New York Times journalism
The fiction that journalism is the first draft of history becomes especially evident during a war. It would be more accurate to say that journalism is part of the fog. Maybe this was always so but it especially true today in the merry-go-round of opinion writers and social media that make up an age of information that is devoid of intelligence to a mind numbing extent.
Every particle of reality is commandeered, organised, and projected to form a dense cloud of supportive rhetoric. Fact checking and explainers live inside the cloud.
Let’s just say that media is an endless game, out of which facts and reality are its provisional outputs. What are the rules of the game? Journalistic ethics and codes are not powerful enough; they are a kind of facadism propped up by the expanding subaltern world of fact checkers, readers editors, and explainers.
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The case of Anat Schwartz at the New York Times is part of the game. Taken up by the New York Times she researched and broke thinly sourced stories of Hamas sexual violence atrocities in the NYT in late December 2023 which were picked up in liberal and less liberal media. Amat Schwartz, who describes herself on her private instagram account as a storyteller, had previously worked for an IDF propaganda unit, and viewed genocide favorably in her social media posting. However, her story spread out across media new and old. The UN eventually dispatched a team to investigate, concluding that stories of sexual violence by Hamas might be true, on the basis of official Israeli accounts and witnesses. The report also found accounts of sexualised violence by the IDF.
But in the nature of these things, the UN report story moved very quickly. As the report was being published, Israel withdrew its representative at the UN on the basis that the head of the UN was trying to cover up the findings.
I do not want to quote from the UN report. It is available here https://acesse.dev/VNXyv . The report suggests that sexual violence is a possible explanation for the evidence presented. It also says that surviving women directly affected were not interviewed, and that there was no evidence for the most sensational claims.
To be clear, it is entirely possible that the IDF and Hamas use sexual violence as part of their modus operandi. Beyond that nothing is clear, and the Anat Schwartz case, documented here https://theintercept.com/2024/02/28/new-york-times-anat-schwartz-october-7/ shows that journalism is part of the cycle of ready made narrative, partial truth and misinformation.
