My angry editorial:
This is one that my editor loved, but the publisher has yet to comment on. I don't know if he'll choose to publish it or not. However, it still needs to be read. So I've posted it here:
The anti-Israel media bias: a sick parody of journalism
By Julie Bien
Israel is no stranger to damaging media bias.
One decade ago, the IDF was accused of a massacre in the West Bank town of Jenin. Although that fiction was eventually debunked by a fact-finding mission, the media had already created a firestorm of hate against Israel that was inextinguishable.
In the past ten years, not much has changed.
On November 19th, the sixth day of the most recent Israeli-Gaza conflict, I took a random sample of online articles published by five mainstream Los Angeles news outlets and one national outlet, and analyzed them for the glaring bias with which they have continued to present the conflict.
Four of the six outlets were reporting from Gaza City, Gaza. Only one was reporting from Sderot, Israel (which has historically taken the brunt of rocket attacks from Gaza.) From personal experience on the ground, it would not be particularly difficult to have reporters contributing from both Gaza and Israel.
To add media-bias insult to injury, these four articles were nearly identical copies of the same Associated Press article, although they conveniently all had different headlines—a publishing tactic meant to mislead the casual reader.
The take away message? Just because you faithfully go to the CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox news websites for variety, does not mean you are actually reading a wide variety of articles about the same topic. You are, in fact, reading the same article with the same bias, except it’s masqueraded as journalistic consensus rather than journalistic laziness.
Let’s return to the content, shall we? While each side of this conflict has a valid narrative (and I use the term ‘valid’ loosely when discussing Hamas), the Gaza side is only one part of a much larger picture. By framing this conflict as an “invasion of Gaza,” which almost every article I’ve read over the course of the conflict has thus far, Israel is automatically framed as an aggressor.
This is just wrong. While the complexities of the situation are too nuanced to truly delve into here, it should go without saying that in any conflict there are at least two sides. This holds especially true when one side is guilty of regularly firing thousands of rockets at civilians.
By omitting the human aspect of one side of a violent conflict while intentionally playing up the other side, the media is performing a sick parody of journalism.
I am a self-proclaimed liberal, identifying most closely with the Doves of Israel. I believe in the humanization of victims of violence. I believe that children should never die as a result of their parents’ wars. I also believe that an Israeli life is equal to a Palestinian life and should be reported as such.
However, as Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu eloquently stated earlier this week, “There is no moral symmetry; there is no moral equivalence between Israel and the terrorist organizations in Gaza. Hamas deliberately targets our children, and they deliberately place their rockets next to their children."
This particular tactic is rarely mentioned in the coverage of this conflict and wasn’t mentioned at all in any of the articles I analyzed.
Thus bringing us to the grand topic of omission, which, besides being an example of lazy journalism, is actually a way of lying to the reader by choosing not to publish salient information.
Not a single article of the six that I looked at on the 19th gave the exact number of Israelis wounded by rockets (which, as of the 18th, was over 50, if you were wondering.)
Those same outlets all too eagerly gave the exact numbers of Palestinians wounded in the conflict while intentionally burying the number of militants versus civilians harmed deep in the article.
As a brief side note, the rocket attacks carried out against Israel were described in the Yahoo article (pulled from Reuters) as, “feeble shockwaves of a flurry of detonations.” I’ve been to Sderot. I’ve heard the tseva adom and the rockets. Believe me, by no stretch of the imagination do they send out “feeble shockwaves.”
None of the articles showed injured Israelis or Israeli funerals, but felt no qualms about showing death and destruction in Gaza. This is not to say that it shouldn’t be shown, but certainly not to the exclusion of Israeli suffering.
Besides the omissions and bias of the mainstream media, there are straight-up lies floating around the internet, being perpetuated by such trustworthy sources as BBC reporters and, my favorite bias-machine, AP.
Although he later apologized for the mistake, BBC reporter, Jon Donnison, tweeted a photo of an injured child from Syria, but labeled it as a photo from Gaza.
As Mark Twain wisely said, “A lie cantravel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes,” something that is doubly true in the age of internet virality.
AP managed to one-up this mistake by posting a photo and article about a four-year-old Palestinian, Mohammad Sadallah, who was tragically killed by an explosion. What they failed to mention was that the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (definitely not a group that would be biased in favor of Israel) believed that the death of the child was actually caused by the misfiring of a homemade Hamas rocket.
This fact-gaffe was made all the more apparent when the Israeli Air Force, which almost always confirms its strike locations, “vociferously denied carrying out any form of attack in that area the previous night,” according to the photo caption AP placed under the picture of Sadallah.
So AP not only published misinformation, but actively chose to lie using a quote that later confirmed that they were lying. Doesn’t this seem like a lot of work to go to make sure the story is going a particular direction?
As a journalist, I understand the pressure that these writers and editors are under to get a compelling story published. The 24 hour news cycle is probably the worst thing to happen to journalism. Ever. That being said, sloppy research about an area of the world which is constantly in turmoil is inexcusable. Actively trying to pass off bias as true-blue journalism is exponentially worse.
There is a place in the world of writing for opinions and fiction. They are respectively called Op/Eds and blogs.
Anything that’s labeled as news should definitively fall outside of the “let’s editorialize!” camp.
Julie Bien is a regular contributor to TRIBE Magazine as well as The Jewish Journal. She has a Master’s degree in Mass Communication and has done extensive research and documentary work on the political atmosphere of Sderot and southern Israel.
