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By Norman Solomon founder of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy Distributed in association with Economy for All, and quoted in Norman Solomon’s paper War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Civil Toll of Its Military Machine (The New Press, 2024)
As the war in Gaza enters its 12th month without notice, the ongoing horrors continue to be normalized in the US media and politics. The process has become so routine that we may not see how omissions and distortions have changed perceptions of events since the war began in October.
The war in Gaza received the attention of the US media, but the extent to which the media covered human realities was another matter. A simple assumption holds that news makes media consumers see what is really happening. But the words and images that reached the listeners, readers, and viewers were very different from what happened on the battlefield. The belief or the ignorant opinion that the media was conveying the facts of the war ended up hiding those facts even more. And the inherent limitations of journalism were compounded by media bias.
An in-depth content analysis by the Intercept found that coverage of the first six weeks of the war by the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times “showed a consistent bias against the Palestinians.” Those influential stories “unduly emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict” and “used emotive language to describe the killing of Israelis, but not Palestinians.” For example: “The word ‘massacre’ was used by editors and journalists to describe the killing of Israelis and Palestinians 60 to 1, and ‘massacre’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis against Palestinians 125 to 2. explaining the killing of Israelis against Palestinians 36 to 4. “
In the first five months of the war, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post used the word “atrocity” or its variation more often for the actions of the Palestinians (77 percent) than the Israelis (23 percent). The findings, from the Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) study, showed the disparity that occurred “even though Israeli violence resulted in more than 20 deaths.” News articles and opinions were in the same place; “The declining rate at which ‘atrocity’ was used in op-eds to portray Palestinians rather than Israelis was almost identical to the so-called straight news.”
Despite the occasional special coverage, what was most important about the war in Gaza—what the intimidation, the mass killings, the maiming and the trauma—remained almost entirely invisible. Gradually, the surface accounts that reach the American public seem repetitive and normal. As the death toll continued to rise and the months passed, the war in Gaza became less of a headline, while most of the interviewees indicated it was rarely discussed.
A gulf has grown between mainstream reporting in media terms and the dire situation in human terms. “The people of Gaza now make up 80 percent of all people facing hunger or famine in the world, marking an unprecedented humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip amid Israel’s continued offensive and bombing,” the United Nations reported in mid-January 2024. The UN statement cited experts said: “Right now everyone in Gaza is hungry, a quarter of the population is dying of hunger and struggling to find food and drinking water, and famine is imminent.”
President Biden dramatized the disconnect between the Gaza war zone and the American political scene in late February when he spoke to reporters about hopes for a “ceasefire” (which never happened) while holding a vanilla ice-cream cone in his right hand. “My national security adviser tells me we’re close, we’re close, we’re not done yet,” Biden said, before departing. On the same day that Biden’s photo emerged from an ice cream parlor near Rockefeller Center, where he had just taped an appearance on NBC’s “Late Night” with comedian Seth Meyers, the UN lamented that “very little humanitarian aid has gone into besieged Gaza.” per month, down 50 percent compared to January. ” Israel was putting aid teams ready to enter Gaza when they crossed the border. More than 10 policemen who were providing security for the aid trucks were deliberately killed by the Israeli army. The disastrous results were obvious.
“The volume of aid delivered to Gaza has dropped in recent weeks as Israeli airstrikes have targeted police convoys, UN officials said, putting them at risk of looting by gangs and desperate civilians,” the Washington Post reported. “On average, only 62 trucks have entered Gaza each day for the past two weeks, according to figures from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs—well below the 200 trucks a day Israel has pledged to facilitate. Just four trucks crashed on two separate days this week. Aid groups, which have warned of looming famine, estimate that 500 trucks are needed each day to meet the basic needs of the people.”
Although such numbers are covered in the news, many of the horrors that actually happened were not in the eyes of the media that caused pain and sorrow to people in private. Major media coverage includes excellent public interest reporting and investigative features on individual tragedies in Gaza. But even at its best, such journalism has done little to convey the magnitude, scope, and depth of the growing crisis. And the disaster narrative was short on enthusiasm for causality—especially when the trail would lead to the establishment of US “national security.” American media surrounding the tragic portrayal of Palestinian victims rarely included their oppressors in Washington. Senior government officials expressed simple regret for the tragic death, while continuing to lay out large welcome mats for the Grim Reaper.
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