For over a year, the US and UK media have refused to identify Israel’s war as a genocide. Mainstream outlets are only willing to regurgitate their governments’ soft criticisms of Israel, which serve to mask the West’s complicity in the slaughter.
by Justin Schlosberg
Part 2 - Shaping the Narrative
So what’s going on? First, we can’t ignore the news values of scale and timing. If relatively more attention has been paid to the violence unleashed on Palestinians since October 7 than that faced by Israelis on October 7, it is only because the former is both ongoing and now over forty times the scale of the latter. Perhaps not surprisingly, these two rather obvious facts were hopelessly lost on a recent “study” carried out by a pro-Israel law firm with zero expertise or experience in media analysis and funded by an “Israeli businessman.”
The media also don’t instinctively like giving aggressors or invaders an easy ride. When Western allies are the invading, conquering, or oppressing state in any given conflict, they are either largely ignored (the US- and UK-backed Saudi war on Yemen is a case in point) or subject to exactly the kind of soft and contained criticism that the empire is given to make of its more wayward client regimes.
The media also don’t instinctively like giving aggressors or invaders an easy ride. When Western allies are the invading, conquering, or oppressing state in any given conflict, they are either largely ignored (the US- and UK-backed Saudi war on Yemen is a case in point) or subject to exactly the kind of soft and contained criticism that the empire is given to make of its more wayward client regimes.
There’s a further complicating factor: Netanyahu has made no attempt to hide his friendship with sworn enemies of the West, including Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and even, to some extent, Vladimir Putin. Added to that is his deep personal connection to Donald Trump — a president whose embittered relationship with the US security establishment was historically matched only by John F. Kennedy’s.
All this has undoubtedly given rise to a degree of discomfort and something of a split within the ranks of the Washington/London power structure. And it doesn’t take much for such unease and uncertainty to be reflected in news narratives.
All this has undoubtedly given rise to a degree of discomfort and something of a split within the ranks of the Washington/London power structure. And it doesn’t take much for such unease and uncertainty to be reflected in news narratives.
But the real problem lies in what this nuance obscures. For a start, it distracts from the subtle but profoundly significant advantage of Israeli officials in shaping agendas and, crucially, the language of reporting. This much has been demonstrated consistently by any credible and serious analysis of mainstream media coverage of Israel-Palestine going back decades. In the current conflict, anyone who’s had the news on, even in the background noise, will recognize the boundaries of what can and can’t be said. So, for instance, it is perfectly acceptable to describe the indiscriminate killing of Palestinians by the Israeli military as “attacks in retaliation for” October 7. But it was much more difficult to describe the indiscriminate killing of Israelis by Hamas and other militants on October 7 as “attacks in retaliation for” any or all of the crimes of what is now almost universally recognized by human rights groups as a brutal apartheid regime.
There is one particularly notable feature of the language adopted by British broadcasters post–October 7. This is the way in which any reference to Hamas is commonly followed by some form of words that make clear it is a terrorist group according to the UK government. Veteran BBC reporter Jon Simpson made an impassioned defense of this convention against pro-Israel critics in the aftermath of October 7, who were furious that the BBC still felt any need to qualify the terrorist label. Simpson argued that it’s not for the BBC to simply accept at face value that Hamas is a terrorist organization just because the United Kingdom, United States, Israel and some other governments say it is.
A more pertinent question entirely overlooked in this pseudo-debate is why broadcasters feel the need to qualify any reference to Hamas in this way. It’s a question that has nothing to do with whether or not Hamas is or should be considered terrorist, but rather the double standards applied in respect of reporting on Israel. For instance, a number of countries have accused Israel of state-sponsored terrorism as well as being an apartheid regime, yet this is almost never mentioned by reporters in respect of Israeli official sources. And since October 7, a total of thirty-three countries have classified Israel’s assaults on Gaza as a genocide, along with a cross section of international legal bodies and human rights groups. Yet there is no pressure on BBC journalists to repeatedly point this out to viewers, no perceived need to provide context in the way that even the reporting of casualties by the “Hamas-run” health ministry is routinely subject to caveat.
Indeed, claims by Israeli officials — from beheaded babies to Hamas control centers located under hospitals — have been far too often accepted at face value over the last year and widely reported as fact, long before they were thoroughly debunked. Even now, despite the overwhelming evidence of indiscriminate bombing of civilian life and infrastructure in Gaza, BBC reporters still adopt the language of Israeli propagandists in framing similar massive bombing campaigns in Lebanon as “strikes targeting Hezbollah.”
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