Mainstreaming bias
Murdoch, who is known for his overt proclivity towards Israel, publically berated western media for what he considered its anti-Israel bias, also tweeting that the “Middle East ready to boil over any day. Israel position precarious. Meanwhile watch CNN and AP bias to point of embarrassment.”
For most of us though, it was clear that a bias certainly did exist, but that it was anything but anti-Israel. To the contrary, most observers feel the bias is consistently Pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian.
As the Gaza conflict dominated airtime and print headlines alike, innumerable reports were aired and columns written. But in almost all of these, objectivity seemed to be missing. Facts, data and numbers came through, but not real human stories. At least not from the Palestinian side
“The media, whether it’s print, broadcast or social, is the one single tool that is employed to voice the pain of all the people suffering. And it is nothing short of cruelty on the parts of journalists who fail to uphold their honour and responsibility for shedding the light of truth on these events,” said Shaker Mahmud, an Egyptian journalist who was recently stuck in Gaza.
Saner voices than Murdoch’s, including that of Noam Chomsky, have condemned the “reprehensible” Gaza coverage. Many internationally renowned media outlets have been observed to be reporting without context, without perspective and with a bias that has overtly favoured the heavily armed and highly advanced nuclear state of Israel against the population of the besieged Gaza Strip. “I think the media, perhaps due to US influence, is always biased toward Israel. I think that perhaps Arabs have been painted as ‘terrorists’ so anything they do is ‘terrorism’ and anything Israelis do is ‘defense’, said Asza Valdimars, a journalist from Iceland, who was recently reporting in Tel Aviv.
The day after Israel carried out the killing of Hamas military leader Ahmed al-Jabari, the BBC published an article on its website headlined, “Gaza rocket arsenal problem for Israel.” The write-up talked about the types of rockets possessed by Hamas in detail, and discussed the threat these pose to Israel. But the Israeli arsenal was not discussed, nor was the fact that it is largely funded (to the tune of $3 billion a year) by the United States.
While the mainstream media was too busy counting the number of rockets fired into Tel Aviv and discussing the possible damages that may arise ‘if’ they were to hit, they failed to look into the most basic issue of the chain of events — why did it start in the first place? Or if they did, they almost invariably parroted the Israeli line.
None of the world news leaders reported on the fact that Gaza has been under an Israeli blockade since June 2007, which restricts the import of materials needed to rebuild Gaza’s shattered infrastructure. One result of the blockade is that, according to the British NGO Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), 58.6 per cent of schoolchildren, 68.1 per cent of children nine to 12 months old and 36.8 per cent of pregnant mothers are plagued by anemia.
“Of course, had they done so, it would have gone against their hard work of building up the anti-Palestinian repertoire,” said Mr Mahmud.
Instead, TV viewers were treated to uninterrupted interviews of Israeli lobbyists by mainstream media aimed at tilting popular opinion towards Israel. As soon as the conflict began, the BBC began featuring Israeli heavyweights like Danny Ayalon, Israel’s deputy foreign minister and Ron Prosor, Israeli ambassador to the UN. The Palestinian counter-narrative was missing.
Of course, the BBC has a history with such tilts. In 2009, the BBC had declined a request from the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) to screen an aid appeal aimed at raising money to aid the relief effort in the aftermath of hostilities in the Gaza Strip. Former cabinet minister Tony Benn had criticised the decision, while giving an interview on BBC News 24, in which he said that the Israeli government was preventing the appeal from being broadcast. But Mark Thompson, the Director-General of the BBC, had denied that the decision was due to Israeli pressure.
On the Today programme on 15 November this year, BBC’s John Humphrys interviewed Daniel Taub, who is Israel’s ambassador to the UK. Humphrys did not question Taub when he said, “We have to recognise, seven years ago, [Israel] pulled out of every inch of Gaza. We removed 9,000 Israeli civilians along with their homes, their schools, their kindergartens, in order to try and have a peaceful situation with Gaza … Tragically, that opportunity was not taken up. Hamas took over and since then has been waging an intensive war.”
Had the speaker not been Israeli, one would have expected Humphrys to exercise the basic journalistic requirement of questioning this narrative by bringing up the siege of the Gaza strip that has been in effect since that date.
But the silver-lining of objective journalism has sprung up from an unexpected source: alternate media. Independent online news publications like The Electronic Intifada (sourced for this write-up as well) have helped counter the bias of mainstream media.
“Amid all the recklessly skewed media propaganda, it [alternative media] appears to be the ying to the highly distorted yang,” said Mr Mahmud.
Democracy Now, a progressive and independent daily news programme, which focuses on bringing to the fore people and perspectives rarely heard in mainstream media, has provided a more balanced perspective. For instance, James Colbert, policy director for the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and Yousef Munayyer, Executive Director of The Palestine Center were interviewed as guests on Democracy Now, on how to resolve the crisis. Both parties were given an equal opportunity to represent their sides thus not resulting in one-sided propaganda.
Many alternate media sources recast the timeline of the Gaza attack in a way that did not pin the Palestinians as the fire-starters. Alternet’s article, ‘4 Most Common Myths About Israel and Gaza- Debunked’, along with probing into the aforementioned, brought many sensitive issues to light in the hopes of separating facts from myths. For instance, amongst other facets, the article explains the difference between killing civilians and militants, while many of the western media continued to brush Palestinian casualties under the carpet while focusing on the ‘success story’ of the ‘targeted killings’ of militants.
In an article in the Huffington Post by Middle East-based correspondent Sherine Tadros, it is aptly pointed out that, “There is a general problem with media when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The need to sanitise events so as not to be controversial and upset the wrong people. They fear that humanising the conflict will make them look sympathetic or worse empathetic to the Palestinians, which could be career suicide. But by not being bold and telling it how it is ultimately is a disservice to the truth and to journalism.” When a house in Gaza is attacked and kills ten people, the Israeli officials label it as a target killing of a Hamas militant. This has appeared to be a major game changer as far as the mainstream western media is concerned and the fact that one Hamas militant might have been successfully killed is highlighted manifold. “Does anyone stop and ask: even if there was a Hamas official inside the house, is killing ten innocent civilians to take out one official who is obviously under Israeli surveillance justified?” questions Tadros.
According to Valdimars, “alternate media is providing a better balance than the mainstream media because they have more ‘freedom’. It is less inclined to cater to the person or people that own them and more able to report news without a motive.”
However, while there might be a plethora of Palestinian blogs run by activists and citizen journalism, alongside the mushrooming alternate media sources, none of them are as far reaching in their impact as the mainstream western media.
The lack of widespread outrage by the public is a direct consequence of the systematic way in which the facts of the Israel-Palestinian conflict are either withheld or distorted. And while these voices in the wilderness may not have the reach of a global news network, they have slowly but surely begun to be heard, and to make a difference.
Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, December 2nd, 2012.
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