The New York Times may have the correction of the year, and it’s only April.
The paper published a report this weekend detailing the steady rise of Facebook’s head of news partnerships, Campbell Brown. Unsurprisingly, the article, titled “Is Facebook’s Campbell Brown a Force to Be Reckoned With? Or Is She Fake News,” addresses what many consider to be the social media site’s most pressing issues: The proliferation and spread of conspiracy theories.
This is where the Times’ otherwise sound reporting takes a big nosedive into sloppy journalism.
“Ms. Brown wants to use Facebook’s existing Watch product — a service introduced in 2017 as a premium product with more curation that has nonetheless been flooded with far-right conspiracy programming like ‘Palestinians Pay $400 million Pensions For Terrorist Families’ — to be a breaking news destination,” read the original version of the story [emphasis added].
Except for one thing: The Palestinian Authority definitely does provide financial support to its “martyrs.”
“About 13,000 Palestinian men and women are beneficiaries of the prisoner payments, which totaled about $160 million in 2017, or an average $12,307 per person,” the Washington Post reported last month, citing data collected from both the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority. “About 33,700 families (19,700 in the Palestinian territories) shared in about $183 million in martyr payments, or $5,430 per family.”
The exact numbers are unclear, but it is certainly true that the Palestinian Authority has a stipend for the relatives of imprisoned and deceased anti-Israel terrorists, and the dollar amounts are in the hundreds of millions. What’s more, it isn’t even a secret, except apparently to New York Times journalists.
“Palestinians acknowledge making payments to the families of suicide bombers and people convicted of heinous attacks,” the Post noted. “Hakim Awad — the then-18-year-old militant mentioned by Netanyahu who murdered five family members in a West Bank settlement — receives about $14,000 a year. But because payments increase with the length of incarceration, Awad would be paid more than $1.9 million if he lived to 80, the male life expectancy in Israel.”
To characterize the Palestine payoff scheme as false is itself false. The Times has since issued a correction, which reads, “An earlier version of this article erroneously included a reference to Palestinian actions as an example of the sort of far-right conspiracy stories that have plagued Facebook. In fact, Palestinian officials have acknowledged providing payments to the families of Palestinians killed while carrying out attacks on Israelis or convicted of terrorist acts and imprisoned in Israel; that is not a conspiracy theory.”
The annoying thing here it that the payoffs are a well-known fact and have been for some time. They are the subject of a bill in Congress that has been extensively debated. It’s not as if this is some obscure, niche detail. Congress even cut aid to Palestine earlier this year over this exact issue. A simple Google search would’ve cleared this up for the Times reporter and her editors.
That this fake claim of fake news went to print without anyone catching it says a lot about the paper’s baked-in biases.
(h/t @AmbDaniDayan)
