Home Secretary Yvette Cooper during a walk through Lewisham town centre, in south London, as part of a visit to speak about neighbourhood policing and meet with policing teams, July 8, 2024
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Cooper cites both far-right and Islamist hate. But political Islam has no profile in Britain at all. She, like Lord Walney, seeks to lump violent fascist riots together with the peaceful Palestine solidarity movement, whose mass demos have been slandered as “hate marches” by the Tories, right-wing media and fascist agitators such as Tommy Robinson.
Where jihadist violence has reached Britain, it has had more to do with our state’s hyper-violent foreign policy than online grooming. The deadliest terror attack of the last decade, that on the Manchester Arena by Salman Abedi in 2017, was carried out by a man our government had helped travel to Libya to fight in a British-backed Islamist revolt against its government, and whose return to Britain was facilitated by MI5.
A state campaign against extremism “across the political spectrum” will reinforce the clampdowns on protest rights and free speech associated with the Conservatives.
That Labour’s current leadership will deploy it to silence left criticism seems predictable given their record: this is the party that banned its branches from discussing the suspension of its former leader Jeremy Corbyn on the ludicrous grounds that this would make Jewish members feel unsafe.
Bans on “fake news” could only be welcomed if we had total confidence in the objectivity and fairness of those sifting the truth from the lies. X, Facebook and indeed the British state are not objective. There is no way such a ban would not simply become a form of political censorship exercised by the ruling class.
Pro-Palestinians in New York City join “Shut down colonial feminism” rally in front of Senator Kristen Gillibrand’s office, U.N. Women office and New York Times building on Friday, January 12, 2024. (Photo: Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Now more than ever, Americans deserve objective, diverse, trustworthy, and contextualized coverage of Gaza.
Rather than providing the kind of objective, fact-based reporting integral to an informed citizenry, our mainstream press bombards us with explicit and implicit biases, false narratives, dehumanization, and misdirection, serving to stifle public dissent and justify, rationalize, and conceal the systematic oppression and extermination of the people of Gaza.
As dependable propaganda tools for Israel’s aggression, our news censors truth not only by what they choose to cover and how they spin it—but what they deliberately omit. This orchestrated disinformation campaign helps ensure the ongoing and unconditional support of the U.S. government and its continued role as Israel’s dutiful genocidal benefactor.
This isn’t war. It’s mass murder. But this isn’t what most Americans are watching, reading, and hearing on the news.
How does a Palestinian-American with family in the region reconcile the disconnect between “reality” and the “story” our press is “telling”?
Consider a day in the life in Gaza: Palestinian schools, hospitals, universities, places of worship, and heritage sites are being systematically destroyed. Civilians, nearly half children, are being murdered on a mass scale (over 30,000 dead, nearly half children). The calculated deprivation of food and water is literally starving families to death. Babies are being born into a living hell, with screams of terror, the ear-piercing explosions of limb-searing U.S.-made bombs, and the painful moans of their parents among the first sounds they hear. The electricity powering the oxygen machines keeping sick patients alive cut off, leaving them to struggle to gulp each of their final breaths. Amputations of children’s limbs without anesthesia with barbed wire have become obscenely routine. Broken, but alive, Palestinian bodies riddled with shrapnel require each piece to be pulled from their flesh. Hungry children are found dead with single Israeli sniper shots to the head because they made the mistake of seeking out food from an aid truck. The deliberate decimation of Gaza’s telecommunications infrastructure has left families unable to communicate with one another, or with the world, allowing daily atrocities to become increasingly invisible and unreported.
American Media’s Israel Bias and Censoring Journalists
Quantitative analyses conducted by The Intercept, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, and an independent collective of U.S. journalists, writers, and media makers of coverage in The York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times lay bare our news media’s dramatic pro-Israel bias. The litany of press failings are disturbing in their sheer scope and intention. Findings included the systematic undermining of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim perspectives and the invocation of inflammatory language that reinforces Islamophobic and racist tropes. Misinformation spread by Israeli officials is commonly printed along with consistent failures to scrutinize Israel’s indiscriminate killing of civilians in Gaza. Israeli deaths are disproportionately emphasized, and more humanizing language is used to describe them than Palestinians. This is to name just a few.
Case-in-point: In what’s now being called the Flour Massacre, at least 112 Palestinians in Gaza were killed and hundreds more injured after Israeli forces opened fire on civilians while waiting for food from desperately needed aid trucks. Leading news media descriptions referred to the slaughter as “food aid deaths,” “food aid-related deaths,” “chaotic incident,” and “reported killed in crowd near Gaza aid convoy.”
Do these headlines properly convey the massacre of starving civilians?
Sadly, censored journalists who speak out are paying the price. The Los Angeles Times recently banned 38 journalists from covering Gaza for at least three months after they signed an open letter criticizing Western newsrooms for their biased reporting on Israel and their role in dehumanizing rhetoric that has served to justify ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
But it’s not just print that is to blame. The Guardian reported the accounts of six CNN staffers from multiple newsrooms, including more than a dozen internal memos and emails, finding that daily news decisions are shaped by a flow of directives from the CNN headquarters in Atlanta that have set strict pro-Israel guidelines on coverage. Every story on the conflict must be cleared by the Jerusalem bureau—which has close ties with Israel’s military—before broadcast or publication.
Holding Media Accountable, Supporting Journalists, and Promoting Independent News
There is no shortage of ways people can help bring this nightmare to an end. Among them should include pressure campaigns on the corporate media to commit to journalistic integrity and truth. Outlets like CNN and The New York Times have a unique opportunity to educate millions by providing rigorous, evidence-based reporting that could serve to end the ongoing genocide—rather than enable it.
Petitions to hold CNN and The New York Times accountable deserve support. But petitions aren’t enough. (including protests, boycotts, and sit-ins) and strategies that target these institutions’ advertisers, revenues, and reputational interests are also required.
Israel’s ongoing genocidal annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza will be reviled by history—rendering the once solemn rallying cry “Never again!” cruelly hollow.
Finally, independent, non-corporate news serves as dependable sources of fact-based information and a powerful check on the official narratives of their corporate counterparts. Now more than ever, Americans deserve objective, diverse, trustworthy, and contextualized coverage of Gaza. Thankfully, these alternatives exist, and need our support, from Pacifica radio to a long list of independent news sites.
Israel’s ongoing genocidal annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza will be reviled by history—rendering the once solemn rallying cry “Never again!” cruelly hollow. “Never again” is not meant to be a phrase of remembrance, but a call to action. Let’s not let the corporate media forget it.
Palestinians mourn loved ones killed by an Israeli airstrike on December 24, 2023 in Khan Younis, Gaza. (Photo: Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images)
The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times have regularly “used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians.”
An analysis published Tuesday shows that three of the most influential newspapers in the United States—The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times—have reliably shown a bias against Palestinians in their coverage of Israel’s assault on Gaza and its reverberating consequences.
Writer Adam Johnson and researcher Othman Ali examined the three outlets’ coverage of Israel-Gaza between October 7—the day of the deadly Hamas-led attack on southern Israel—and November 24, which marked the start of a negotiated pause that ended just a week later. The Israeli bombardment has continued relentlessly since.
The pair’s analysis, published in The Intercept, found that across more than 1,000 articles, the three newspapers showed a “consistent bias” against Palestinians. Specifically, the outlets “disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict; used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians; and offered lopsided coverage of antisemitic acts in the U.S., while largely ignoring anti-Muslim racism in the wake of October 7.”
As the Gaza death toll surged during the first month and a half of Israel’s assault, the three newspapers’ mentions of Palestinians in their coverage declined, Johnson and Ali found.
In the period between October 7 and November 24, the outlets used the words “slaughter” and “massacre” a combined 180 times when describing the toll of the Hamas-led attack on Israel. The newspapers used those terms just five times when describing Gazans killed by the Israeli military.
“The Washington Post employed ‘massacre‘ several times in its reporting to describe October 7,” Johnson and Ali wrote. “‘President Biden faces growing pressure from lawmakers in both parties to punish Iran after Hamas’ massacre,’ one report from the Post says. A November 13 story from the paper about how Israel’s siege and bombing had killed 1 in 200 Palestinians does not use the word ‘massacre’ or ‘slaughter’ once. The Palestinian dead have simply been ‘killed’ or ‘died’—often in the passive voice.”
Johnson and Ali previously found similar bias against Palestinians in the coverage of CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC.
Among the findings in Ali’s research is the selective use of emotive terms to describe killing—something reserved almost exclusively for Israeli deaths. It’s a sort of reverse humanization, horror only goes in one direction. The killing of Palestinians is seen as sterile/clinical https://t.co/TFvczDwTlIpic.twitter.com/oaMsObTFnK
The analysis also shows that the newspapers’ coverage of the Israeli assault’s impact on children and journalists has been relatively sparse given the unparalleled impact the war has had on kids and members of the media.
In the three weeks after October 7, Israeli forces killed more children in Gaza than were killed in all of the world’s armed conflict zones since 2019, according to Save the Children. The Committee to Protect Journalists said last month that more reporters were killed during the first 10 weeks of the war “than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year.”
Johnson and Ali wrote Tuesday that “the lack of coverage for the unprecedented killing of children and journalists, groups that typically elicit sympathy from Western media, is conspicuous.”
“By way of comparison, more Palestinian children died in the first week of the Gaza bombing than during the first year of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, yet The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Timesranmultiplepersonal, sympatheticstorieshighlightingtheplightofchildren during the first six weeks of the Ukraine war.”
The analysis comes days after The Intercept highlighted a longstanding CNN policy under which the outlet runs its Israel-Palestine coverage through its Jerusalem bureau, which must abide by the rules of the Israeli military’s censor.
The Western media’s slanted coverage of Israel’s devastating war on Gaza has drawn outrage from individual journalists, including some who work at The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times.
“We are renewing the call for journalists to tell the full truth without fear or favor,” reads an open letter signed by hundreds of journalists in November. “To use precise terms that are well-defined by international human rights organizations, including ‘apartheid,’ ‘ethnic cleansing,’ and ‘genocide.’ To recognize that contorting our words to hide evidence of war crimes or Israel’s oppression of Palestinians is journalistic malpractice and an abdication of moral clarity.”
After the letter was released, dozens of signatories—including journalists from The Associated Press and Washington Post—asked that their signatures be removed, fearing retaliation from their employers.
