propaganda and the media’s Israel-Palestine coverage

This FAIR article lists some propaganda techniques it says the media uses to bias Israel-Palestine coverage. I am not taking a political stand here on the basis of my limited knowledge of these issues, but rather taking note of the propaganda techniques themselves. It is a useful skill in today’s world to be able to spot propaganda. The bold-faced headers are my paraphrasing of what the article presents, while the remaining text is my own analysis.

  1. Disproportionately presenting position statements made by one side or the other, or interviewing individuals representing one side or the other. Corporations and governments are well aware that “press releases” become pre-packaged news for the cash strapped and possibly lazy media to use with minimal effort. So the better organized side with deeper pockets is going to get more coverage. Sure there are journalistic ethics, but economics is the stronger force, so it becomes an arms race where everybody hires “communications” specialists and competes to get their version of a story out. The news coverage then goes to the highest bidder.
  2. Using words that do not assign blame for violence, such as “clash” rather than “assault”. We see examples in the local U.S. media too, where street violence is caused by “criminals” or “gangs” but vehicular homicide, negligent road design, and non-enforcement of traffic safety laws are portrayed as “accidents”.
  3. Excessive use of the passive voice. “People were killed” used more often when talking about violence affecting one side or the other.
  4. Covering deaths on one side much more than the other, or not covering deaths on one side at all. We certainly see this with U.S. coverage of our foreign wars and local violence. I think there is also just a sensationalist aspect to this where unfamiliar acts of violence (a horrific suburban school shooting) are covered disproportionately to all the other acts of violence around us (again, deaths in and around motor vehicles possibly being the most glaring.) I think the media could combat this somewhat by giving more facts and figures on death and violence to give context to the more sensational, anecdotal stories. And a lot of this could be automated pretty easily. For example, if the media is covering the latest incident involving an autonomous vehicle, AI could very easily put national crime, violence, and transportation safety data stats at their fingertips. This is routinely done in the sports world (this is the 18th time such and such a combination of random events has happened on a Thursday in June is 1976…).
  5. “Sidelining international law”. In the case of Israel, there is somewhat of an international consensus that some of the government’s actions are illegal. Palestine is also recognized as a state by quite a few UN member states. We don’t hear much about this in the U.S. media. Again, it is not hard to have facts and figures provided by international non-governmental agencies handy. Although, in the U.S. we have propaganda causing us to discount information coming from the UN.
  6. “Reversing victim and victimizer”. This has to do at least partially with how “protests”, “demonstrations”, “looting”, and “riots” are covered. In the U.S., one example of this was the Hurricane Katrina coverage, although I think the media coverage of the 2020 George Floyd protests was a bit more even-handed. There is a certain element of media and corporate self-licking ice cream cone on this though, where they all stand around in a circle patting each other’s backs while continuing to rig elections for the rich and powerful and not deliver concrete benefits and services to the working people of this country.

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