Media Review: Bearing False Witness--New York Times, Western Media

Media Review: Bearing False Witness--New York Times, Western Media

    Thursday, February 29, 2024   No comments

Journalism (mass communication) is the fourth branch of government. As to how much power this fourth branch of government has, that depends on the circumstances and events being covered. During war times, this fourth branch of government is as powerful as the armed forces, the most potent state instrument in the hand of the first branch of government. That is because a war cannot be won without a powerful narrative that justify it and motivate soldiers to fight in it.

In the wars involving majority-Muslim countries and when covering events involving Muslims in genral, Western media often skips the due diligence protocols and releases questionable stories as long as such stories fit the narrative needed for winning the war or not release critical information that may prevent winning the war.

After (and during) the US illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, not only did the New York Times withheld information about the US torture programs for more than a year and half, but the paper methodically refused to use the word “torture” to describe the programs when writing about them as reported by Colin Kalmbachera in 2018. It was not until 2014 that the New York Times decided to “use the word “torture” to describe incidents in which we know for sure that interrogators inflicted pain on a prisoner in an effort to get information,” when ordered by NYT’s executive editor, Dean Baquet. The withholding of evidence of torture programs is likely to have continued longer if it were not for Wikileaks data dump that brought that information to the public. A person involved in Wikileaks, Julian Assange, is sought by the US government on espionage charges. In 2019, the UN Special Rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, stated that “while the US Government prosecutes Mr. Assange for publishing information about serious human rights violations, including torture and murder, the officials responsible for these crimes continue to enjoy impunity.”

During this ongoing war in Gaza, we are now learning that news stories that may have facilitated and justified the “plausible genocide” committed by the state of Israel, as found by the International Court of Justice in its provisional injunctions in the case brought by South Africa, these stories were fake stories, and many were based on secret government agents.

The New York Times is facing an ethical dilemma that was behind the launch of an internal investigation and review of the author of the article “Screams Without Words: How Hamas Used Sexual Violence as a Weapon on October 7,” which was published on December 28 by Israeli journalist Anat Schwartz. The investigation began after the newspaper found that Schwartz had liked posts on social media platforms calling on Israel to execute Palestinians and turn Gaza into a “slaughterhouse.”

Anat Schwartz wrote a total of seven articles for the New York Times, all of which except one, focus on the sexual violence against women angle that captured the mind of the Western public at the beginning of the war are what gave cover to the rage of the Israeli killing machine that has been going on for months. All seven stories are still published here, nytimes.com/by/anat-schwartz, as of this writing.

The “independent” Israeli journalist, who began working with the American newspaper after the operation of October 7, 2023, is being reviewed by the newspaper because she liked posts on social media that showed support for the genocide committed by Israeli forces, including posts that called for the transformation of Gaza to a “slaughterhouse” and promoting the lie of “40 headless children.” The New York Times’ social media policy prohibits its journalists from expressing partisan opinions or endorsing political views.

During her work at the newspaper, Schwartz’s reporting focused on highlighting “Israel” as a victim, especially writing fabrications about sexual violence that she claims was committed by Palestinians. It also supported publications that said
Westerners should be “afraid” and should believe that “Hamas” is like ISIS. Schwartz’s work has faced internal criticism, leading to the removal of an episode of The Daily podcast related to the original story. Schwartz quickly deactivated her account on the X platform for a short period to remove the posts she liked after users noticed them. But the matter had already turned into a scandal and the newspaper’s management was forced to take action.

Anat Schwartz was not a reporter or journalist before last October 7. She is a filmmaker who was suddenly hired by the New York Times last October. More evidence has emerged online that Schwartz also served in Israeli military intelligence. Her assistant in writing two of the articles was her nephew, Adam Sella. As the scandal escalated, one of the main media outlets in Israel, Ynet, wrote about Anat Schwartz, quoting Israeli sources who feared that the New York Times’ move against Schwartz would affect the Israeli narrative, and that the Israeli government was pressuring the American newspaper to conceal these facts.

The first person to discover that Schwartz liked racist posts calling for the extermination of the people of Gaza was an account on the X platform called zei_squirrel on the 24th of February. Then, the Internet began investigating Schwartz’s background and searching for any of her digital traces on the web. It was  revealed that she has been working at the “Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation” since 2021, and continued her work while writing the fabrications published by the New York Times.  This means that the New York Times was aware of all these matters, but decided to rely on a film director, and a former soldier in Israeli intelligence, to write propaganda content that the paper published as reliable, vetted information.

Now, the New York Times is claiming that it is investigating Schwartz, not for the content it published, but for violating the newspaper’s rules regarding how to appear on social media platforms.

The bias does not stop there. Western media was fully saturated with news stories after the Israeli government presented a made-for-drama show about the sexual violence allegedly committed by Hamas. The New York Times alone published six stories on the matter by the same individual reporter. However, when two independent UN bodies produced evidence documenting sexual violence committed against Palestinian women and girls at the hands of Israeli officers, Western media ignores it or provide little coverage of it. The complicity of Western media in genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity is what enables these crimes to continue to happen. Importantly, the prominent media outlets’ biased coverage  provides the first draft of history, and often the final draft of it.

Adapted from The Way Western Media Whitewashes Illegal Invasions And Torture And Enables Genocide

Media review: CNN faces pressure from its employees because of its bias towards Israel

Media review: CNN faces pressure from its employees because of its bias towards Israel

    Monday, February 05, 2024   No comments

The Guardian newspaper said that the American CNN network is facing violent reactions from its employees over editorial policies that they say adopt the Israeli narrative, while censoring the viewpoints of Palestinians in the network’s coverage of the war on Gaza.

Journalists in CNN newsrooms in the United States and abroad say the broadcast was skewed by administration rules and a topic approval process that resulted in very partial coverage of the October 7 attack and the Israeli war in Gaza.

“Most of the news since the war began, no matter how accurate the initial reporting, has been skewed by systemic and institutional bias within the network toward Israel,” a CNN employee said, adding that CNN’s coverage of the Israeli war on Gaza amounts to journalistic malpractice.

According to accounts from six network employees in multiple newsrooms, and more than a dozen internal memos and emails obtained by The Guardian, daily news decisions are shaped by a flow of direction from CNN headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, which sets strict guidelines on coverage.

They include severe restrictions on quoting the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and conveying Palestinian views, while Israeli government statements are taken at face value. In addition, every war story or news item coming from the Jerusalem office must be deleted.

The American network's journalists say that the tone of the coverage was set by its new editor-in-chief and CEO, Mark Thompson, as some employees are concerned about Thompson's willingness to tolerate external attempts to influence coverage, as Thompson previously served as director general of the British Broadcasting Corporation, and was accused of caving in to government pressure. In a number of positions, including calling for the dismissal of one of the network’s most prominent correspondents in Jerusalem in 2005.

In early November, David Lindsay, the network's director of news standards and practices, issued a directive banning the publication of most Hamas statements, describing them as "inflammatory speech and propaganda."

CNN sources admitted that no interviews had been conducted with Hamas and its leaders since the October 7 attack. CNN correspondent Sarah Synder faced criticism for repeating the alleged Israeli story that Hamas beheaded 40 children at the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Flood operation. The correspondent later apologized for the story.

One of the network's journalists told the Guardian that there are selected individuals who edit all reports with an institutional pro-Israel bias, and often use language and phrases to absolve the Israeli army of responsibility for its crimes in Gaza, and downplay the number of Palestinian deaths and Israeli attacks.

While other employees said that some journalists with experience covering war and news in the region are avoiding assignments related to Israel, as they believe that they will not be free to tell the whole story.

One employee said there is a lot of internal conflict and opposition within the network, and some employees are looking to leave.

Media Review: How did major American newspapers cover the Gaza war?

Media Review: How did major American newspapers cover the Gaza war?

    Tuesday, January 09, 2024   No comments

 A quantitative analysis conducted by the American website "The Intercept" concluded that the coverage of major newspapers in America in the first six weeks of the attack on Gaza showed a strong bias in favor of Israel.

The website said that coverage of the Israeli war on Gaza by the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times was consistently biased against the Palestinians.

The website explained in its report that the print media, which plays an influential role in shaping American public opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, did not pay much attention to the unprecedented impact of the Israeli blockade and bombing campaign on both children and journalists in the Gaza Strip.

Disproportionate coverage

He said that major American newspapers disproportionately highlighted Israeli deaths in the conflict, used emotional language to describe the killing of Israelis, did not do so with Palestinian deaths, and provided unbalanced coverage of anti-Semitic actions in the United States, while largely ignoring anti-Muslim racism in the wake of the attack. October 7th in Israel.

Pro-Palestinian activists accused major newspapers of bias with Israel, with the New York Times witnessing protests in front of its Manhattan headquarters over its coverage of the Gaza war, an accusation supported by The Intercept's analysis.

The Intercept's open source analysis focuses on the first six weeks of the conflict, during which 14,800 Palestinians, including more than 6,000 children, were killed by Israel's bombing of Gaza.

The Intercept collected more than a thousand articles from the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times about Israel's war on Gaza, and recorded the uses of some key terms and the context in which they were used.

Serious defect

She said that the statistics reveal a serious flaw in the way Israeli and pro-Israel figures are covered versus Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices, with uses that favor Israeli narratives over Palestinian narratives.

She commented that this anti-Palestinian bias in the print media combined with a similar survey of US television news conducted by the analysis writers last month, found a wider disparity.

The risks of this routine devaluation of Palestinian lives cannot be small. With the death toll rising in Gaza, entire cities flattened and uninhabitable for years, and entire families wiped out, the US government wields enormous influence as Israel's main sponsor and arms supplier. The media's exposure to the conflict means that there are fewer political downsides to American support for Israel.

A bleak picture for the Palestinian side

Coverage from the first six weeks of the war paints a bleak picture of the Palestinian side, according to the analysis, one that makes humanizing the Palestinians, and thus eliciting US sympathy for the Palestinians, more difficult.

The site explained that it searched for all articles containing related words (such as “Palestinian,” “Gaza,” “Israeli,” etc.) in the three aforementioned newspapers. He analyzed every sentence in every article and counted the number of specific terms.

He said that the coverage survey he conducted contained 4 main results:

Disproportionate coverage of deaths

In all three newspapers, the phrase “Israeli” or “Israel” appears more often than “Palestinian” or variations thereof, even as Palestinian deaths exceed those of Israelis. For all deaths, Palestinians are mentioned once, and for every Israeli death, Israelis are mentioned 8 times, or an average of 16 times more for each Palestinian death.

"Slaughter" the Israelis, not the Palestinians

The Intercept reported that highly emotional terms for killing civilians such as “massacre,” “massacre,” and “horrific” were almost exclusively reserved for Israelis killed by Palestinians, and not the other way around.

He added that editors and reporters used the term "massacre" to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, and used the word "massacre" to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to 2. The word "horrific" was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4.

The Washington Post used the word “massacres” several times in its reporting to describe what happened in the October 7 attack. “President Biden faces mounting pressure from lawmakers in both parties to punish Iran after the Hamas massacre.”

In a Washington Post story published on November 13 about how the Israeli siege and bombing had claimed the lives of 1 in 200 Palestinians, the word “massacre” or “massacre” was not used once. Palestinians were simply “killed” or “died,” often in the passive voice.

For children and journalists

The website also noted that only two headlines out of more than 1,100 news articles in the study mentioned the word “children” related to the children of Gaza. In a notable exception, The New York Times ran front-page stories in late November about the historic pace of killing of Palestinian women and children, even though the headline did not mention children or women.

He added that although Israel's war on Gaza is perhaps the bloodiest for children, most of whom are Palestinian, in modern history, there is no mention of the word "children" and related terms in the titles of the articles included in the study.

Gaza and Ukraine

While the war on Gaza was one of the bloodiest wars in modern history for journalists, most of them Palestinian, the word “journalists” and its repetitions such as “reporters” and “photographers” appear in only 9 headlines out of more than 1,100 articles studied. Approximately 48 Palestinian journalists were killed due to Israeli bombing at the time of the truce, and today, the death toll of Palestinian journalists has exceeded 100. However, only 4 of 9 articles containing the words journalist and correspondent were about Arab correspondents.

The Intercept commented that the lack of coverage of the unprecedented killings of children and journalists, groups that usually elicit sympathy from Western media, is conspicuous. By comparison, more Palestinian children died in the first week of the Gaza bombing than in the entire first year of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, yet the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times all published sympathetic stories highlighting the Ukraine war.

The website commented that the asymmetry in how children are covered is both qualitative and quantitative. On October 13, the Los Angeles Times published an Associated Press report saying: “The Gaza Ministry of Health said on Friday that 1,799 people had been killed in the territory, including more than 580 under the age of 18 and 351 women. Last Saturday's Hamas attack led to the deaths of more than 1,300 people in Israel, including women, children, and young music festival-goers. Note that Israeli youth are referred to as children while Palestinian youth are described as under 18 years of age.

During discussions about prisoner exchanges, this repeated refusal to refer to Palestinians as children was most evident, with the New York Times in one instance referring to “Israeli women and children” being exchanged for “Palestinian women and minors.”

A Washington Post report published on November 21 announcing the truce agreement removed the phrase “Palestinian women and children” entirely: “President Joe Biden said in a statement Tuesday night that the deal to release 50 women and children held hostage by Hamas in Gaza, in exchange for 150 A Palestinian prisoner held by Israel. The brief did not mention Palestinian women and children at all.

Coverage of hate in the United States

Likewise, when it comes to how the conflict in Gaza contributes to hatred in the United States, major newspapers pay more attention to anti-Semitic attacks than to those directed against Muslims, The Intercept continued. Overall, there has been a disproportionate focus on racism toward Jewish people, versus racism targeting Muslims, Arabs, or those perceived as such.

During the period of the Intercept study, the three newspapers studied mentioned anti-Semitism more than Islamophobia (549 vs. 79), and this was before the “campus anti-Semitism” debate created by Republicans in Congress.

Despite many high-profile instances of both anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim racism during the survey period, 87% mentioned discrimination around anti-Semitism, compared to 13% mentioned Islamophobia, including related terms.

When major newspapers fail

In general, the killings of Palestinians in Gaza do not receive as much coverage in terms of scope or emotional weight as the killings of Israelis on October 7. These killings are often presented as arbitrarily high. Hamas' killings of Israeli civilians are consistently portrayed as part of the group's strategy, while killings of Palestinian civilians are covered almost as if they were a series of one-time mistakes committed thousands of times, despite many operations indicating Israel's intent to harm civilians and infrastructure. Civilian. The result is that the three major newspapers rarely gave the Palestinians humanitarian coverage.

Despite the biased coverage of Israel

Despite this disparity, opinion polls show a shift in sympathy toward the Palestinians and away from Israel among Democrats, with huge generational divisions driven in part by stark differences in news sources. In general, we find that young people get their information from TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter, while older Americans get their information from print media and news.

The Intercept said biased coverage in major newspapers and mainstream television news affects public perceptions of the war and directs viewers toward a distorted view of the conflict, and this has led pro-Israel critics to blame pro-Palestinian views on social media “misinformation.”

He concluded by saying that, however, an analysis of both print media and television news shows that if any group of media consumers gets a biased image it is because of the news broadcast by the established media outlets in the United States.

Media review: On CNN, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, 'Israel built the tunnels under Gaza hospital'

Media review: On CNN, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, 'Israel built the tunnels under Gaza hospital'

    Tuesday, November 21, 2023   No comments

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, just like that, dismantled the Israeli narrative that Hamas built the tunnel systems under hospitals and is using it as command-and-control centers--justifying Israel troops attack on hospitals and other protected places in international law. 

Ehud Barak revealed confirmed in an interview with CNN’s Amanpour, who was clearly surprised by the disclosure and tried to give him a chance to take what he said back… he disclosed that the tunnel complex beneath Al-Shifa Hospital was constructed by Israel when Gaza was under Israeli occupation decades ago.

Conflating news and propaganda is becoming a problem of credibility for both politicians and media outlets. First, it was the lie about “40 babies beheaded by Hamas.” Then Israel's claim that Hamas targeted and killed party goers on Oct. 7, only to learn later that Hamas did not know about the concert and that some Israelis were killed by Israeli troops who deployed a protocol that is mean to kill Israelis if they were in the process of being taken hostage. All in all, mainstream media are struggling to rebuild public trust.

Colonial media practices: The blatant double standards will mark the fall of the "free world" discourse on previously-universalized values

Colonial media practices: The blatant double standards will mark the fall of the "free world" discourse on previously-universalized values

    Wednesday, July 26, 2023   No comments

Western governments have used the pillars of their modern civilization to shame and intimidate other communities to submit their systems of dominance. Human rights, free press, free speech, individual rights were all used as universal values that legitimized western interventionism. It worked because many thinkers and leaders in the Global south communities actually bought into this discourse. However, with new technologies that enabled impoverished communities to build their own institutions, and enjoy a degree of autonomy, the Western discourse revealed its superficial commitment to freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Sanctions and bans became a favorite instrument in the hands of Western states to punish speech they did not like. Suddenly freedom of speech became limited; they just needed to find the context for banning it. That is now creating a problem for the so-called free world.

Foreign Policy asks: "What drives the Western media to filter out a lot of international news or to neglect it completely?"

Foreign Policy asks: "What drives the Western media to filter out a lot of international news or to neglect it completely?"

    Monday, May 29, 2023   No comments

The American magazine "Foreign Policy" revealed the role of the media in concealing massacres around the world, especially those that are bloody and are more deadly than others.

As an example, the newspaper said that in the year 2013, in the Central African Republic, a massacre took place in which hundreds of civilians were killed, but the surprise is that even in the neighboring regions, the population did not know about it, because the media was purged of its news, and the survivors did not dare to speak about it.

And the newspaper added that so far the press is unable to cover many events in the world, and while the media is preoccupied with the Ukrainian war, the deaths in the conflict in the Central African Republic have not been counted, even the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the bloodiest in the world since World War II, It did not appear on news sites.

The newspaper attributed the reasons to a lack of interest in places that are considered remote, and violence against people who are seen as different from others, as it put it.

Another problem, she said, is that news from places like the Central African Republic and Congo often needs to travel to London or New York before it reaches countries like Nigeria and India.

This means that so much international news is filtered through a Western lens or left out altogether, that the lack of international news outlets in the Global South leaves huge gaps in coverage even when millions of people die in the world's deadliest wars.