> I think in the internet age we can do better than "according to a Gaza health ministry spokesman". Linking to original sources should be the standard. Almost everything is online. I think exceptions for things like anonymous sources is reasonable, but then explicitly saying "from an anonymous source" is best.

I agree with you! Unfortunately, original primary sources aren’t always available to the public even when they aren’t anonymous. It’s not just the fault of the journalists but of the organizations that the journalists cover. It’s much easier to have a PR team that deals with journalists than to post everything for public consumption. Among other things, journalists at least used to be really good about “on the record” versus “off the record”—there are infamous instances where Lyndon Johnson would literally whip out his penis in front of journalists and nobody ever reported on it. Which is not a great state of affairs in general but you can see why governments would rather communicate through journalists willing to put up with that sort of thing instead of massaging every piece of information into a formal public statement.

For Hamas it’s even harder. They probably can’t set up official social media accounts because they’re a designated terrorist organization, and if they hosted their own website, they still probably couldn’t use anything like AWS or Cloudflare, and they would struggle to stay online in the face of DDoS attacks which would go completely unpunished, just like Kiwifarms. It’s much easier to just talk to journalists instead.

So you’re not just asking the journalists to do more work here; you’re also asking everyone else to do half the journalist’s job. At which point they might as well cut out the middleman and just talk to the public directly, which is an increasingly popular strategy in the tech industry. In those cases it’s worth the extra work because you get to tell your side of the story, but people only resort to that strategy when the press burns them enough times. If the press is still willing to pretend your terrorist group is a legitimate health ministry or that you didn’t just whip out your penis in front of them because you lost your temper, why would you bother doing that extra work? Likewise, the press goes along with this stuff in exchange for access.

> But since the standards can be externally validated (don't require going into the org like with health inspections), I think it can be an independent third party.

Agreed.

> I wouldn't go so far as to say news organizations are inherently untrustworthy. I'm sure many are and there are a lot of competing motivations, but many are genuinely trying to provide good information.

It’s weird because I’m simultaneously trying to give you a devils advocate argument for why the press does what they do, but also I feel I’m more cynical about them than you are. For what it’s worth, I agree in principle. Journalists are not the spawn of Satan, they’re simply ordinary people responding to incentives.

> It's a difficult problem of balancing those motivations, and I think the new motivation of "the way we make money is by having articles that go viral so ads get more eye balls" has introduced a new dent into that balance.

Except that’s not actually the governing incentive these days. Social media and ad revenue aren’t the business model, paywalls and subscriptions are. The problem with subscription revenue is that it creates a sort of audience capture, where the NYT will only want to publish stuff that doesn’t upset their subscribers. Add in market segmentation by political leaning and you end up in the situation we have today.

> Having a set of standards and then "rating" news organizations should help give organisations a path to improve their services, as well as help readers evaluate how much they should trust a paper.

The problem with that is that setting up and evaluating these standards is a reputation-based business. If you buy electrical equipment that’s certified by UL, you know it’s good because you know and trust UL. Who does the public know and trust about the news? Historically this was the news media themselves, which is where the “just trust me bro” reporting practices came from in the first place.

The good news is that it’s increasingly possible to find primary sources for things, so if you apply enough research and critical thinking of your own, you can sort of self-service this function. As OP is doing here.