The mainstream U.S. media is using the word “hostages” to describe the Israelis who Hamas militants have captured and taken into Gaza. Analyzing this usage is a good way to introduce how the mainstream is distorting this latest crisis. First, some of the captured Israelis are soldiers, who should properly be called “prisoners of war,” especially as Benjamin Netanyahu has actually declared war on Gaza. But, in fact, other captured Israelis are in fact civilians, and “hostages” is arguably the appropriate description.
But wait. This conflict didn’t start at 6:30 a.m. on October 7. Israel has occupied both West Bank Palestine and Gaza for nearly 60 years, and over that time has arrested and imprisoned hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, often without even show trials. Nathan Thrall, in his impressive, just published book, explains that during the First Intifada (1987-1993) the Israeli occupiers jailed some 700,000 Palestinian men and boys on the West Bank, roughly 40 percent of the entire male population there.
Today, the Israeli occupiers continue to arrest Palestinians, holding them for long stretches without anything resembling a fair trial. But the U.S. mainstream never seems to describe these Palestinian people as “hostages.”
The double standard perfectly illustrates the U.S. media’s playbook on how to distort the crisis. First, twist your actual reports, with one-sided language and biased framing. But second, and arguably even more important; ignore any of the history in Israel/Palestine, so that the attack from Gaza looks like an inexplicable, unprovoked spasm of violence and Jew-hatred.
At least the New York Times and the Washington Post do call the armed Palestinians from Gaza “militants.” But much of CNN, some of MSNBC, and of course Fox News describe them as “terrorists.” And there is more subtle linguistic bias. One observer, Jeff Sharlet, noted on Twitter that CNN routinely calls Israelis “people,” but refers to Palestinians mainly as “Palestinians,” which is “the kind of unwitting language that shapes narratives.” As the coverage continued through its second day, the bias grew: the cable networks almost exclusively interviewed Israeli victims, but nearly ignored Palestinians.
CNN’s color-coded map of Israel/Palestine, which it displayed on screen regularly all week-end, was another instance of slanting. The map showed the entire occupied West Bank as “Palestinian-controlled,” which will be a surprise to Palestinians who every single day have to pass through Israeli military checkpoints.
The mainstream also failed to actually report Hamas’s stated reasons for launching the attack. By contrast, Haaretz, the Israeli daily, did quote Ismail Haniyeh, the head of the Hamas political bureau. Haniyeh charged Israel with damaging the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City. He also accused Israel of continuing to ethnically cleanse the occupied West Bank: “We also warned them against continuing the policy of demographic change in the West Bank, and the acceleration of the settlement project, but they continue the raids on the cities and refugee camps. . .”
And Haniyeh concluded:
Israel could have silenced us by giving us crumbs, but the government turned its back on any possibility of a prisoner exchange deal, and continued the siege of the [Gaza} Strip.”
You could watch the centrist U.S. cable networks from morning to night and have little or no idea what Haniyeh is talking about. Whether you end up agreeing with him or not, you should at least know what he said.
(The Washington Post, to its credit, did run one valuable report explaining “Why the Israeli raids on al-Aqsa Mosque are stoking tensions.” But the rest of the paper’s reporting reflected the mainstream slant.)
National Public Radio was surprisingly better than its usual low standard. NPR even ran an interview with Yousef Munayyer, the respected Palestinian-American analyst, who did explain the significance of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Another huge angle the U.S. mainstream is mostly missing is:
1) The Netanyahu government’s colossal failure to detect the coming attack, and
2) Even more important: how and why the arrogance of Netanyahu’s far-right ruling coalition contributed to the disaster.
Haaretz, by contrast, didn’t mince words. One after another, reporters and columnists blistered Netanyahu’s coalition, pointing out that the far-right government continued to push the “settlement” campaign in the West Bank and stood by as the “settlers” carried out pogroms against Palestinians. Then, having provoked increased Palestinian resistance, Netanyahu had to move army units to the occupied territory, leaving the southern border with Gaza relatively unprotected.
Haaretz commentators, instead of blindly “standing with Israel,” didn’t hesitate to blast their own government.
There were a few exceptions to the prevailing U.S. mainstream bias. During the first morning of the attack, on MSNBC Ali Velshi and Ayman Mohyeldin actually did thoughtful reporting that provided some truths and background. Velshi even interviewed Diana Buttu, the well-known Palestinian legal expert.
But more typical was the coverage guided over at CNN by Wolf Blitzer, who commandeered the anchor’s chair for long hours over the weekend. Blitzer rattled on with pro-Israel talking points, citing the Israeli death toll without mentioning Palestinian casualties inside Gaza. His most ludicrous moments came when he invited on English-speaking Israeli military spokesmen and let them give long propaganda speeches while he sat there like an elderly gargoyle, apparently forgetting that part of his job is supposed to be to challenge interviewees with follow-up questions.
One of the military mouthpieces, Lieutenant-Colonel Jonathan Conricus, was already known at this site. Back in 2021, we reported how he duped the New York Times into making a false report that Israeli ground forces were already attacking Gaza. The Times, and others, published articles reporting his statement. In fact, he had lied. Israeli news outlets explained that the fake news was Israel’s effort to trick Hamas fighters into hiding in their underground bunkers, where Israeli warplanes would be able to strike at them.
The Times, to its credit, revealed back then that it had been tricked. Maybe someone should show that article to Wolf Blitzer.
Re the mainstream media, there was a semi-sane analysis today in the New York Times by Roger Cohen. To be clear, I am selectively quoting, but here’s some of the essay ( emphasis mine ):
For many years the assumption had grown within Israel that the Palestinian question had become a nonissue and that a policy of tactical procrastination, as Israeli settlements in the West Bank grew ever larger, would ensure that no Palestinian state ever came into being… Mr. Netanyahu emerged as the champion of a kick-the-can-down-the-road approach that left the two-state idea on life support…the Palestinian issue all but disappeared from the global agenda. There was talk of a new Middle East. All this, however, could not hide the elephant in the room: the growing Palestinian fury at humiliation and marginalization that had already led to a spike in West Bank violence this year….The longer-term test has been clear for some time. It was summed up years ago by Danny Yatom, the director of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, between 1996 and 1998. A single Israeli state between the sea and Jordan, encompassing the West Bank “will deteriorate into either an apartheid state or a non-Jewish state,” Mr. Yatom said. “If we continue to rule the territories, I see that as an existential danger.” Mr. Netanyahu never wanted to listen to such warnings or engage in serious talks for a two-state peace. The consequences of that policy could not forever be waved away in talk of a shiny new Middle East.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/08/world/middleeast/israel-hamas-gaza-analysis.html
I agree with the complaint of press bias but I just glanced at the B’Tselem website and they say Hamas murdered hundreds of civilians, so the word “ terrorist” is correct, at least for the people who did the killing. That is what the word means.
The problem is not that they used the word “ terrorist” but that the press doesn’t refer to Israeli soldiers who kill unarmed Palestinians as war criminals or murderers or state terrorists or whatever the appropriate term would be. It’s a fairly consistent double standard on the reporting of the deliberate killing of civilians.
As it is the norm in the IP conflict or anything related to ME, the first day or so, the news is more neutral (a better phrasing is less hostile) to Palestinians but then the media bosses take over and it all becomes hasbara and propaganda. There is asymmetry here, a government that has broken every Geneva convention rules and every human rights group and is about to murder thousands of people in the open air prison it has created is compared to a militant group that is prejudged as a terrorist group. One way of clarifying what happens is to have a an international commission of inquiry. But when Goldstone report was completed, Hamas accepted its conclusions, Israel not only did not accept it but destroyed reputation of its Jewish author. In war, there are atrocities, but when one of the sides has the backing of the entire Western World and has no respect for the human rights or regard for the Geneva conventions, speaking of fact finding or waiting for explanations to emerge is futile. The people of color who live in Palestine are viewed and prejudged as sub humans and animals as an Israeli leader said today, an opinion widely shared by Israelis, I am afraid.
Though one can oppose mass incarceration by Israel of Palestinian males, one need not molest the English language by using the term hostage, which does not apply, given the definition. The urge to propagandize against Israel has driven James North to molest the English language. Journalism? Hardly. Propaganda. He’s been preaching to the choir so long, he doesn’t seem to care anymore.
What else is to be expected from the biased West???