>Even if they do report for the BBC at other times, they aren’t reporting for the BBC in this tweet.
Right, hence the use of the phrase, "bbc reporters" and not, "the BBC". Given how common it is for reporters to tweet like this these days, that's a natural assumption one could - and should - be making when they read phrases like that. That was the very assumption that I made when I first read the comment.
>The BBC being mentioned here is misleading.
Not really, it's just saying, "Someone an outlet like the BBC trusts." Which is to say that while a claim hasn't been confirmed, it has a higher likelihood of being true relative to if you, myself, or any old Joe Schmoe had made the claim. That doesn't necessarily mean we should automatically assume it's true, but it also doesn't necessitate a complete write-off.
The BBC clearly has not trusted these reports. Nor has any other journalistic outlet.
They are literally just the tweets of any old Joe Schmoe. It doesn’t matter who they work for, since the BBC is not taking any responsibility for the reports.
Journalism has fact checkers and editors for a reason.
False. Googling "us soldiers shot civilians airport kabul" brings up a number of articles about it, albeit not from Western outlets. I can provide links, if you'd like, but they show up in the first two pages of results.
Please note that this is not me endorsing the validity of those articles.
>They are literally just the tweets of any old Joe Schmoe. It doesn’t matter who they work for, since the BBC is not taking any responsibility for the reports.
We don't know why these claims haven't appeared in the BBC, or if they even bothered to look into them at all. That's also a pretty disingenuous take on the credentials and credibility of reporters. Again, I never said that what they claimed was true, just that it holds relatively more (even if it's just an ever-so-tiny-bit more) weight than if Joe Schmoe made a similar claim. Surely you'd agree that someone with actual knowledge and experience in a certain area is more trustworthy than someone with none at all? That's all I'm getting at.
Aren't grey areas fun? :)
>Journalism has fact checkers and editors for a reason.
> I can provide links, if you'd like, but they show up in the first two pages of results.
Please share a link to one you trust.
> Surely you'd agree that someone with actual knowledge and experience in a certain area is more trustworthy than someone with none at all? That's all I'm getting at.
That’s obviously false. We have examples of people being untrustworthy at every level of expertise in every domain.
Your argument doesn't hold water here, since it assumes that the BBC regularly makes official reports on NATO war crimes in Afghanistan. This is something they do voluntarily very, very rarely, if ever - esp. not recent ones. The BBC would have acted the same way had the reports been true or not. It's not verified because they made no attempt to verify it. We have to rely on individual journalists, wikileaks and non-MSM for such reports for the most part.