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submitted 8 months ago by intelshill@lemmy.ca to c/worldnews@lemmy.ml

The New York Times is one of the newspapers of record for the United States. However, it's history of running stories with poor sourcing, insufficient evidence, and finding journalists with conflicts of interest undermines it's credibility when reporting on international issues and matters of foreign policy.

Late last year, the NYT ran a story titled 'Screams Without Words': How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7. Recently, outlets like The Intercept, Jacobin, Democracy Now! , Mondoweiss, and others have revealed the implicit and explicit bias against Palestine that's apparent both in the aforementioned NYT story and in the NYT's reporting at large. By obfuscating poor sources, running stories without evidence, and using an ex-IDF officer with no journalism experience as the author, the NYT demonstrates their disregard for common journalistic practice. This has led to inaccurate and demonstrably false reporting on critical issues in today's world, which has been used to justify the lack of American pressure against Israel to the American public.

This journalistic malpractice is not unusual from the NYT. One of the keystone stories since the turn of the century was the NYT's reporting on Iraq's pursuit of WMDs: U.S. SAYS HUSSEIN INTENSIFIES QUEST FOR A-BOMB PARTS, Defectors Bolster U.S. Case Against Iraq, Officials Say, Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, An Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert. These reports were later revealed to be false, and the NYT later apologized, but not before the reporting was used as justification to launch the War on Iraq, directly leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands and indirectly causing millions of death while also destabilizing the region for decades.

These landmark stories have had a massive influence on US foreign policy, but they're founded on lies. While stories published in the NYT do accurately reflect foreign policy aims of the US government, they are not founded in fact. The NYT uses lies to drum up public support for otherwise unpopular foreign policy decisions. In most places, we call that "government propaganda."

I think reading and understanding propaganda is an important element of media literacy, and so I'm not calling for the ban of NYT articles in this community. However, I am calling for an honest discussion on media literacy and it's relation to the New York Times.

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[-] ursakhiin@beehaw.org 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

The core of your argument seems to be 2 separate incidents that are 20 years apart. The WMD article series is one of many series that were released by different outlets at the time because the Whitehouse did make such claims.

I don't know enough about the most recent article to form a serious opinion, but I did read the intercept link you posted and it appears to be entirely sourced by an interview with somebody who was fired for expressing bias outside of work. I also clicked the democracy now link and its just a paragraph stating that the intercept wrote the article in the first link but doesn't provide anything else.

I'm not sure these two incidents are enough of an indictment against the NYT to sway me at all. News outlets get it wrong sometimes. The question is how they handle it afterwards and 2 incidents in 20 years is hardly a pattern. The NYT is definitely leaning slightly left but is generally considered to be highly factual by most fact checkers that I've seen.

[-] intelshill@lemmy.ca 9 points 8 months ago

Most fact checkers don't know shit. Fact is, these two stories have been used to justify conflicts where hundreds of thousands of people have died.

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this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2024
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