1942 - 2023
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6 | NOVEMBER 9 • 2023 J
N
PURELY COMMENTARY
continued on page 7
essay
Stop Helping Hamas Win
Its Disinformation War
Fake news and lies are flooding your feed.
Do these four things before sharing that powerful war post.
T
he fog of war, a term often
attributed to Prussian military
theorist Carl von Clausewitz,
describes the chaos that clouds a bat-
tlefield commander’s vision. But in the
digital age, this fog obscures everyone’s
vision. Just ask Joe Kahn,
the executive editor of the
New York Times.
For the first time since
assuming the helm in June
2022, Kahn recently issued
an editor’s note (read: apol-
ogy) for a headline stating
that an Israeli airstrike was
responsible for 500 deaths
at Gaza’s al-Ahli Arab Hospital, with an
attribution to the “Palestinian Health
Authority.” “Times editors should have
taken more care with the initial presenta-
tion,” he wrote.
In the week between the Times’ head-
line and Kahn’s statement, it has become
clear that practically everything about
the initial story was off. The blast hit the
parking lot, not the hospital. There were
far fewer deaths than initially reported.
And video analyses point to the damage
coming from a misfired rocket, aimed at
Israel, launched from Gaza itself.
Along with my colleagues at Stanford
University, I have spent the last seven
years studying how people learn to make
better decisions about what to believe
online. We can partially ascribe the
Times’ confusion to conflicting reports in
the immediate aftermath of this event.
However, not only should the Times
have known better than to swallow whole
the claims of the Palestinian Health
Ministry and its Hamas overlords — it
did know. Before the banner headline
went up, a senior editor on the inter-
national desk warned colleagues on the
Times internal Slack channel, leaked to
Vanity Fair, that “we can’t just hang the
attribution of something so big on one
source without having tried to verify it.”
The senior editor’s warning fell on deaf
Sam
Wineburg
The Time
of Israel