How Western media helped build and then protect the Israeli narrative that allowed a genocide to continue

globinfo freexchange 

 

For two years, Palestinians in Gaza have been killed in 4K on all of our screens. And for those same two years, many of the Western media institutions meant to hold power to account chose silence, distortion and doubt.

Newsrooms repeated Israel's allegations with no pushback, ignored the evidence of genocide even as it played out live.

This isn't a story about bias or mistakes. It's a story about how Western media helped build and then protect the Israeli narrative that allowed a genocide to continue. 

So, how many Palestinian lives have been lost because the world's news outlets chose to repeat Israel's narrative instead of questioning it? 

 

From the earliest days following October 7th, Israel's talking points were treated as fact. The now disproven claims of 40 beheaded babies and the story that Hamas used Palestinian civilians as human shields revived with every bombing of a hospital or school despite the mountain of evidence that it's the Israeli army that has been using Palestinian civilians as human shields throughout the genocide. Western media outlets amplified it all without proof. Then many simply moved on when it was debunked. 

Karishma Patel is a former BBC journalist. She left her job after repeatedly challenging the BBC's Gaza coverage. As she states:

              I absolutely do believe that Western media has played a significant role in manufacturing consent for this genocide. There are so many different things and they've come together to paint a very specific picture and communicate one very specific thing, which is that Palestinian life is not worth as much as - you know - let's say, Israeli life. 

That hierarchy of empathy shows up everywhere, even in language. A six-year-old child, Hind Rajab, killed by Israeli bullets, called a woman on CNN. A four-year-old girl, also killed, called a young lady on Sky News. There's a repeated theme. Instead of Palestinian children named and mourned when they're killed, they are brushed off. Patel tells her own experience:

               I think one of the biggest breaking points for me was actually pitching Hind Rajab's story. I was also very aware of the fact that if this happened to be a Ukrainian girl, let's say, it would get wall-to-wall coverage. So I  pitched her story with a lot of passion, as I should have done. I was taken aside and told that perhaps it was time to let Gaza go. I was too attached to the story. I wasn't able to remain impartial. So my kind of journalistic integrity was questioned when I was just doing my job.

The result? A Western public conditioned to see Palestinian suffering as background noise. And most recently, when Israel's navy illegally intercepted the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in international waters, headlines simply said, "An interception" with little to no mention of the fact it was an illegal one and in violation of international law.

At the same time, Israel still bars international journalists from Gaza entirely, meaning the only reporting on the ground comes from Palestinian journalists, working under constant threat, many of whom are killed and targeted for simply doing their jobs. When Al Jazeera's Anas al-Sharif was assassinated, the BBC repeated Israeli claims that he was linked to Hamas, reportedly even ignoring internal requests to correct them. So it appears this is what both sides journalism looks like during a genocide. It repeats the occupier's narrative and questions the victims.

But now, public opinion is shifting. Polls show support for Israel collapsing across the West. And so, Israel's strategy changed, turning to paid influencers. Patel points out:

                       Mainstream media has created the ideal conditions in which paid influencers might actually gain a lot of purchase or might actually be able to make really ridiculous claims that mainstream media will then amplify and repeat without caveats, without the right sort of context, without going away to actually verify them. 

But even the most expensive propaganda can't hide what's happening. Two years into this genocide, the silence is breaking, but not from the top. Journalists are walking away and the people's support for Israel is deteriorating rapidly. 

 

Because this isn't just a story about Gaza. It's about journalism and what it became when it looked away.