Mute Giants: Is Ethical Journalism Dead? 

In times of unimaginable destruction, such as with the ongoing genocide in Gaza, it feels like language lost its meaning, or rather, meaning has evaded the world altogether. There is a plethora of images of war, ash-covered, dead babies who seem as if they were still sleeping, children with missing limbs, whose one pant leg—if lucky—has been tucked in the waist to adjust their clothing to their disability, killed or maimed by the state of Israel and their allies in the West. There are no words for the gap between a little girl’s blown away leg and the floor, nor the space between a mother and the dead infant she is holding at her chest. There is only the quiet of a fire, and in that quiet, the urge to scream at the top of one’s lungs as life only becomes more horrendous for the surviving Gazans.

But then, language is instrumental in justifying, starting, and carrying on wars. And just like the way our collective humanity failed to stop the genocide in Gaza, the newspapers and news organizations who deem themselves uncontested in the highest standards of ethical journalism (as well as bastions of free speech) have failed to report on Israel’s occupation of Gaza with justice and dignity. At the time of writing, 1.7 million people have been displaced and are living in emergency shelters in Gaza, most of whom are on the brink of starvation. More than one thousand children have become amputees as a result of the attacks on civilians carried out by the Israel Defence Forces. After the Second World War, the Holocaust received a “the” and became capitalized, as a new word was needed to describe the horrors inflicted by the Nazis. As Israel’s unlawful and tormentous attacks on the Gazan civilians continue, a new acronym was born of a similar need: WCNSF, standing for “wounded child no surviving family.” A cluster of words that become harder to pronounce as you add one letter to another. Another knot in the throat of anyone with a grain of human decency and empathy.

On March 22, 2024, while industry giants like the New York Times had only partly begun to expand their coverage to include more voices from Gaza, a United Nations resolution supporting a permanent ceasefire was vetoed for a third time in a row (later, a proposal for a temporary ceasefire was passed, encompassing the month of Ramadan). In the earlier days of the occupation, headlines were significantly more biased and, at best, suspicious of the civilians in Gaza: When Israel attacked the al-Ahli Arab Hospital on October 17, 2023 —the first of many hospital attacks– the headline the New York Times chose to run read “Israeli strike kills hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians say.” While the attack was a developing story, the same title could not have been spelled out for any Western nation. The headline is just an add-on to a long line of mass media manipulation and aggressions that are seen fit for non-white inhabitants of the non-Western world.

Ten days prior, on October 7, 2023, the subheading on an infographic spoke even more plainly. In an interactive infographic titled “Maps: Tracking the Attacks in Israel and Gaza,” the subtitle read, “See where Israel has bulldozed vast areas of Gaza, as its invasion continues to advance south.” While the verb “bulldoze” suggests there was no human life in this “vast area”, Israel’s invasion “advances”—a very positive word for an army that is known to shoot Palestinian children just below the kneecap to ensure they become disabled.

Later, a New York Times opinion piece dated February 2, 2024, titled “Understanding the Middle East Through Animal Kingdom” showcased another, even more blatant instance of racism. At this point, four months into the war, unacceptable op-eds were seemingly neutralized by the actual realities of war announced on the newspaper’s homepage. When a title like “In Gaza, Desperate Palestinians are Killed While Hungry” is followed by “Israel’s return to Al-Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza stretches into a third day,” New York Times’s editorial integrity and standards of ethical journalism still remain dubious. In the following weeks, what the newspaper giant referred to as “return” proved to be a two-week-long massacre of zip-tied civilians —patients and health workers— alike. According to the United Nations Office of High Commissioner’s (UNHCR) statement, “the besieging and destruction of a hospital and the killing of health workers, the sick and wounded, and the people who protect them, is prohibited by international law.” One can’t help but wonder if anyone keeps tabs on the role of Western media in the genocide in Gaza other than Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG) and Al Jazeera Journalism Review and peace activists on Twitter. (WAWOG offers an extensive analysis of the New York Times’s consent manufacturing processes, breaking it down to infographics, data analysis, and wording.)

Hundreds of protesters occupy the lobby of the New York Times building, denouncing the paper for journalistic malpractice and manufacturing consent for genocide. March 14th, 2024. Credit: Writers Against the War on Gaza

The bias in language and representation and the dehumanizing trail it leaves have been discussed in the academic sphere and sometimes concerning the Middle East. In her 2004 book Precarious Life, Judith Butler brought forth the discourse of fear and censorship in the post-9/11 USA and underlined how each American who died in Iraq had a name. Asymetrically, the many Iraqis who were killed had no name, no face, rendering them more precarious and less mournable (both in the book and later, in the wake of Israel’s 2023 occupation of Gaza, Butler wrote about the Palestinian’s right to mourn and be mourned). Meanwhile, if and when the survivors of these media-sanctioned wars become refugees, they are met with further dehumanization in the media. In The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, Anne Hammerstad writes: “The threatening discourse to describe migrants takes away their humanity and depicts migration as a natural disaster rather than a normal human activity —mobility. Such dehumanization is commonplace in the construction of enemy images and makes it easier to detain, deport, and ignore the distress signals of boat migrants.” Just like with the U.S.’s wars on Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, in Israel’s occupation of Gaza, civilians are rendered nameless, faceless, less than human, and unmournable to anyone but their loved ones in mainstream media.

The New York Times is far from alone in its biased reportage and potentially sueable wording: The BBC, another media giant on the other side of the Atlantic, had to make a correction after they misleadingly claimed there were “several demonstrations across Britain during which people voiced their backing for Hamas,” on BBC News on October 16, 2023 (hundreds of people showed up at the headquarters to protest on the following day). Meanwhile, on their website, headlines like “‘Isis-level savagery’ by Hamas killed 11 Americans, says US”, and “‘Human shield horror’ and Israel’s ‘9/11 moment’” appeared repeatedly, equating Gaza with terrorism and hence robbing Gazans off of basic human empathy. Many BBC headlines echo the words of IDF spokespersons, senior U.S. defense officials, and President Biden. The same president repeated the unverified “reports” of beheaded babies, which one would think would have cast a more permanent shadow on taking his lead in the newsroom. More recently, in March 2023, the U.K.-based news organization repeatedly wrote about Israel’s attacks on the hospitals in Gaza, a total of 36 of them, without ever mentioning attacking a hospital is a war crime. Academic and activist Noura Erakat tweeted one of those BBC articles, noting “The only thing more terrifying than the Nassar hospital raid is the @bbc reporting, which rattles off what are tantamount to war crimes w/o once mentioning those violations or fitting this raid in a pattern of Israeli attacks on all 36 hospitals in #Gaza.” Elsewhere, The Guardian was widely criticized for an article dated November 23, 2023 (and has since been amended). The article in question read “the hostages to be freed are women and children” (of the Israeli hostages), “…and the Palestinian prisoners are also women and people aged 18 or younger.” A reminder that only white or white-passing children can be called “children” in the liberal west.

Creating a complete list of ethical breaches in the media’s coverage of Israel’s destruction of Gaza and its people would be a Herculean task. The following examples are limited to North America and are just scratching the surface: CNN’s reporting is so notoriously skewed that in February 2024, its own staff protested the recurring Israeli propaganda. According to the reporting from The Guardian, one CNN staffer said, “The majority of news since the war began, regardless of how accurate the initial reporting, has been skewed by a systemic and institutional bias within the network toward Israel. Ultimately, CNN’s coverage of the Israel-Gaza war amounts to journalistic malpractice.” Unreliable news outlets such as the New York Post and Fox News went so far as to publish the claim about beheaded babies, forging a false public opinion through lying and sensationalizing. At the time of writing, a White Kites Resistance minivan drives around New York City, showcasing some of these journalistic war crimes. Due to the language barrier and scope, the practices of European outlets, especially in Germany, where extreme censorship on Palestine blankets every facet of civil society, are more difficult to track but clearly as crucial.

In multiple instances, journalists across newsrooms in the United States did try to correct the institutions that employed them. On November 9, 2023, a letter protesting the continued murder of journalists and asking for “integrity in Western media coverage of Israel’s atrocities against Palestinians” was signed by hundreds of journalists. In response, the signees were banned from covering news related to Gaza (as in the case of the Los Angeles Times) or punished otherwise. More than 30 journalists asked for their signatures to be removed for fear of reprisal since its publication. The Associated Press, The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, and Bloomberg are among the employers of the journalists who requested the removal of their signatures.

A nearly 12,000-word close reading of “Screams Without Words” by the Feminist Solidarity Network for Palestine —an international collective of feminist academics, writers, and lawyers. January 12th, 2024. Credit: The New York War Crimes

Speaking to The New York War Crimes, a publication that questions and publicly corrects the New York Times’s editorial integrity and policies, Palestinian journalist Shuruq As’ad said, “Mainstream American outlets, ones that call themselves very professional in journalism, became spokespeople for the IDF after October 7. They really bought the story of the Israeli army about what happened that day, and it was a lie. They did not even cover the bases of simple, ethical journalism to make sure the information they delivered was accurate and instead bought the story that Palestinians killed children and cut heads and burned and raped without any evidence. This was shocking to me. I knew that these outlets were never really accurate or two-sided [when covering Palestine], but with this, it was even clearer… If Palestinians were ever in their coverage, it was a soundbite from Hamas taken from social media, something to help the IDF say that we are criminal… The most dangerous thing they do is depict this war as beginning on the 7th of October. When they reported on Ukraine, they used to go back in history, twenty or even one hundred years. They did not do this in Palestine. They did not refer to any political ground or history. They were misleading people, and their words were as dangerous as bullets.”

New York War Crimes’s tagline is “All the Consent That’s Fit to Manufacture,” referring to Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. The book talks about five filters of editorial bias in the propaganda model of communication. After the end of the Cold War, Chomsky argues that the fifth filter, “anticommunism,” was replaced with “war on terror.” (It is worth noting that the Turkish state sued publisher Fatih Taş after the 2001 publication of this book over its comments on Turkish state’s violent treatment of the Kurdish population, which involves its own long history of manufactured consents.)

During the time it took to write and revise this article, hundreds of more civilians in Gaza were murdered by Israel, along with seven World Central Kitchen aid workers. Iran and Israel started attacking each other. A mass grave was discovered inside a medical complex in Khan Younis. The occupation has been going on for over 200 days, and millions of people are still starving in Gaza. Students across the United States set up encampments at Columbia University, NYU, Yale, MIT, and more, and Columbia announced the classes were going to be held virtually due to the protests. A group called The Freedom Flotilla Coalition is getting ready to sail from Istanbul to Gaza’s territorial waters, to break the unlawful Israeli naval siege and deliver 5000 tons of humanitarian aid. Made up of over 1000 volunteers from 30 countries (Ada Colau, the former mayor of Barcelona, among them), the group has set out to “do the job of our governments.” In one of the many videos posted on FFC’s Instagram account, the organization’s press officer says, “In the past, we did rely on traditional media. We still need them, and they are important. However, FFC have put together a really solid and strong team in order to create content, to show what’s going on and to expose the atrocities that the Palestinian people are suffering in Gaza.” Although social media’s failing of Palestinians predates Israel’s 2023 occupation of Gaza, the organization’s need to put together its own media spokespeople stands for itself.

In her Baffler article, “Crimes Against Language,” Palestinian author Sarah Aziza calls Palestine a political canary and a portal torn in time, through which “we glimpse a future that is ours to resist, or accept.” Similarly, crimes against Gazans and humanity, in media language and otherwise, are past, present, and potential future, taking place when they still can, witnessed by many, and will never be forgotten about.

Tags: journalism, Palestine, The New York Times, The New York War Crimes