Progressive Politics

(Responding to your response about my edit)

Hm, I didn't know about the Times doing A/B tests before deciding what headline to run. Yeah, I guess I am wrong about it ever happening -- although it still sounds like once they settle on one digital headline they stick with it for everyone and drop a note in the "updated X ago" line if they change it. For reference here's exactly what they said:

Digital headlines often evolve after a story has been published online, too. A writer might file an update containing new information that changes the focus, for instance, or an editor may decide to update a headline so that search engines will find the article more easily. “In a competitive news environment, there’s value in changing a headline when the story changes, because it keeps you up in search,” Ms. Taylor said.

The Times also makes a practice of running what are called A/B tests on the digital headlines that appear on its homepage: Half of readers will see one headline, and the other half will see an alternative headline, for about half an hour. At the end of the test, The Times will use the headline that attracted more readers. “People think if you change a headline, that it’s some kind of ‘Gotcha!,’ and it’s just not,” said Mark Bulik, a senior editor who oversees digital headlines. “People who think it’s a ‘gotcha’ just don’t have a full understanding of news in the digital world.”

But in any case, I think the point still stands -- Reuters was clearly doing that first-paragraph thing here, updating to remove the Israeli viewpoint (possibly because they had time to gather more information themselves and determine that the Israelis were talking bullshit about what had happened and there wasn't a need to report their claims). I don't believe that they have one version of the headline that represents one set of facts and another that doesn't and they serve them both simultaneously, and archive.is and the Twitter guy just happened to see them transforming in opposite directions, with lies underneath where it says "Updated 4 mins ago". It sort of looks to me more likely that Twitter guy / OP is just lying about what happened, to make Reuters look bad for reasons unknown.

Certainly the thesis that at the current time it's transformed into Israeli propaganda is dead wrong, and that is relevant.

It sounds like they were modifying the headline to be more pro Palestinian and more in line with the facts, and edit out some things Israel was saying which turned out to be lies. I fail to see how that matches up with the thesis that Reuters is slanting the story for Israel, or that their headline was getting more pro-Israeli over time, or the broader argument that Reuters is slanting its coverage to manufacture consent (e.g. look at their current front page).

I do recognize that both of those scenarios involve Reuters changing the headline, yes. You don't have to keep explaining that concept to me; I can grasp it. I was asking OP about some of the details of when they saw these intermediate headlines that they were using to paint a picture that seemed to me to be backwards from the reality.