naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
(text post)
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #2
This is a refreshed megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
As someone mostly ignorant of media from the Middle East, I had had the impression that Al Jazeera was a fairly dependable news organization, but certainly the past few days have severely changed this view.
One was seeing a commentator state as fact that Joe Biden uncritically announced after he was fooled into believing that an AI-manipulated photo of a puppy was actually a photo of a baby burnt by Hamas on 10/7. This is obviously false if you've seen the pictures in question, as there is no credibility to the idea that the picture showing the puppy was the original photograph - both the context clues and the actual image quality make it clear that there is no way that the real location had a real puppy in that spot. If Biden was deceived into falsely believing horrors committed by Hamas, it wasn't through this particular claimed manipulation. Yet this claim was stated as fact and unchallenged.
Another was seeing a video title of theirs about this incident, where they made unqualified statements that an Israeli strike hit a hospital and killed 500 people. Even before I did any investigation, I was skeptical just from 500 people being killed in one shot that's like 1/5 of the total number of Palestinians killed from the counterstrikes by this point, and merely finding and counting that many bodies seems likely to take some time. Then, every additional piece of evidence threw doubt on the cause of the attack, and so every news organization would at least have the responsibility to put qualifications, like "sources from Palestine/Gaza/Hamas/Israel/etc. say" or "possibility of" or the like, but there was nothing like that.
Good news is, I wasn't getting much of my news from Al Jazeera anyway, so I won't have to change my news consumption practices much, but it's disappointing, because I was hoping for a good news source with a heavy anti-Israel bend.
I had had the impression that Al Jazeera was a fairly dependable news organization
It is on topic not concerning Israel etc. For example it is likely to be fairly trustworthy or at least not blatantly biased when reporting on some Poland vs Germany spat.
But they will happily lie to run propaganda against Israel or in support of their funders.
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Notes -
As someone mostly ignorant of media from the Middle East, I had had the impression that Al Jazeera was a fairly dependable news organization, but certainly the past few days have severely changed this view.
One was seeing a commentator state as fact that Joe Biden uncritically announced after he was fooled into believing that an AI-manipulated photo of a puppy was actually a photo of a baby burnt by Hamas on 10/7. This is obviously false if you've seen the pictures in question, as there is no credibility to the idea that the picture showing the puppy was the original photograph - both the context clues and the actual image quality make it clear that there is no way that the real location had a real puppy in that spot. If Biden was deceived into falsely believing horrors committed by Hamas, it wasn't through this particular claimed manipulation. Yet this claim was stated as fact and unchallenged.
Another was seeing a video title of theirs about this incident, where they made unqualified statements that an Israeli strike hit a hospital and killed 500 people. Even before I did any investigation, I was skeptical just from 500 people being killed in one shot that's like 1/5 of the total number of Palestinians killed from the counterstrikes by this point, and merely finding and counting that many bodies seems likely to take some time. Then, every additional piece of evidence threw doubt on the cause of the attack, and so every news organization would at least have the responsibility to put qualifications, like "sources from Palestine/Gaza/Hamas/Israel/etc. say" or "possibility of" or the like, but there was nothing like that.
Good news is, I wasn't getting much of my news from Al Jazeera anyway, so I won't have to change my news consumption practices much, but it's disappointing, because I was hoping for a good news source with a heavy anti-Israel bend.
It is on topic not concerning Israel etc. For example it is likely to be fairly trustworthy or at least not blatantly biased when reporting on some Poland vs Germany spat.
But they will happily lie to run propaganda against Israel or in support of their funders.
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