Media watch: NYT’s Fake News in Story on Fake News

New York Times tech reporter Nellie Bowles over the weekend described Facebook’s Watch project as “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.’ ” Far-right conspiracy? At Tablet, Liel Liebovitz sets her straight: “Read the real news, and you’ll learn that, in 2017, the PA doled out more than $347 million to families of terrorists who had murdered Jews, increasing the amount to $403 million this year.” It’s one thing for idiots online to share obviously false nonsense, Liebovitz writes. “But we need journalistic institutions like the Times precisely because we trust them to be more discerning, to sift through the stream of falsehoods for the few glittering nuggets of hard truth.”