is that over the course of the last 20 years or so it has turned from a liberal-leaning newspaper of record into a bastion of illiberal left-wing progressivism. It suffices to see the 14 JUL 20 letter of resignation from NYT by Bari Weiss, a former up-and-coming NYT opinion writer and editor , who cited the atmosphere of outright hostility toward staffers who hold anything other than left-of-center ideologies, and especially, the 14 DEC 23 Economist essay " When the New York Times lost its way" written by James Bennet, the former NYT Chief Opinion Editor, who was drummed out of NYT by progressives after he dared to publish an opinion piece by Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR).
Can someone please tell me why the Palestinian health ministry's numbers are reported seemingly as accurate? Are they deriving some level of support or supplies from Hamas and subject to influence? Is this worthy of a disclaimer when reported? sure, they may be the only available numbers and the PHM may do an outstanding job of health services. but are the people giving out numbers the same ones providing health services and running hospitals.?
Honestly, all casualties are suspect since Gaza really doesn't have a free press. The exact count may be unknown since you may have people buried in buildings.
Israel is a little better since you can't hide casualties from grieving families. They also have a free press who would investigate casualty claims.
Most groups including Israel and the US consider it to be largely accurate. The issue is how those deaths are reported. The lancet noted that there was no time, date, location or cause of death provided on the death registry and obviously no distinguishing between combatants and civilians. So we can say with a high degree of certainty that the number of those who have died is correct to the best of their knowledge, however the issue is we have no way of knowing if they were civilians who died, in say a car accident or shot by hamas as 'zionist sympathisers', or if they were combatants who died in an air strike or a raid.
The issue then is people conflate the largely accurate number of casualties to be all civilian casualties because usually we have a military figures, people don't typically consider terror groups to be thousand's strong (despite groups like ISIS, Taliban and boko haram being tens's of thousands strong), Hamas obviously wont show their 'martyrs' but are more than happy to show dead civilians, and Israel consider it to be extremely not kosher to show corpses, even at funerals (hence why most Israeli photos of October 7th are 'cleaned up' of corpses) so all people end up seeing for the vast majority of the time is dead or dying Palestinian civilians.
I think you’re underestimating the number of people with a deeply seated hatred for Israel and Jews who readily assume the worst and actively seek out opportunities to ‘reveal’ the evil within the Jewish and Israeli communities. Palestinians successfully took over the PR narrative around the change of the millennium and have worked it hard especially on college campuses, as those students matured in their trades and became professors themselves they spread it from above as well as below which is how a top academic at the top schools can in a serious hearing assert that calls for a Jewish Genocide are only antisemetic if followed by an attempt to do so.
Excellent analysis, as almost always. Points worth noting:
1. CNN even brings in guests who are former senior officers.
2. Military news simply wasn’t as big a deal two years ago. That changed in one fell swoop.
As far as your future focus goes, we can all hope that military news dwindles as a topic. Regardless, your disinformation forensics will be valued as long as humans interface with media - including the Internet.
As usual, great analysis. I’m proud to be a paid Substack supporter. It is surprising that these outlets are so thin in subject matter experts on staff rather than those talking heads, they contract with when a specific need arises. Especially the print media like the New York Times, think they want to be accurate, but maybe I’m being naïve in this time of sensationalistic and politically skewed journalism. You sir, are a national treasure. Keep up the great work brother.
While I would like to hope no one wants to get a story wrong but at the same time, I don't think they're entirely concerned about getting the story right. Their own bias skews how they cover the story.
Answer: Read S. Steven Powell’s book “Covert Cadre: Inside the Institute For Policy Studies”. Specifically, chapter 8. This is a left-wing think tank, lobbyist organization, with very close knit Communist ties even today. The political Left hates the U.S. military. They use their influence via the 2 big media sources to push Communist propaganda , ie, the New York Times and the Washington Post.
I’m not sure you’re correct about the reporting from the NYT having zero military experience. One of the reporters seems to be Israeli and an undergraduate of an israeli university. She should have served in the IDF albeit at a low level and briefly.
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.
-
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).
So why do they refer to every armoured vehicle as a 'tank'? Why do they say AK16 and M47? Calling an M4 a 'machine gun? Calling rifles 'guns' even? And how about every edged weapon over a foot long is automatically a 'samurai sword'? Ignorance of the nomenclature; nothing to do with the 'fundamental nature of journalism' and everything to do with simply not having a clue.
Ask any veteran how they react when they watch movies showing behaviour between officers, NCOs and men that would simply NEVER happen. I remember my first experiences on working with US Navy, Marines and Army and how we all commented on how they weren't like in the movies. Their discipline was strict! I know, it is often done for literary reasons to move the story along but it twists our Wa. Saluting without hats, talking back and insubordination, physical abuse, ridiculous tactics and such is all down to ignorance. Movies hire advisers like Capt. Dale Dye (Band of Brothers etc) and still get it wrong... print and TV don't even hire many vets, it seems.
Even if a vet is hired their copy is edited, usually by someone worried about the boss kicking their butt, the advertisers, the stock holders and the legal department and they know sod all about the details and don't care so they wield the red pen. Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do... or what they write about. It just gets a tad tiresome. Great work as always Ryan, I got's me five bucks worth agin!
As I remarked in another comment I absolutely agree that not hiring vets causes the kind of errors you mention. It's just not the primary issue causing them to repeat pro-Palestinian propoganda in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
It's just like with science reporting. They don't have scientists on staff so they make all kinds of little errors when they try and translate what whatever expert they spoke to said -- but that usually comes up in things like naming the equipment, using wrong terminology etc but that's not the big thing going on with the coverage of Gaza. An they absolutely should hire more veterans (and people with experience in science for that matter) but that will fix all the kinds of issues you mention not the fact that they publish a bunch of headlines that say: Hamas claims X killed in Israeli attack. The problem there isn't that they are unaware that Hamas lies or haven't talked to anyone who raises this concern so having vets on staff won't solve it.
There are two issues here and while hiring veterans fixes one it doesn't fix the problems that give Hamas the upper hand in the information war.
Spot on. The real issue is why do they knowingly mislead? Is there someone behind the scenes orchestrating this? I don't believe in that kind of conspiracy simply because it is too big and too widespread. Is it a case of GroupThink? You get enough people in a room with similar mindsets and they multiply the canon generically. Look at how people in Communist countries quickly developed a style of report writing that ticked the boxes and kept them from the Gulags.Islamic extremists all talk the same way, forever saying Inshallah and throwing in the required epithets and we see it with the PC Left and their rewriting of the language. what do others think?
They knowingly mislead because they are not unbiased. This is not surprising. The NYT is 110% pro-israel, but they have to make concessions sometimes to maintain their reputation.
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!
Well, I had to use a baseline - and that common baseline was the webpages that the major news organizations list as reporters and contributors. I couldn't pick and choose which data to show and everything I do has to be repeatable.
Unfortunately, channels don't list their "talking head" experts. I've been a talking head expert on NEWSMAX and we are just there to provide color commentary for an answer that they already have.
I think this is an excellent point. Traditional journalism has a strong seperation between the reporters themselves and the experts and analysts they rely on.
I agree that it doesn't solve the problem of journalists not being personally familiar (Ryan is discovering the same problem scientists have been complaining about for years) but the way the errors tend to materialize is things like mangling basic terms or concepts when they try to translate their expert's viewpoint (calling a carbine a machine gun) not in top level headlines. The issue with Israel is a different problem.
This is why I am so happy to be a paid subscriber!!! Thank you, Ryan. I do not always agree with you or what you cover, but you are exactly what I think a journalist should be.
Last month there was a story by the former NYT Editorial Page editor entitled "When the New York Times Lost its Way." Very much worth reading. https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/12/14/when-the-new-york-times-lost-its-way
Hey Ryan can you look into this video https://x.com/DrMadsGilbert/status/1746446254240874967?s=20
When it comes to New York Times (NYT), the issue is that they lack professional military expertise. They could always find sufficient expertise if they really wanted to. The fundamental problem with NYT is that over the course of the last 20 years or so it has turned from a liberal-leaning newspaper of record into a bastion of illiberal left-wing progressivism. It suffices to see the 14 JUL 20 letter of resignation from NYT by Bari Weiss, a former up-and-coming NYT opinion writer and editor , who cited the atmosphere of outright hostility toward staffers who hold anything other than left-of-center ideologies, and especially, the 14 DEC 23 Economist essay " When the New York Times lost its way" written by James Bennet, the former NYT Chief Opinion Editor, who was drummed out of NYT by progressives after he dared to publish an opinion piece by Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR).
Can someone please tell me why the Palestinian health ministry's numbers are reported seemingly as accurate? Are they deriving some level of support or supplies from Hamas and subject to influence? Is this worthy of a disclaimer when reported? sure, they may be the only available numbers and the PHM may do an outstanding job of health services. but are the people giving out numbers the same ones providing health services and running hospitals.?
How would one apply ICD 203 to this question?
Honestly, all casualties are suspect since Gaza really doesn't have a free press. The exact count may be unknown since you may have people buried in buildings.
Israel is a little better since you can't hide casualties from grieving families. They also have a free press who would investigate casualty claims.
A little better? Really? So basically like HAMAS, just a little tiny bit better. I don't think you really can justify such a point of view.
Most groups including Israel and the US consider it to be largely accurate. The issue is how those deaths are reported. The lancet noted that there was no time, date, location or cause of death provided on the death registry and obviously no distinguishing between combatants and civilians. So we can say with a high degree of certainty that the number of those who have died is correct to the best of their knowledge, however the issue is we have no way of knowing if they were civilians who died, in say a car accident or shot by hamas as 'zionist sympathisers', or if they were combatants who died in an air strike or a raid.
The issue then is people conflate the largely accurate number of casualties to be all civilian casualties because usually we have a military figures, people don't typically consider terror groups to be thousand's strong (despite groups like ISIS, Taliban and boko haram being tens's of thousands strong), Hamas obviously wont show their 'martyrs' but are more than happy to show dead civilians, and Israel consider it to be extremely not kosher to show corpses, even at funerals (hence why most Israeli photos of October 7th are 'cleaned up' of corpses) so all people end up seeing for the vast majority of the time is dead or dying Palestinian civilians.
I think you’re underestimating the number of people with a deeply seated hatred for Israel and Jews who readily assume the worst and actively seek out opportunities to ‘reveal’ the evil within the Jewish and Israeli communities. Palestinians successfully took over the PR narrative around the change of the millennium and have worked it hard especially on college campuses, as those students matured in their trades and became professors themselves they spread it from above as well as below which is how a top academic at the top schools can in a serious hearing assert that calls for a Jewish Genocide are only antisemetic if followed by an attempt to do so.
"Nobody gets up in the morning intending to get a story wrong."
Sure...but the NYT should change their slogan from "All the News That's Fit to Print" to something like
"All the News Printed to Fit [our narrative]"
Excellent analysis, as almost always. Points worth noting:
1. CNN even brings in guests who are former senior officers.
2. Military news simply wasn’t as big a deal two years ago. That changed in one fell swoop.
As far as your future focus goes, we can all hope that military news dwindles as a topic. Regardless, your disinformation forensics will be valued as long as humans interface with media - including the Internet.
As usual, great analysis. I’m proud to be a paid Substack supporter. It is surprising that these outlets are so thin in subject matter experts on staff rather than those talking heads, they contract with when a specific need arises. Especially the print media like the New York Times, think they want to be accurate, but maybe I’m being naïve in this time of sensationalistic and politically skewed journalism. You sir, are a national treasure. Keep up the great work brother.
While I would like to hope no one wants to get a story wrong but at the same time, I don't think they're entirely concerned about getting the story right. Their own bias skews how they cover the story.
Are you saying NEWSMAX GETS IT RIGHT?!
Good day, Ryan,
Are these photos and videos of protesting in Yemen after the strike old photos and videos of protest? They look similar.
I cheer my glass to you and thank you for all the outstanding work you put into this content.
“Why the New York Times Gets it Wrong”?????
Answer: Read S. Steven Powell’s book “Covert Cadre: Inside the Institute For Policy Studies”. Specifically, chapter 8. This is a left-wing think tank, lobbyist organization, with very close knit Communist ties even today. The political Left hates the U.S. military. They use their influence via the 2 big media sources to push Communist propaganda , ie, the New York Times and the Washington Post.
I’m not sure you’re correct about the reporting from the NYT having zero military experience. One of the reporters seems to be Israeli and an undergraduate of an israeli university. She should have served in the IDF albeit at a low level and briefly.