• azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
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    11 months ago

    Yes, that rephrasing helps. Or something along the lines of “Israel Denies Deliberate Targeting of Reuters Journalist in Killing”.

    All of these options are factual. Every redaction has an editorial policy. The choice not to contextualize a headline is an editorial choice by definition. So is the choice of which institutions’ press briefings to report on.

    “[Redaction] doesn’t editorialize titles” is as much of an oxymoron as “[Government official] doesn’t do politics”. The unwillingness to take accountability for unavoidable decisions is a huge red flag and points to either duplicity or a very submissive approach to decision-making.

    • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      It’s true that all publishing decisions are ultimately editorial, but there’s a big difference between deciding to report on what IDF and Hamas representatives say while not reporting on social media opinion, and reporting speculation and interpretation of events.

      I don’t feel like they failed to contextualize the headline. It was a subpar headline updated for clarity shortly after publication.

      There just seems to be a lot of jumping on one of the more factual and objective news sources for a headline taken out of context for failing to include sufficient context.

      • azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        It’s virtually impossible to conclusively prove ill-intent for any individual headline like this. However on the whole there is a clear bias from mainstream media outlets towards under-critically perpetuating Israel’s official, carefully controlled narrative – a narrative that they control in part through their own legitimacy as a recognized state, and in part through the deliberate murder and suppression of journalists.

        Israeli state officials keep putting out factually incorrect, disingenuous, harmful public statements to distract from their ongoing genocide. It pollutes an already VERY saturated information space, and any headline that uncritically passes on such a decontextualized F.U.D. fails its duty as journalistic messaging.

        Again, it could be an honest mistake from Reuters. But in such troubled times, it’s getting very hard to forgive those mistakes as innocent when the impact of such repeated failures has been so great.

        • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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          11 months ago

          I mean, you can go look at Reuters headlines for the middle east.

          https://www.reuters.com/world/israel-hamas/

          It’s hardly uncritically accepting of Israels narrative goals, which would be expected for a news outlet that tries to report objectively.
          Given that the initial headline, which I don’t think was as bad as people are responding, was shortly changed and their long history of good reporting and current history of seemingly not following someones dictated narrative, I’m inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.