For what it’s worth, here’s MediaBias/FactCheck’s take on HonestReporting:
Bias Rating: RIGHT-CENTER
Factual Reporting: MOSTLY FACTUAL
Country: USA
Press Freedom Rating: MOSTLY FREE
Media Type: Organization/Foundation
Traffic/Popularity: Minimal Traffic
MBFC Credibility Rating: MEDIUM CREDIBILITY
I’m no ballistics expert or radiologist, but the x-rays featured in the HR article look…problematic to me. Wouldn’t there be some evidence of bullet track or surrounding reaction to such rounds?
If it means selective reporting of facts and omission of those that don’t support the narrative, then yes, bias is bad.
The BBC, just a couple of days ago, published an article including quotes from identified individuals concerning targeted attacks on non-combatants, women, children, and old people, so in any case it is not just something made up by The New York Times. If someone is lying, it would be the named sources.
There have been accounts of gunshot wounds seen in children in Gaza, as related by US medical volunteers, in the news long before now. Why is this suddenly seen as some kind of extreme and outrageous accusation?
The bias really becomes dishonest when your mission statement reads:
“We embrace the principle that a healthy democracy requires a well informed citizenry. Accordingly, the mission of HonestReporting is to ensure truth, integrity and fairness, and to combat ideological prejudice in journalism and the media, as it impacts Israel.”
Calling themselves “HonestReporting” is beyond laughable.
Of course, but trial lawyers are not trying or claiming to be otherwise. They are literally representing only one side of a dispute. Bias is only bad when your holding yourself out as unbiased, and are expected to be so by the public.
But that’s the whole purpose of advocacy groups, on any side of any dispute. They’re not supposed to be impartial authorities - instead, their aim is to show us their point of view, and to convince us to agree with them. Isn’t that the basis of the adversarial system? Each side pushes its own narrative, and in the end, hopefully some sort of truth, integrity and fairness is achieved.
Sure, but in that case it’s a bit sneaky and nontransparent for them to assume the mantle of an impartial authority, by giving themselves a name like “HonestReporting” and a mission statement saying “We embrace the principle that a healthy democracy requires a well informed citizenry. Accordingly, the mission of HonestReporting is to ensure truth, integrity and fairness, and to combat ideological prejudice in journalism and the media, as it impacts Israel.”
“To combat ideological prejudice… as it impacts Israel” is a fair claim for a highly biased advocacy group to make. “To ensure truth, integrity and fairness” is not, IMHO. (Mind you, that same sort of “truth”-propaganda sneakiness and nontransparency is admittedly par for the course among many types of advocacy groups with similar degrees of bias.)
We here in the USA right now are overwhelmed by advocacy groups loudly proclaiming to be sources of unvarnished absolute disinterested truth. As a result, when we do encounter obvious bias, we assume it’s invidious disingenuous made-from-pure-BS bias, not mere intellectually honest advocacy.
In other words, the word “bias” is another thing the enshittification of Radical Reactionary politics has destroyed in the USA.
It would be nice if there could be effective “truth in labeling” laws applied to the ingredients of our information supply just as there are for our food supply. But we can’t, and so our information supply resembles an open sewer more than it resembles a clear mountain stream.
Why? Many advocacy organizations accuse the NYT and other mainstream media of “promoting dishonest propaganda” of various kinds. Should any such accusation automatically prompt an internal investigation?
If not, where do we set the bar for assessing the credibility and good faith of such accusations?
Yeah, it seems really weird for a bullet to just stop in the middle of soft brain tissue, rather than either exiting the skull or bumping up against a bone. I glanced at the article and assumed it was going to say the photos were fake.
But then it said, “no, it was probably Palestinians who shot those Palestinian children, not Israelis”. And I’m left scratching my head. Because… That’s not what Occam would tell me. Not without some actual evidence.
This thread is developing a noticeable whiff of Streisand Effect, IMHO. Personally, I wasn’t clearly aware of detailed accusations about IDF snipers having deliberately targeted young children: I was definitely already in the “whoa too much indiscriminate slaughter” camp, but not informed about the discriminating kind, so to speak.
But the OP’s criticisms of the recent NYT Opinion guest essay sent me looking for information, which is how I found the previously linked CBS News article on the subject from July, and a lot of other mentions of similar reports.
Again, I’m a bit baffled why the advocacy group “HonestReporting” appears not to have been making these kinds of high-profile complaints about earlier publicized allegations of IDF snipers targeting children, like those in the July CBS News article.
If I were a cynical person, I might speculate that “HonestReporting” figured that accusations of “dishonest war propaganda” and anti-Israel “lies” would seem more plausible leveled against an essay by a “Dr. Feroze Sidhwa” than against an interview with a “Dr. Mark Perlmutter”.
(Disclaimer: I personally know nothing about the political or religious affiliations of either Dr. Sidhwa or Dr. Perlmutter, or anything else about them other than that they were both volunteer surgeons at the European Hospital in Gaza earlier this year, and have both been quoted in several news reports about these allegations.)
Given the claims of the OP I was really expecting the HonestReporting piece to be a more in depth criticism of the NYT article, instead it looks like basically a bunch of strung together twitter posts of people asserting their opinion. Clicking on the posts, I find that all of the posts that they use as evidence come from twitter X feeds for which pro-Israili, anti-palistinian sentiment makes up a significant portion. So not entirely unbaised. And if Cheryl E is actually a forensic balistics specialist I will eat my hat.
From my perspective it looks like a deciding whehter to believe reports of 65 doctors nurses and paramedics on site in Gaza, vs. 8 rando’s on the internet.
