The Extremely Low Bar of War Reporting

“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:

  1. One, None of the outlets credited Al Jazeera as the source of the interview.

  2. Two: No reporters replied to Zweig's request for the source.

  3. Third, "Important quotes or citations should always be linked or sourced."

  4. 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.".

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Darryl Cooper’s Nuanced Analysis Regarding Israel – Gaza

I appreciate the nuanced analysis of Israel - Gaza offered by Darryl Cooper on Breaking Points.. He offers, "This is a political conflict over disputed territory. That's it. We can bring all the religious considerations into that, and maybe that intensifies the complexity of the emotions relative to other disputes. But at the end of the day, it's a dispute between two groups of people laying claim to the same piece of land. That's it. . . . . 99% of the people on both sides are just regular people."

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That Feeling that One Must Inevitably Pass the Torch

Calendars don't lie. I've already used up most of the 1,000 months I'm ever going to have on the planet.

As an older dad, I took quite an interest in Rikki Schlott’s New York Post article about her relationship with her 84-year old dad. Reading this caused me to pause and hope that I’ve helped to give my two daughters (both now in their mid-20's) the tools they need to thrive in this insane world. Rikki, BTW, is, at the age of 22, co-author of a best-selling new book on the scourge of cancel culture: The Canceling of the American Mind. An excerpt:

My dad’s breadth of life experience and wisdom woke me to the transience of today’s fads and fallacies. It’s hard to humor my peers who demand safe spaces and trigger warnings when my best friend remembers the plights of World War II. It’s impossible to flirt with socialist politics when my father recalls the rise and fall of the USSR. It’s hard to spend my days scrolling through TikTok when my dad is a living testament to the wisdom a lifetime of reading can foster.

Having an older father also means it’s difficult to swallow the victim mentality of many of my contemporaries. While Generation Z indulges in identity politics and intersectionality, it’s an attitude my father would never accept from me. He’s a self-made man who pulled himself up by his bootstraps. Now that he’s provided me with an education and life beyond what he could imagine growing up on a goose farm, I won’t rest until I make the most of all the opportunities I’ve been given and do him proud.

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