NYT Was Pressed To ‘Hedge’ On Gaza Hospital Story, But Senior Editors Ignored Warnings: Report

Several editors and reporters cautioned The New York Times against running with the Gaza hospital story based solely on a Palestinian source, but senior editors reportedly ignored the warnings.

According to a report published by Vanity Fair on Tuesday, the story was discussed on an internal Slack channel — where several editors and a reporter raised concerns about the veracity of the information, particularly when the source was considered.

Shortly after the first version of the story was published — titled “Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinian Officials Say” — one senior editor tagged two others in the Slack channel #Israel-briefings and proposed a more direct version of the initial story lede.

“I think we can be a bit more direct in the lead: At least 500 people were killed on Tuesday by an Israel airstrike at a hospital in Gaza City, the Palestinian authorities said,” the editor wrote, prompting one of the tagged individuals to reply, “You don’t want to hedge it?”

“Better to hedge,” a junior reporter who was on the ground in Israel agreed.

The senior news editor shrugged off the criticism, saying, “We’re attributing” — suggesting that because they had attributed the headline’s claim to Palestinian officials, they were not culpable for any part of that claim that might turn out to be inaccurate.

One of the outlet’s international editors pushed back, saying that the front page headline — despite the attribution — went “way too far.”

“How is it different than the blog hed?” another senior editor objected, adding, “They both say Israeli strike kills, per Palestinians.”

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The international editor pushed back, saying, “I think we can’t just hang the attribution of something so big on one source without having tried to verify it and then slap it across the top of the [home page]. Putting the attribution at the end doesn’t give us cover, if we’ve been burned and we’re wrong.”

The information from the “Palestinian officials” did, in fact, turn out to be false. Instead of an “Israeli strike,” the explosion was caused by a rocket fired by terrorists inside Gaza — and rather than striking the hospital itself, the rocket fell on a parking lot. The estimated death toll was not the 500 or so civilians and children that the original sources claimed, but was likely between 10 and 50.

The NYT attempted to recover after nearly every aspect of the initial story was debunked, issuing a statement claiming that they had “relied too heavily on claims by Hamas, and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified.”

The note added, “The report left readers with an incorrect impression about what was known and how credible the account was.”