The Times of the September 11, 2005 Atmospheric Explosion: Covering Breaking News in the Light of Hamas Accretion
“The early versions of the coverage — and the prominence it received in a headline, news alert and social media channels — relied too heavily on claims by Hamas, and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified,” it read. The paper said it would re-examine its protocols and safeguards for covering breaking news in light of the incident.
U.S. officials said their assessment was also based on communications intercepts provided by the Israelis and images of the explosion and aftermath. Last week, US officials said that the explosion was caused by an armed Palestinian group, rebutting claims that an Israeli strike caused the explosion. U.S. spy agencies did not release detailed evidence at the time to support their assessment.
The Times continued to update its coverage as more information became available, reporting the disputed claims of responsibility and noting that the death toll might be lower than initially reported. Within two hours, the headline and other text at the top of the website reflected the scope of the explosion and the dispute over responsibility.
Given the sensitive nature of the news during a widening conflict, and the prominent promotion it received, Times editors should have taken more care with the initial presentation, and been more explicit about what information could be verified. Newsroom leaders continue to examine procedures around the biggest breaking news events — including for the use of the largest headlines in the digital report — to determine what additional safeguards may be warranted.
The audiences’ perception of media outlets’ fairness is a big part of how much trust they have in the media. Speed may matter a lot to readers, viewers and listeners. Accuracy and fairness still matter more, especially when stakes are so high.
The Gaza Attack: Israel Gaza Hospital Strikes After Denying Hamas’ Claims, Says the Washington Free Beacon
Physicians for Human Rights called for an independent investigation into the blast on the day of it. It didn’t project blame.
Last week, The Washington Free Beacon’s Drew Holden documented a series of prominent news outlets and public figures organizations that appeared to rely on Hamas’ claims as authoritative with little or scant acknowledgement of how little had been verified before publication.
The Israeli military conducted its own investigation and subsequently confirmed that an Israeli soldier had likely fired the lethal shot but did not disclose the shooter’s name. Abu Akleh’s family didn’t believe the government’s expression of sadness for her death was enough. An FBI investigation that started a year ago has not been resolved.
The Times’ selection of journalists has come under sharp scrutiny in recent days as well. The paper was chastised for using a videographer in Gaza to document the conflict. Over the past decade, Hijjy has praised Hitler or referred to him in social media postings. A spokesperson for the Times says the paper reviewed those “problematic” postings last year, when the issue was first raised, and took actions “to ensure he understood our concerns and could adhere to our standards.”
Unlike in some other war zones, such as in Ukraine, it’s nearly impossible for outside reporters to get into Gaza, even from Israel. Local journalists are being relied on by news outlets to cover it remotely, because their families are at risk from Israeli strikes.
Hamas is the source of much of the information about the events in Gaza. Hamas denied in an interview with NPR that the group had killed hundreds of civilians at a music concert in the Israeli desert, despite accounts by survivors, Israeli officials and journalists for major news outlets. (Inskeep pointedly noted that the attackers did kill civilians.)
Hamas is more than that. The U.S. and the European Union both believe it to be a terrorist organization. Indeed, it just unleashed the most deadly attack in Israeli history, with more than 1,400 people dead, and more than 200 people taken hostage.
Footage of the Hamas blast in the courtyard of an Al Ahli hospital: State of the matter, and investigators say no evidence
The BBC later issued a statement citing the full breadth of its coverage but saying that the degree of speculation in his report was, in retrospect, wrong.
The stakes are too high. The sources can be unreliable. Concrete facts are often scant. And yet readers reward publications that push out information instantaneously.
“I don’t think the question will ever get fully resolved using open source intelligence,” says Andres Gannon, an assistant professor of political science at Vanderbilt University.
Hundreds of Palestinians were sheltering in the courtyard of Al Ahli Arab Hospital on Tuesday, believing the Christian-run facility would be a safe haven.
Just before 7 p.m. local time, militants began firing a barrage of rockets from a site west of the hospital, according to independent footage of the event.
The Hamas-run health ministry has also declined to release further details about those 471 victims, and all traces of the munition have seemingly vanished from the site of the blast, adding to the difficulty in assessing its provenance. Raising further questions about Hamas’s claims, the impact site turned out to be the hospital parking lot, and not the hospital itself.
But in the video closest to the blast, there’s the sound of something whizzing by. That sound is marked by the Doppler effect, which can be heard in the rise and fall in pitch as something moves toward an observer and then away from them.
An nongovernmental organization called Earshot, which conducts “sonic investigations,” analyzed that sound. Earshot found that whatever fell very likely came from the east, not the west.
Earshot director Lawrence Abu hamdan says this is reducing the chance of this coming from the west. “It’s rocket science after all, so we can’t rule it out.”
Others say that the publicly available evidence, as it stands, is unlikely to give a a definitive answer. The video is available but it might not be enough, says a former United Nations war crimes investigator.
“I totally get why people are concerned about this,” he says. “It was a horrible thing, but man — there’s been a lot of people killed since that incident, right?”
He hopes the U.N. can eventually conduct a war crimes investigation to establish who was behind the explosion. Other issues require urgent public attention, for now. “U.N. facilities are being hit, hospitals are out of fuel — there’s a lot to worry about.”
The assessment is based on what hasn’t been discovered. A senior intelligence official said there were no images of any Palestinians displaying an Israeli weapon from the bomb site.
But the senior official said the agencies were continuing to investigate. If the United States gets additional information that would point in a different direction, the official said, intelligence agencies will release it.
U.S. officials say the blast at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital was not a rocket that broke up mid-flight
The Prime Minister of Britain said that a Palestinian rocket firing from Gaza may have been the cause of the deaths at the hospital.
The US government estimated between 100 and 300 individuals were killed, but the death toll is likely to be low. On Tuesday, U.S. officials said they only had low confidence in that assessment. The death toll in Gaza was revised down from the previous estimate of 500.
U.S. officials said on Tuesday that an accurate count of the people who died at the hospital was impossible to obtain because of a lack of independent sources.
Images of a fireball at the hospital site, and pictures taken after the fact showing burned cars in the parking lot, are consistent with a malfunctioning missile according to U.S. officials.
U.S. officials said only light damage was sustained at the site, which is consistent with the premise of a Gaza-made rocket that broke up in flight, rather than an Israeli munition striking the hospital.
The officials said, however, that numerous mysteries still remained about the incident. Those include how many people were killed or injured when, by the U.S. account, the warhead of a Palestinian rocket landed in the parking lot of the hospital. They said there was nothing to worry about, and there was no collapse of the structure.
American intelligence officials said Tuesday they now had “high confidence” that the blast at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza last week was the result of a Palestinian rocket that broke up mid-flight, and that no Israeli weapon was involved in the explosion.