The British Guardian has just published an extraordinary, thorough confirmation of what we already suspected — that CNN’s bias about reporting Israel’s war on Gaza is no accident, but a conscious and complex policy directed from the very top of the network.
The Guardian’s long report should be entered in every prize competition possible. Chris McGreal got six network insiders in multiple CNN newsrooms to talk. He also got his hands on “more than a dozen internal memos and emails.” The report — the Guardian does not have a paywall — runs on for 16 printed pages. Here is its lead sentence:
“CNN is facing a backlash from its own staff over editorial policies they say have led to a regurgitation of Israeli propaganda and the censoring of Palestinian perspectives in the network’s coverage of the war in Gaza.”
You get the impression that CNN spends just as much time distorting the news as it does actually gathering it. Here’s a quick summary:
“. . . daily news decisions are set by a flow of directives from the CNN headquarters in Atlanta that have set strict guidelines on coverage.
“They include tight restrictions on quoting Hamas and reporting other Palestinian perspectives while Israel government statements are taken at face value.”
Then, even more extraordinary:
“In addition, every story on the conflict must be cleared by the Jerusalem bureau before broadcast or publication.”
This is exactly how authoritarian regimes control their news output.
The CNN insiders told McGreal that the network’s bias
“resulted, particularly in the early weeks of the war, in a greater focus on Israeli suffering and the Israeli narrative of the war as a hunt for Hamas and its tunnels, and an insufficient focus on the scale of Palestinian civilian deaths and destruction in Gaza.
McGreal’s informants said “the tone of coverage is set at the top by its new editor in chief and CEO, Mark Thompson.” The CNN insiders pointed to Thompson’s track record in his previous 2004-2012 tenure at the head of the BBC, where
“. . . he was accused of bowing to Israeli government pressure on a number of occasions, including the demand to remove one of the corporation’s most prominent correspondents from her post in Jerusalem in 2005.”
(That veteran BBC correspondent, Orla Guerin, continues to report from just about every frontline crisis on the planet, and is arguably the British network’s most accomplished foreign correspondent. Yet you will rarely see her broadcasting in Jerusalem.)
McGreal unearthed a revealing two-page memo, openly called “an instruction from Mark,” that said that
“. . . while CNN would report the human consequences of the Israeli assault and the historical context of the story, ‘we must continue always to remind our audiences of the immediate cause of this current conflict, namely the Hamas attack and mass murder and kidnap of civilians.’
McGreal’s excellent report did leave out a key fact about Mark Thompson. After Thompson left the BBC, he went on to be president and CEO of the New York Times, from 2012 to 2020. Those of us who have spent years trying to explain the NYT’s chronic bias on Israel/Palestine may have just found one of the smoking guns.
Let’s see how much follow-up this remarkable Guardian investigation generates in the U.S. media. Mark Thompson’s phone should already be ringing off the hook, as American reporters ask for his reaction to these serious charges. Jake Tapper, Dana Bash, and Wolf Blitzer, among others, should also be approached for comment.
Of course, they probably won’t talk. But Chris McGreal has already shown that there are CNN staffers who are willing to go off the record. What’s more, why not also surreptitiously approach people at MSNBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post? What about National Public Radio, arguably the most timid of them all? Let’s hope it is only be a matter of time before we learn more.
This story isn’t so much “news” to any actual thinking person…it’s analysis…as it provides a little bit of “how” they manage the “news”(sic). And we could certainly use a great deal more of that, provided it actually corresponds to reality.
Any thinking people who haven’t figured out that whether we watch Fox, CBS, NBC & ABC, the stories are planted to tell us only that which they want us to hear, govern how we think, or vote for, haven’t been paying very close attention over the last 10 years here in Big Brother Land. Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and others have also described the Big Brother routines on Substack.
The once Shining City on a Hill is now on life support at best. Chances of survival best estimated at <10%.
“…any reference to casualty figures from the Gaza health ministry must say it is “Hamas-controlled”, implying that reports of the deaths of thousands of children were unreliable even though the World Health Organization and other international bodies have said they are largely accurate.”
Sadly, this practice is also followed by the BBC. It’s tautologous (as well as misleading), since by definition ministries are run by government ministers all over the world.
Every mainstream news and current event outlet in every Western country is professionally and ethically compromised. When it comes to Israel/Palestine, all are shilling for Israel. Of course, they will occasionally run a piece that can be characterized as objective but this is a rarity and is done so they have deniability when accused of bias. The bias is built into the institutions. Here’s an egregious example.
Three years ago on a CBC current events program called The Current, the host used the word “Palestine” when asking questions of his guest, Joe Sacco, a journalist and graphic novelist who has written about Indigenous peoples in various conflict zones. Next day, the host was compelled to deliver a grovelling apology for using the word, and the CBC then excised the word from the audio and online records.
A minor yet disturbing example at erasing Palestinians by a government funded outlet that purports to have high journalistic standards. How can this be good for democracy? Forget alleged Russian and Chinese interference threatening our democracies. We’re doing a fine job ourselves.
I am not defending CNN….however I must say that just recently I watched 2 videos (one a doctor, the other a nurse) explaining/showing what goes on in a hospital (or what passes as such) in Gaza. Frankly, I was surprised but glad to see CNN come to its senses and reporting what so many of the MSM just sweeps under a carpet…as instructed by Washington and the ZIO(n)AZIS.
CNN Insiders Reveal Jerusalem Bureau Must Approve Every Gaza Story Before Publication
February 5, 2024
by Chris Black
“This is another example of The Guardian going somewhere no American outlet would ever go, this time reporting on an American outlet.
It’s an interesting dynamic that has formed.”
https://citizenwatchreport.com/cnn-insiders-reveal-jerusalem-bureau-must-approve-every-gaza-story-before-publication/