Like many Times critics and fans, I have not reported on the ground in Israel, and I have no new reports on the details of October 7. Nor will I attempt to answer the unspoken questions that have shaped this story, and many others so heartbreaking, in a conflict in which each party believes the other is trying to drive it off the face of the earth – and hopes the media to confirm these intentions.
But I think I can shed some light on a fact that strikes me: The Times has directed crucial elements of its coverage of one of the most difficult and sensitive stories it has ever published to amateurs, which would include social media posts cause reasonable people to question their ability to be fair.
That sounds crazy when you say it out loud. Why would you do that?
(The Times denies that happened in this case: “We did not share critical elements of the reporting with researchers. Adam and Anat made valuable contributions. Jeffrey closely monitored their work and conducted dozens of interviews with them,” a spokeswoman said , Danielle Rhoades Ha, said.)
In fact, major American newspapers have always worked this way, especially in times of crisis. Many of their biggest names are skilled reporters, but the top tier is often occupied by journalists who are also brilliant storytellers, distilling large amounts of information into brilliant narratives. And they're relying on teams — at best, trusted and experienced local reporters, at worst, anyone they can quickly grab — to do more of the original reporting than they've previously admitted.
This practice leaves journalism vulnerable in both directions: correspondents could republish the shoddy work of incompetent aides or burnish their reputations at the expense of talented locals. Or they could be manipulated by stringers and fixers who are agents of local government or political factions. The Times and other media outlets are increasingly careful about this practice. But this uneven teamwork is a fading tradition among both foreign correspondents and domestic reporters who cover parts of the United States that might as well be another country.
Even before the Internet had completely torn the veil around every institution, this dependence on invisible local hands occasionally led to scandals. In 2003, the Times fired a feature writer who was then considered its greatest storyteller, Rick Bragg, after a story about Florida oysters, full of resonant details, turned out to be like fish “that hit the steel-gray water with a sharp splash.” splash.” were largely reported by his unpaid intern, Wes Yoder. This revealed a broader practice that Jack Shafer called “Dateline toe-touch,” in which a Bigfoot came to town just long enough to claim to have been there, keeping his helpers invisible.
Even after the practice of relying on anonymous natives looked like a colonial relic and the fixers were described as “local journalists” and given bylines, the power dynamic remained. One of the New York Times' major recent scandals, the “Caliphate” podcast's reliance on a fabulist, occurred after a reporter and her editors ignored a series of warnings from a veteran Syrian journalist about being deceived by unreliable sources.
On the other side of the ledger, my colleague Gina Chua, a former Wall Street Journal correspondent, recalls meeting a Taiwanese tobacco factory manager on the outskirts of Hanoi. As the interview progressed laboriously from Mandarin to Vietnamese to English, she asked her State Department-appointed assistant what happened during the long back-and-forth with his colleague at the factory. “Oh,” he said matter-of-factly, “we talked about what we should tell you.”
Gettleman is an easy target for these complaints and, to his critics, is a caricature of the boastful narrative correspondent of old. He does much of his own reporting and has witnessed many big stories and legendary confrontations, including while reporting from Fallujah during the Iraq War. He also reports extensively from various countries whose languages he does not speak. New school international reporters love to hate his memoir “Love, Africa.” A Post review complained that the narrative appeared to focus largely on “fancy, expatriate-focused hotels in conflict zones,” while the Times, in its own reporter's book, called it a “confusing” echo of colonial writers “who were primarily for Africa is interested”. a place for their dreams and nightmares.” A parody Twitter account: “Gettle Gems“Following are some former Times Africa correspondents.
Some of the Gettleman criticisms form their own simplified narrative. The Pulitzer Committee honored him for “his vivid, often personal risk accounts of famine and conflict in East Africa, a neglected but increasingly strategic part of the world.” He often shared or promoted bylines with local journalists working for the Times. “For many years he has been someone who has ensured that this is guaranteed [those writers] “I got bylines and, in many cases, wrote stories myself,” Greg Winter, the Times’ international editor, told me.
Criticism of Gettleman's work stems in part from the fact that he made his dependence on Schwartz and Sella clear by giving them verse. He was well within the Times' standards when he used local help for this high-stakes story, even though many local journalists are far more experienced than the two he relied on. The story also faced significant internal opposition — and multiple fact-checks — before it was published. It then played a central role in an Israeli campaign that criticized American feminist organizations and the UN for not siding with Israel in the violent invasion of Gaza that killed tens of thousands of people in the following months.
The arguments over the Times' coverage of Israel and Gaza can seem hair-splitting and cruel. Few deny that women were brutally attacked during the Oct. 7 massacre, and the Times continues to defend the Dec. 28 story. While critics have raised legitimate questions about the timing of a witness report in particular, they have also offered their own flattening account of the Times' bias. Their evidence includes the political activity of editor-in-chief Joe Kahn's father.
The Intercept's first story referred to Schwartz as a “former Air Force intelligence officer” in the first sentence, with the implication of a government conspiracy but no reference to it. A translation of a podcast in Hebrew was subsequently published in which Schwartz sounds like an inexperienced reporter trying to do her best but working hard to prove a story's thesis (and her boss's assignment to her). (I started my career as an incompetent correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, doing just that on assignments that had far less at stake.)
The Intercept also reported that the departure of the Times' longtime standards chief, Phil Corbett, was “related to pressure he faced to tone down coverage in favor of Israel.” Corbett emailed colleagues last week in a message obtained by Semafor that the report was “completely false” and that “there was no dispute or disagreement on my part with this reporting or the language we used.”
Now all the debates about Gaza and Israel in Democratic Party politics are also taking place in the Times, whose international staff is preparing for a tense meeting in Istanbul this week amid anger over internal leaks and a hunt for the leaker. The Times union claimed the company targeted its Arab journalists, which the Times denies.
But inside the building, even some defenders of the underlying reporting wince at the headline of the Dec. 28 story. The phrase “sexual violence with weapons” is catchy and memorable – but it’s not entirely clear what it literally means. The Times article below the headline does not show that Hamas leaders or field commanders planned or ordered sexual assaults – such as those documented in the former Yugoslavia – but does not rule it out. The most telling details of history, gleaned from photographs of sexually mutilated bodies, cannot answer this question.
Alia Malek, who directs the international reporting program at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and writes for The New York Times Magazine, once remarked to me that old-school foreign correspondence “was based on the idea that our work was not written by readers was read.” People we wrote about.” The Internet put an end to that years ago. More subtly, this older style also relied on the illusion that the correspondent's line represented one person's work. Behind this single (usually American) person were local helpers – people who are usually patriots of their own country and may have even served in the military from Israel to Korea, as Schwartz did.
Meanwhile, the Times also defends strong attacks on a Gaza photographer, Yousef Masoud, whom a pro-Israel nonprofit ironically dubbed “HonestReporting” and accused, without evidence, of knowing in advance about the Hamas attack. This is part of a wide range of claims from Israel's allies that Palestinian journalists are, by definition, almost untrustworthy.
There is no patent solution here. One can hardly expect news outlets to find local Israeli reporters who were not traumatized by October 7, or Gazans who are not currently angry against Israel. I suppose you can demand that they only use polyglot foreign correspondents with no personal sympathies. Good luck.
Institutions of all kinds are struggling to gain trust in this kaleidoscopic, interconnected world. If you cannot handle the arduous work of presenting an indisputable truth with absolute confidence, the alternative is humility and openness to different viewpoints.
And the December 28 story, with its powerful writing and vulnerable reporting, is particularly puzzling because there is another method of journalism invented at The New York Times, as elsewhere, to address complex allegations that often involve sexual violence is possible. It is forensic – careful, pedantic, reproducible. The writing style is modest and it's not always fun to read. (The film “She Said” did its best to dramatize the process of reporting sexual assault. Read the frustratingly tight and hedged first story, which gave some exposure to the Harvey Weinsten scandal.) The reporters who did this do, obsess over not just what's on the page, but what every element of their own work will look like when exposed to the light of litigation.
A Wall Street Journal article on the same topic as the Times', published a few days later, provides a useful counterexample. The story lacks the certainty and narrative momentum of Gettleman's, although it also cites Israeli officials' claims without giving the impression that they have been confirmed.
But the story is pedantic about omitting two crucial points: The Journal comes to no conclusion about whether sexual violence was a deliberate war strategy. And it does not say who committed specific acts of sexual violence – Hamas fighters or other Gazans who may have crossed the open border. A scary photo won't answer this question.
And yet the theme of the story is still the shocking violence against women and other civilians in a war zone, the effects of which shape Israel's current military operation. Like the Times, the story describes photos of mutilated corpses but makes less effort to create a coherent narrative. “The Journal saw images taken by a first responder of a naked woman with a knife and three nails in the crotch area, women with some or all of their clothing removed, and women with blood from the crotch area. In another image provided by the first responder, a woman’s breast was almost completely cut off.”
My former colleague Miriam Elder, a veteran correspondent who built the foreign desk at BuzzFeed News, told me that she finds both the questions surrounding the Times story and the approach of its most relentlessly critical episode daunting. “ Rushing the story — and trying to pick it apart mechanically — is a disservice to the actual people at the center,” she said.