Look at most news stories these days. There's some kind of conflict, two parties don't agree on something, and they report both "sides" of the story. Because the writers don't know what really occurred, it's common that a news story will give equal weight to lies and truth (or semi-truth and semi-truth).
In the insanity of normal society, this is actually promoted as a good thing. News stations pat themselves on the back for being "fair and balanced", and use it as proof of being "unbiased".
It's the opposite of unbiased, when there's no bias there are no "sides". You can't take both sides in a conflict, each "side" being a heavily biased opinion in itself, and combine them together to create a lack of bias. That's not how it works, two conflicting partial truths don't equal a whole truth, two conflicting partial truths just create cognitive dissonance (FUD).
Now look at this news story, it's quite different from what I described above. It's proper investigative journalism where the goal is cutting through opinions and second-hand information to find the actual truth. It's a major accomplishment and something to be applauded.
In my heavily-biased opinion, it's the job of a free press to seek and report the truth, to create new stories like this one, not to report "both sides".
CNN doesn't know exactly what happened, there's conflicting stories, and all we know for sure is that a bunch of hungry Palestinians were just killed while trying to get food. Here's what CNN found:
According to Palestine it's Israel's fault.
According to Israel it's Palestine's fault.
Yes, clear as mud. It's the perfect kind of reporting for adding to the controversy and acting like there's no clear right & wrong, or viable solutions to the conflict. It's how I would do things if I wanted to extend the war as long as possible. However, I'm biased toward peace and preservation of life, so it's quite clear to me what's causing food riots and subsequent massacres.
Some of that is just that there's a 24 hour news cycle, and the event is out there so they have to report that it happened. It takes _time_ to untangle what really happened in an event like that, and it's not going to happen in a day.
I'm not going to get into the politics of that, but I do wish that news orgs would report the necessary context for understanding what "so-and-so claims" really means and letting people have all the information they need so they can judge how many grains of salt are appropriate. A little bit of he-said, she-said is necessary in breaking news, but there should be a lot of caveats that go along with reporting like that.
You have a country full of starving people, an active war, and trucks full of food guarded by soldiers of the opposing force. You also have the UN, a somewhat independent organization that's supposed to help resolve the conflict, and they're saying Israel is intentionally restricting Gaza's food supply.
Understanding this context, seeing all the threads, and there's really not much to untangle. If anything, this was entirely predictable. Nobody should be surprised that starvation was enough to provoke a violent conflict between Palestinians and the IDF.
I believe the news media is here to provide clarity, not add to confusion. The problem is that when things are a tangled mess, the media has a lot more to report on. Truth is cut and dry, but when there's a mystery you can just keep going on and on and on... I still remember all the news about OJ Simpson, so much to report and so few facts!
I'll save you the headache: News media does not exist to inform you. In the actually existing real world that we live in, news media does not exist to inform you.
When something newsworthy happens, like many civilian deaths around a food truck, people reading the news want two things: they want the truth, and they want it now. I agree with you that good journalism seeks the truth first of all - but that takes time and if everyone else is talking about that truck today, your news outlet has to feature that story too somehow. Maybe we'll have a proper investigative report on that truck in a week, or a month.
I remember that earlier in the war, when some kind of rocket struck a hospital in Gaza, Israel and Hamas also blamed each other - then President Biden said as far as his intelligence goes, it was Hamas and I think that's the consensus now? We might never know for sure, but in the immediate aftermath of the hit the options for a media outlet were basically "we don't know" or "it was definitely the side we don't like". The truthful answer until someone's done the investigation is the former, but that gets you the kind of article on CNN that you're pointing out.
Look at most news stories these days. There's some kind of conflict, two parties don't agree on something, and they report both "sides" of the story. Because the writers don't know what really occurred, it's common that a news story will give equal weight to lies and truth (or semi-truth and semi-truth).
In the insanity of normal society, this is actually promoted as a good thing. News stations pat themselves on the back for being "fair and balanced", and use it as proof of being "unbiased".
It's the opposite of unbiased, when there's no bias there are no "sides". You can't take both sides in a conflict, each "side" being a heavily biased opinion in itself, and combine them together to create a lack of bias. That's not how it works, two conflicting partial truths don't equal a whole truth, two conflicting partial truths just create cognitive dissonance (FUD).
Now look at this news story, it's quite different from what I described above. It's proper investigative journalism where the goal is cutting through opinions and second-hand information to find the actual truth. It's a major accomplishment and something to be applauded.
In my heavily-biased opinion, it's the job of a free press to seek and report the truth, to create new stories like this one, not to report "both sides".
And to illustrate when I'm saying, look at what happens to be the #1 story on my Google News at this moment: https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/29/middleeast/gaza-food-truck-de...
CNN doesn't know exactly what happened, there's conflicting stories, and all we know for sure is that a bunch of hungry Palestinians were just killed while trying to get food. Here's what CNN found:
According to Palestine it's Israel's fault.
According to Israel it's Palestine's fault.
Yes, clear as mud. It's the perfect kind of reporting for adding to the controversy and acting like there's no clear right & wrong, or viable solutions to the conflict. It's how I would do things if I wanted to extend the war as long as possible. However, I'm biased toward peace and preservation of life, so it's quite clear to me what's causing food riots and subsequent massacres.