The huge antiwar protest for Palestine at New York’s Grand Central Station was the kind of media event that the mainstream press should eagerly cover. They ignored it.
The New York Times says that Israel values human life, but a reexamination of Times coverage of Israel’s 2018 massacre of peaceful protesters in Gaza shows that the Times itself does not uphold such values.
The Palestinian struggle brings to the forefront the colonial relations that underpin today’s world, and that the West, and its media, work tirelessly to hide.
U.S. reporters are providing breathless around the clock coverage from Israel, but none are reporting from the destruction of Gaza. The result is that Palestinians are dehumanized and Americans are missing the story.
Despite near unanimity of support for Israel in the US political establishment these days, some voices are making it into the mainstream media to explain the causes of violence and state that while they condemn the Hamas attacks on civilians, they were not “unprovoked.”
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 is a good start to understanding how the mainstream media distorts the news.
The heroes of “60 Minutes” report on Israeli protests were reservists refusing to serve. “If you want pilots to be able to fly and shoot bombs and missiles into houses knowing they might be killing children, they must have the strongest confidence in the people making those decisions,” says a helicopter pilot.
The ‘NY Times’ has long whitewashed Israel’s far-right. In a welcome surprise, the paper covers the rising segregation by sex there.
The proposed U.S.-Saudi Arabia-Israel deal will almost certainly fail. Then, the U.S. mainstream media will blame the Palestinians.
The Biden administration plans to station Marines on commercial ships in the Persian Gulf. This could trigger war with Iran, but most of the mainstream U.S. press is not paying attention.