International editor Doug Jehl joined Peter Kafka’s Recode Media to discuss how The Post has “mobilized the entire newsroom” to cover the Israel-Gaza war with “intensity, rigor and velocity,” embracing newsroom collaboration and 24/7 coverage to tackle a sea of misinformation and produce critical reporting for The Post’s global audiences.
This really is an operation in which we’ve mobilized the entire newsroom. We have about 12 or 13 people on the ground in Israel. We have more in neighboring countries, Lebanon and Egypt. We have teams in Seoul and London who focus on breaking news coverage around the clock and we have many people in Washington including our extraordinary visual forensics team that helps to authenticate the flood of images and video pouring in as people present this conflict.Unfortunately we’ve had a lot of experience in the last 26 months, and even before, with what seemed to be never-ending stories. We had the coronavirus epidemic, and then…the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, we’ve had Russia’s invasion of Ukraine…throughout those major stories, we’ve continued to cover the major stories on a 24/7 hour basis. We built breaking news teams in London and Seoul that launched in the summer of 2021 that launched just in time for this intensive period of news…this is going to be a story that goes on, and one we believe it’s our obligation to cover with this intensity and rigor and velocity that we’ve brought to it for the last 10 days.We do have some of the power with our own reporting beyond what we witnessed on the ground of using tools to verify videos, to analyze videos and other information that can be gathered in a way that sort of multiplies our reporting power…We have a large and dedicated team devoted to visual forensics that use tools to look at metadata, look at other information to be confident that video was shot when and where it was claimed to have been shot. We recognize that there’s a lot of misinformation out there…We’re able to using these tools to filter out a lot of the bad information and focus on the good.Every day, I would say and certainly in a conflict like this, we’ve made decisions [to pause and ensure accuracy] multiple times a day…We encourage [reporters and editors] to stop and pause and say again, ‘What do we know? What do we not know?’…There have been multiple claims made in this crisis that we’ve decided not to report and I’m glad we have refrained.— https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/recode-media/id1080467174?i=1000631778056
