This a bit of a random thought, but it seems like it could be useful. I listen to The Daily from the NY Times pretty religiously, although I’m often a day or two behind (since it’s daily 5 days a week).
I was listening to today’s broadcast titled “Israel’s Invasion Begins” and I heard the Times journalist, Patrick Kingsley, express surprise (“perhaps naively”) that the Israeli army didn’t brief him or others on their plans for invading Gaza. In fact, surprise surprise, no one told the journalists that communications would be cut off, on purpose by Israel, presumably to avoid letting Hamas in on the Israeli army’s intentions.
Let me be perfectly clear that I am not expressing any political opinions here, at all. But I’ve lived long enough to know that you don’t launch a military action (invasion, battle, whatever you want to call it) and invite the rest of the world to sit in on your tactics and strategies. So where the heck did journalists get the idea that they would be clued in, like in a presidential press conference?
Pause for a second: Do you remember when Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022? (Yes, that war is still going on, even if our short-term attention is focused on Gaza.) The thing that stood out for me is the accuracy with which the U.S. government was able to predict the next move that Russia would make in the first few months of its incursion into Ukraine. I thought to myself: Compare that to the U.S. government’s ability to predict the existence of WMDs in Iraq in 2002. The Central Intelligence Agency, I thought, has come a LONG way in the past 20 years. (This is true and worth a treatment all by itself about why it’s true, but that’s not my point today.)
Now we have the phenomenon of the NY Times validating what the U.S. government (or any other government) claims. For readers of the NY Times, have you noticed a phrase like this being used in reporting of the war(s): “imagery verified by The Times”. That’s right, the New York Times employs a team of analysts, some of whom may or may not have learned their tradecraft at the CIA or the NSA, to analyze images (from Maxar and Planet Labs, among others) and communications (including on X) to independently verify statements made by the military or executive branches of government.
News organizations haven’t totally learned how to manage this process, as when the NY Times initially reported that the Israeli army had bombed the hospital in Gaza City, a headline that was corrected within minutes because the only source was the Gaza Health Ministry, not generally considered a trusted source.
But here we are now in a world where the press can operate at the same speed and with many of the same tools and resources as the government. The only question I can think to ask: Who do you trust more: The NY Times or the Central Intelligence Agency (or its counterparts)? Personally, I’m torn to decide.