To Alex’s post: I think the Times did a great job in packaging its reporting into a varied set of products to reach the widest audience possible. While Khan’s long-form writing is a lengthy investment, both parts are split up into digestible chunks: headers, highlighted messages between U.S. army members, pictures of survivors and the aftermath of strikes. Also, legal cases and reports are boring; footnotes even more so. The Times could have chosen to overwhelm the reader with statistic after statistic, airstrike after airstrike. But for the sake of public understanding, they have to narrativize and drop less important details. That’s not a bad thing.
The Times also made several big audience engagement choices that I think go a long way towards bringing more people into their reporting. First, they released thousands of pages of documents they obtained via FOIA, allowing anyone to investigate these attacks further. I think that’s especially important in the OSINT age, where breakthroughs might depend on an everyday person who happens to take a video of something newsworthy. Their database is exhaustive, and basically anything you click on is interesting (conversely, you could also argue that the Times should not withhold documents anyway because they were obtained via public records request). Additionally, they also wrapped up this long-form reporting into a “What you need to know” story that runs through key takeaways and narrative points. Finally, they also released CENTCOM’s responses to their reporting in full, as opposed to the clipped versions that made it into the piece — so that if anyone really had doubts about the narrative, they could see the (uninspiring) rebuttal and judge for themselves.
I think this type of lengthy disclosure, where possible, is especially important for war reporting. It feels like trust in media is particularly tenuous in this realm; look to the war in Gaza as an example. As Khan well acknowledges in her writing, reporters may have to do extra work to “push back” against a prevailing national narrative about X conflict being just and Y group of people being bad. Khan should also be commended for publicly detailing her extensive methodology, another step towards shoring up trust in reporting.
This kind of detailed, in-depth reporting takes years; Khan talked to people who lost family members in 2015 for an article published in 2021. That also means there are years of coverage that did not — and could not — include her new revelations. Attaching an editor’s note pointing to Khan’s reporting on every single story about an airstrike feels ham-fisted, but how should editors think about old coverage once it becomes outdated?
