Newsdiffs and the NY Times
Just as we track meaningful differences across Talmudic manuscripts (girsaot), others track differences across news articles.
This was brought to mind yesterday when I saw this tweet:
In a follow-up tweet, he links to an archived version of the story (at archive.org) compared to the present version. In one, the subheading listed them as terrorists, but this was changed to gunmen.
In the interim, an editor changed it back to “terrorists”.
David Zweig of Silent Lunch chimed in, connecting it to recent Substack post of his:
in terms of style guides and how news outlets shape perceptions via careful word choice. He has a telling recent example, where NPR took a relatively short quote and went in and out of direct quotation, simply for the sake of not exposing its audience to the actual words. Thus,
“Our troops are still fighting and hunting down” remaining Hamas militants, Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Jonathan Conricus said, out of some 1,000 militants who “went house to house, building to building in search for Israeli civilians.”
where the original quote was:
“Our troops are still fighting and hunting down the last terrorists that are still inside Israeli territory… we assess that there were approximately 1,000 terrorists who participated in yesterday’s invasion of Israel. About 1,000 bloodthirsty Palestinians who went house to house, building to building in search for Israeli civilians.”
I used to use NewsDiffs to track changes to articles. It was (still is?) a website that automatically checks differences at NYTimes and elsewhere. They had noteworthy diffs (differences) such as this:
For some reason, they haven’t updated in quite a long time.
But there is NewsSniffer which is pretty good. However, they only track text and changes to the actual article, not the sub headline. Here is the one change they have on this article. They have three versions, and the changes are minimal. Thus:
