[acdha]

Your second claim seems to being mistaking their role as telling absolute truth. The very first sentence makes it clear that they are reporting an official government statement, and the next that Israel disputes it and says the PLJ was responsible. This seems very normal for war reporting and I note that they’re very careful to attribute each claim so the reader can decide how much to trust it.

Edit: your first source is a pro-Israeli advocacy group run by a former AIPAC employee, which has marked its coverage of the war with things like baselessly claiming reporters were in on the October 7th attacks:

https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-photographers-attack...

Given that in this case they ran a report by a witness, and then publicly updated that to say that a Hamas investigation had called her credibility into question, it’s interesting to note how carefully the “Honest Reporting” writer relies on uncited insinuation or tries to distract your attention to statements by people who are not part of al Jazeera. Again, it’s not great that they ran a story by someone who lied but that’s a hazard of breaking news coverage and it’s hardly unique in the field.

[dlubarov]

> then publicly updated that to say that a Hamas investigation had called her credibility into question

I don't think there's much of a question, the claims were just fabricated, according to Hamas themselves.

By "publicly updated", do you just mean quietly deleting the articles with false information? As far as I know, they never acknowledged the error and published a retraction, which calls into question their legitimacy as a news organization.

[acdha]

I was referring to the lead in that “Honest Reporting” article which was about one of their employees doing the opposite of this claim by correcting the record:

https://twitter.com/abuhilalah/status/1771996521312973088

Now, I do think they should have put out an official statement pointing out the unreliability of the interviewee rather than simply yanking the video but a single unreliable witness interviewed in a tumultuous event which is promptly dropped seems to fall well short of establishing a lie. All news organizations interview people who turn out to be wrong or misleading, so we’d want to see more than a single interview to establish whether there’s a pattern of poor vetting or running a story after evidence has come forth that the witness is unreliable. The public has rather strongly expressed a desire for immediate news coverage rather than waiting for lengthy review and corroboration.

[dlubarov]

I don't really take issue with publishing the allegation (it's credibility might have been lacking, but that's difficult to judge), just quietly yanking the false information. Wouldn't any legitimate news agency do some form of retraction, such as adding a prominent note at the top of the original article?

[acdha]

To be clear, I think they should have updated their liveblog to add a link to the subsequent Hamas statement calling its accuracy into question. That said, I think some of this comes into questions about the format - this wasn’t a specific story but one of many breaking news details in a tumultuous event, and it’s far from unprecedented within the industry.

As a good example of how messy this can be, consider this story:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/28/world/middleeast/oct-7-at...

They fairly quickly ran into some problems with reliability of one of the key witnesses which reached the point where a number of journalism professors wrote an open letter: https://www.thenationalnews.com/news/us/2024/04/29/journalis...

There’s a rundown with many links here: https://mondoweiss.net/2024/01/family-of-key-case-in-new-yor...

None of that is mentioned on that story and the only correction is a minor detail.

Now, to be clear, I am not saying that it’s okay for Al Jazeera to be sloppy if the NYT is sloppy but rather that we should be consistent in our standards and they should probably be higher for everyone. The public and especially people covered in these stories deserve better.

[dlubarov]

I've been following the Screams Without Words story and I don't think it's really comparable to something that was basically confirmed to be false. The NYT stands behind the report

> We remain confident in the accuracy of our reporting and stand by the team’s investigation which was rigorously reported, sourced and edited.

A lot of the "debunking" seems fairly weak in my opinion. E.g. Gal Abdush's brother in law made a rather baseless statement that "the media invented" Gal's rape. Really the article was reporting what Israeli police believed, mainly based on (non-public) video evidence which the Times reporters also reviewed.

I think it would be comparable if Israeli police retracted their claims and stated that Gal was not raped. Then surely the NYT would make some kind of clear correction/retraction, rather than quietly deleting (part of) the report.