How mass media is enabling mass murder

I’ve included a list of publications that I believe are doing, or trying their best to do right by the people of Gaza at the end of the piece. Check ‘em out, and support them if you can.

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Photo by Visual Karsa on Unsplash

I’m writing to you today because Rafah is, or should be, one of the clearest stories that news outlets have ever told. 1.5 million civilians have been guided, herded, forced to Gaza’s southern edge. The IDF has proclaimed safe zones over the last four months, then steadily moved them south, often while bombing the zones regardless. People have run for their lives for four months straight. Now, they’re huddled in Rafah.

So when an army plans an invasion of, and bombs, the one final safe place in Gaza, where well over a million civilians are packed in, sheltering and fearing for their lives, the narrative should be clear. The bombing and attacking of a densely populated civilian area is a war crime, and doing so after the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel was on the brink of committing genocide, and ordered them to do everything possible to avoid genocide, should be unthinkable. It should also be easy to label as a gross violation of international law, and easy to condemn.

But no. We are getting radically, radically different headlines.

Here we see a clear and disturbing distillation of the first problem with the ongoing media coverage of Rafah: the use of language to minimize Israeli culpability. The passive voice, the way we are expected to accept the framing that bombs move of their own accord, is an exercise in erasing the agency, the deliberate choices made by Israeli politicians and commanders.

Then we have another issue. Or two.

First, we have Reuters stating Israel’s actions as fact, as certainty. The rescue of two hostages, news they surely got from an Israeli source, is definite, positive, unquestionable. On the other hand, “Palestinian TV” is the source for dozens of people being killed. It is not simply a fact that can stand unquestioned. It is something reported by some other, less reliable source than the venerable Reuters. Never mind the videos and pictures of dead bodies coming out of Rafah, the children killed in their sleep, in their tents.

Maybe even more significant, even more insidious than Israeli information always being stated as fact while the mass murder of Palestinians is more speculative, uncertain (despite the U.S. State Department confirming that the Gaza Ministry of Health is accurate, or even conservative in their death toll estimates) is the implicit idea that killing dozens of Palestinian civilians is somehow a legitimate trade for two Israeli hostages. 

Repeating the Israeli military’s line that they bombed and killed dozens of civilians to rescue two hostages lends validity and credibility to the notion that several dozen civilain deaths should be considered an acceptable and legitimate trade-off for two Israeli hostages. Especially when the biggest publications in the English language are doing it. And Reuters and the Times weren’t alone; CNN, AP, the Washington Post, and countless other outlets accepted and ran with this framing. This should horrify us. Not only is it unacceptable for the media to simply repeat the media releases of a genocidal military, the idea simply doesn’t make sense.

For one thing, Israel conducting widespread bombing on an area to rescue hostages is, in itself, putting hostages in danger. The IDF doesn’t know the location of all the hostages, obviously, and carpet bombing is just as likely to hurt or kill the captives as it is to aid in their rescue. Just one week ago hostage Yossi Sharabi likely died in a building collapse in an area of Gaza targeted by IDF strikes, according to Israeli channel i24. That news of course got far less coverage in the U.S. than this hostage rescue, which we are supposed to believe excuses the bombing of Rafah, has received.

Beyond the logistical issues inherent in saying that widespread bombing is cover for a rescue, there’s a much bigger issue at play. Headline after headline, article after article, lack any context. They ignore the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing and accept Israel’s framing of this as a war against Hamas. But with more than 12,000 Palestinian children slaughtered in Gaza, how can Hamas possibly be the real target? Even by Israel’s wildly unlikely claims that they’ve killed 10,000 Hamas fighters (a claim it has provided no evidence for) that would still mean more dead children than dead enemy combatants.

This basic information, these basic truths that should be used to frame what Israel is doing in Rafah, in Gaza as a whole, are instead buried deep in articles or left out entirely. The word of a genocidal army is accepted and the word of Palestinians is deemed untrustworthy. In this process, the lives of Israelis are implicitly, and yet loudly, declared to be more valuable than the lives of the people they are killing. Thus is a genocide enabled. 

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

What I would ask, what I would hope, would be for journalists everywhere to care about the humanity of Palestinians and of everyone they write about. I would ask editors to do the same. But the sad reality is that our media is captured by capital, by billionaires and millionaires whose interests are too aligned with U.S. hegemony and with Israel. The for-profit media model is failing us. The for-profit societal model is failing us. There are, thankfully, non-profit outlets and non-Western publications doing much better work, much more truth-telling right now.

But we need more. We need media workers everywhere to agitate harder. We need our unions, my union, to do more. We need people to stand up and make sacrifices and not allow the bosses to keep rolling out cover for genocide. The people huddled in Rafah, not knowing when the next bomb might fall, not knowing when a ground invasion might begin, knowing that their tent provides not much safety against the elements and even less safety against the military that seeks to exterminate them, need the world to act. They need us to know the truth so we can act as a collective and force a halt to this genocide. And they need it now. They need a media that speaks truth to power, instead of speaking on behalf of the powerful. And they need it now. There is no time to waste. 

Some sources to read and support:

Middle East Eye: https://www.middleeasteye.net/

Democracy Now: https://www.democracynow.org/

In These Times: https://inthesetimes.com/

Al-Jazeera: www.aljazeera.com

Means TV: https://means.tv/

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (not media, but covers Palestine): https://euromedmonitor.org/en

The Real News: https://therealnews.com/

I’m sure there are plenty more! Please feel free to comment with reccomendations, and to share this list with anyone looking for good sources.