“In war, truth is the first casualty.”
― Aeschylus
Remember the 500 who died at a Gaza hospital? But then we learned that wasn’t true. And it was an Israeli attack that caused it–until it wasn’t. David Zweig was suspicious about that nice round number of 500. It turns out that, yes, this is more extremely slipshod reporting by dozens of corporate media outlets.
This reporting debacle is very bad for several reasons pointed out by Zweig:
- One, None of the outlets credited Al Jazeera as the source of the interview.
- Two: No reporters replied to Zweig’s request for the source.
- Third, “Important quotes or citations should always be linked or sourced.”
- Fourth: “Newsrooms composed of dozens or hundreds of staff members, including teams of editors and foreign correspondents, and so on, backed by billion-dollar corporate owners still published a claim that was never fact-checked at its source.”
The epilogue of Zweig’s article is that lover of corporate media Michelle Goldberg, who has been one of the corporate media people who claims that Twitter (“X”) is a “cesspool of misinformation,” admitted that she got it wrong about the 500 deaths because she relied on this massively shoddy reporting by the corporate “news.”.
