Fiat News in the Fog of War

I am not a munitions expert.

I don't know whether the IAF munitions equipped with JDAM guidance systems can be configured for an airburst detonation that would prevent the creation of the crater we'd expect from a 500 to 2,000-pound bomb. I don't know whether IAF GBU-39s are actively deployed in Gaza operations, or even whether they might be a candidate for producing the (now apparent) smaller scale detonation. Nor do I have any insight into whether that strike could have been errant or whether there is reason to believe it was intentional.

I don't know much about the design of the rockets in the possession of Hamas, much less those in the possession of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. I know neither the physical properties nor the volumes of propellants used in the larger Badr 3s supposedly in the stockpiles of the latter, nor of the Ayyash 250s in the stockpiles of the former that might be capable of producing a large conflagration as seen in multiple videos of the explosion. I've seen what a small amount of burning fuel can do in a tightly controlled volunteer fire company setting, but there I reach the rather sad limit of what I know. And it isn't much.

That's the point.

I. Don't. Know.

What do I think? I think that during the evening of October 17th and into the wee hours of October 18th, western media outlets acted as if they did know when they didn't. In the fog of war, they published confident, unhedged, unqualified assertions. Some reported almost verbatim the claims of the Israeli government and the IDF. Far more reported almost verbatim the claims of Hamas, acting uncritically as its de facto press agent.

I think that the reporting of a terrible tragedy by almost every major news organization in the world was transformed for an entire evening into a pure expression of the preferred interpretations and opinions of their editors, journalists and reporters, at all times masquerading as fact.

I think that more innocent people will die and peace will be delayed because of what media outlets did last night.

After the deadly explosion at the al-Ahli Arab Hospital, Hamas issued a statement through its Health Ministry claiming as many as 500 or more deaths as a result of an Israeli airstrike. Instead of reporting what was known - an explosion with casualties - while working to confirm details about the scale of the blast, the number of deaths and the source of the explosion, each of the major newswires simply rushed to repeat each of the claims of Hamas verbatim. The Associated Press did it. So did Reuters. So did AFP. The west's largest English-language news organizations followed suit. The Washington Post did it. So did CNN. So did the Wall Street Journal.

The LA Times, on the other hand, chose to run run a story about the tragedy at the hospital with a large series of heartbreaking photographs. Finally, some facts on the ground. Except for one thing: as truly heartbreaking as they were, not a single one of the pictures they ran was from the actual explosion at al-Ahli Arab Hospital. The headline image to the story, in fact, is one showing significant rubble from another airstrike in Khan Younis. Why pick this image? Because it was more important to the journalists working on this piece that you have the picture they wanted you to have in your mind about what the hospital explosion might have looked like than it was to show you what the hospital explosion looked like.

Like the LA Times, the New York Times led its top-fold coverage the evening of the 17th with an image from a different photojournalist of this same separate event in its initial coverage. The context here, however, was even worse. Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett tracked the thought process of the New York Times in real-time as their headline writers retreated from the phraseology of the Hamas public statement to more cautious language.

Perhaps the worst performance, however, was turned in by the BBC. They not only reported Hamas claims verbatim in their written coverage, but hosted an on-air personality who ad-libbed an amateur analysis of the possible causes of the size of explosion to validate those claims. That reporter, Jon Donnison, was already the target of entire webpages dedicated to his penchant for making (and rarely being asked to walk back) similar on-air pronouncements.

"It is hard to see what else this could be, really, given the size of the explosion, other than an Israeli air strike, or several air strikes."

Jon Donnison, BBC News, in an October 18, 2023 on-air segment

The "independent" press agents for the Israeli government were initially less active. That was not, I think, because there weren't outlets that would have been happy to simply reprint the claims of the IDF and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. WND and Breitbart, for example, were pretty quick on the draw once they emerged. Neither did they abstain because Israel's government isn't in the business of promoting state propaganda through the media. Like all governments, they are very much in that business, and they are very good at it. I think the speed with which Hamas's health ministry published detailed claims of the explosion's aftermath and causes gave them a brief narrative monopoly that only required one thing to establish itself: an uncritical western news media full of journalists and editors so eager to be first to publish bias-confirming news that they could be trusted to do so before any other facts or alternative claims emerged.

And boy did they get it.

It's mid-day on October 18th, and I still don't know. I think the weight of the evidence at this point favors Israel's claims, or at the very least that it disfavors many of the claims made by Hamas and thoughtlessly recirculated by western media. The Pentagon told ABC News this morning that it had corroborated the claims of the Israeli government about an errant PIJ rocket. There are detailed analyses on social media which make compelling arguments in favor of certain of Israel's claims. There are purported (if somewhat dubious, at least to me) sigint recordings of PIJ-Hamas discussions of the specific rocket launch, along with analyses of flight paths and potential debris fields that seem to corroborate the claims. Given the warnings given by the Israeli government to vacate some Gaza hospitals and the since-deleted tweet by noted Israeli media personality Hananya Naftali (who also posted the Sigint recordings) taking early credit for the strike, I can understand the hesitation by some to believe anyone's story here.

I'm not convinced that I know exactly what happened last night yet, so I'm the last one who will try to convince you of anything. But whether the claims of one of our two belligerents turns out to be true, or if the truth ends up being something else entirely or in between, the fact will remain that the media outlets who uncritically rushed to regurgitate unsubstantiated propaganda did the world a disservice. Peace meetings conducted by US officials with other Arab and Muslim countries are being canceled. Hezbollah has been given ammunition for escalation. Protests are erupting. The capacity for intermediaries to engage productively is evaporating.

Would some of this have happened after this tragedy, even if its claims had not been forcefully spread by western fiat news outlets working in concert? Of course. But you will not convince me that the actions of western news outlets last night will not add to the totals of dozens, scores or maybe even hundreds of innocent people who died outside that hospital last night, or to the thousands that have been claimed by war, violence, terrorism and outright murder in the last 10 days.

And Nate Silver - good ol' Nate Silver - wants to let them off the hook.

We are all about extending grace for error here at Epsilon Theory, but this is, to use the scientific term, some bullshit.

Silver is right that the fog of war makes the job of the journalist vastly more difficult. I know he is hyperbolizing here, but honestly, "10x harder" may not be far off the mark. Especially when it comes to geopolitical news, where both the "good guys" and "bad guys" are both in the business of pushing narrative-based propaganda. For that reason, a reasonable consumer of news should absolutely show far more grace to the media when rapidly changing events make providing useful information more difficult. We should expect to be somewhat in the dark. We should expect events to outpace information. And yes, on occasion, we should expect that some of what those journalists earnestly and in good faith believed to be facts might turn out to be false.

What we should never accept is a news media whose response to the fog of war is to pretend at confidence, stridently reprint and frame stories around propaganda of a single actor, and do so at a speed that strains the credulity of any claim of good faith evaluation of the facts on the ground.

What we should never accept is a news media whose response to uncertainty is to exercise less discretion instead of more.

And if your response to all that is to say, well, this is just how the social media engagement-driven media business works today, you're not wrong. But that's neither an excuse nor an answer.

It's another problem for all of us to solve. Let's start by holding media outlets to account for promoting fiat news in the fog war.