How the Times stumbled on a sensitive Israel story

Source: Semafor

Ben Smith
Updated Mar 3, 2024, 8:33pm EST
MEDIA

How the Times stumbled on a sensitive Israel story

There are about 1,700 journalists at The New York Times. But its editors, to their great frustration, are always running out of them.

That is at its most true when a crisis hits and Bigfoot correspondents and columnists from all over the globe descend on a bureau and demand translators, drivers, stringers, security guards, assistants and all-around fixers to support the fact-gathering that undergirds the sort of evocative and sweeping narratives that have been their stock and trade.

The Jerusalem Bureau is one of the Times’ better-staffed even in calmer times, with a few full-time journalists and an extended team of contractors. But by the time Jeffrey Gettleman arrived from London, it was already straining to keep up with the demands of editors in Washington, Bigfeet in Jerusalem, and the chaos of war reporting.

So Gettleman had no chance of getting one of the experienced regulars to help him. He is a lesser Bigfoot. He has the coveted “international correspondent” title and has told moving stories of suffering from Ukraine to Rwanda. But he’s also a divisive character inside the paper who — to the horror of his peers — won his Pulitzer in 2012 by nominating his own work on war and famine in Somalia after the Times declined to include it in its official package for consideration.

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But I believe I can shed some light on what is, to me, a mind-boggling fact: The Times turned crucial elements of its reporting on one of the most difficult and sensitive stories it has ever published to amateurs, one of whose social media posts would make reasonable people question her ability to be fair.

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Read more: https://www.semafor.com/article/03/03/2024/how-the-times-stumbled-on-a-sensitive-israel-story