Democracy dies in disinformation reporting

Ben Collins dons his hotdog costume and pledges to go after the guy responsible for this.

This week there’s been a lot of pushback against NBC’s Ben Collins just because he uncritically spread falsehoods about the Israeli attack on a hospital in the Gaza strip which killed hundreds, only for it more likely to have been a Palestinian rocket falling apart en route to Israel and detonating in a Gaza parking lot, with a death toll much smaller than alleged by Hamas, which is shocking because they’re normally so reliable and judicious about this stuff:

Collins is treated as an expert in the burgeoning field of countering the spread of misinformation. Yet his error rate is noteworthy.

Take the Gaza hospital explosion, for example. On Tuesday, reports surfaced that the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza had come under attack, resulting in as many as 500 deaths. The New York Times ran with "Israeli Strikes Kill Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians Say." Underneath this headline was an image of an obliterated building—readers who squinted would have noticed that this was not the hospital, b…