[ As stories about Israel/Palestine continue to bombard our
screens and daily papers, readers and journalists alike need to remain
aware of the pro-Israel pitfalls that pockmark establishment news
coverage.]
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6 BIASED TROPES IN ISRAEL/PALESTINE REPORTING  
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Lara-Nour Walton
August 22, 2023
Common Dreams
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_ As stories about Israel/Palestine continue to bombard our screens
and daily papers, readers and journalists alike need to remain aware
of the pro-Israel pitfalls that pockmark establishment news coverage.
_

Protestors raise their fists in support of Palestine at a march in
Los Angeles on May 15, 2021. , Credit: HOSAM ELATTAR, Voice of OC

 

“This is quite something,” remarked Nadi Abusaada in a May
8 tweet [[link removed]].
As many
[[link removed]] of
us have done, the Palestinian academic found himself experimenting
with the seemingly boundless powers of OpenAI’s ChatGPT software.
But during this activity, he uncovered something disturbing.

“I asked @OpenAI whether Palestinians deserve to be free,” he
said. The natural-language processing tool responded to Abusaada’s
query ambivalently:

As an AI language model, I do not have personal opinions, feelings, or
beliefs. The question of whether Palestinians deserve to be free is a
complex and controversial issue with many different perspectives and
opinions…

But then he posed the same question about Israelis. This time, the
chat box did not equivocate:

Yes, like all people, Israelis deserve to be free. Freedom is a
fundamental human right that should be protected and guaranteed for
all individuals, regardless of their nationality, ethnicity, or
religion. It is essential that Israelis, like all people, are able to
live their lives free from violence, oppression, and discrimination…

“Explanation?” demanded Abusaada.

The explanation lies in the overarching attitudes of the 570 GB
[[link removed]] of data that
ChatGPT scrapes from the internet. And, with news media being one of
the primary
[[link removed]] sources
of information that the bot is trained on, Abusaada’s experience is
hardly surprising.

To say that U.S. news skews pro-Israel raises many an eyebrow, since
the public has been conditioned to believe otherwise. With outlets
like _NPR_vilified
[[link removed]] as
“National Palestinian Radio” and papers like _The New York
Times_ castigated by pro-Israel watchdogs for lending “the
Palestinian narrative” undue credence (CAMERA, 10/15/13
[[link removed]]),
the myth of pro-Palestine bias appears plausible.

Yet such claims have
[[link removed]] been
[[link removed]] litigated
[[link removed]],
and the verdict is plain: U.S. corporate media lean in favor of
Israel. As Abeer Al-Najjar (_New Arab,_7/28/22
[[link removed]])
noted: “The framing, sourcing, selection of facts, and language
choices used to report on Palestine…often reveal systematic biases
which distort the Palestinian struggle.” Some trends are more
ubiquitous than others, which is why it is vital that news readers
become acquainted with the tropes that dominate coverage of the
Israeli occupation.

1. Where Are the Palestinians?

In 2018, 416Labs, a Canadian research firm, analyzed
[[link removed]] almost
100,000 news headlines published by five leading U.S. publications
between 1967 and 2017. The study revealed that major newspapers were
four times more likely to run headlines from an Israeli government
perspective, and 2.5 times more likely to cite Israeli sources over
Palestinian ones. (This trend was further confirmed by Maha
Nassar—_+972_, 10/2/20
[[link removed]]).

Owais Zaheer, an author of 416Labs’ study told
T_he __Intercept__ (_1/12/19
[[link removed]])
that his findings call attention to “the need to more critically
evaluate the scope of coverage of the Israeli occupation and recognize
that readers are getting, at best, a heavily filtered rendering of the
issue.”

In its media resource guide
[[link removed]],
the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association (AMEJA) counseled
reporters: “Former U.S. diplomats, Israeli military analysts, and
non-Palestinian Middle East commentators are not replacements for
Palestinian voices.”

The exclusion of Palestinian voices from corporate media reporting
does not stop at sourcing. For example, contrary to its pro-Israel
critics, _NPR_’s correspondents are rarely Palestinian or Arab, and
almost all reside in West Jerusalem or Israel proper
(FAIR.org, 4/2/18
[[link removed]]).
Editors also overlook obvious conflicts of interest, like when the son
of _The New York Times’_ then-Israel bureau chief Ethan Bronner
joined the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) (_Extra!_, 4/10
[[link removed]]).

When _Times _public editor Clark Hoyt (2/6/10
[[link removed]]) acknowledged
that readers aware of the son’s role “could reasonably wonder how
that would affect the father,” _Times_ executive editor Bill
Keller rejected
[[link removed]] this
advice, saying that having a child fighting for Israel gave Bronner
“a measure of sophistication about Israel and its adversaries that
someone with no connections would lack,” and might “make him even
more tuned-in to the sensitivities of readers on both sides.” It’s
hard to imagine Keller suggesting this if Bronner’s son had, say,
signed up with Hamas.

Isabel Kershner, the current Jerusalem correspondent for
the _Times__,_ also had a son who enlisted in the IDF
(_Mondoweiss_, 10/27/14
[[link removed]]).
Moreover, her husband, Hirsh Goodman
[[link removed]], has worked at the
Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) (FAIR.org, 5/1/12
[[link removed]]),
where his job was

shaping a positive image of Israel in the media. An examination of
articles that Kershner has written or contributed to since 2009
reveals that she overwhelmingly relies on the INSS for think tank
analysis about events in the region.

When establishment media outlets privilege
[[link removed]] one
narrative over another, public opinion is likely
[[link removed]] to follow
[[link removed].].
Thus, the suppression of alternative viewpoints is among today’s
most concerning media afflictions
[[link removed]].

2. Turning Assaults Into ‘Clashes’

Reporting on Israel/Palestine often relies on a lexical toolbox
designed for occlusion rather than clarity, “clashes” rather than
“assaults.” Adam Johnson (FAIR.org, 4/9/18
[[link removed]])
explains that “clash” is “a reporter’s best friend when they
want to describe violence without offending anyone in power—in the
words of George Orwell, ‘to name things without calling up mental
pictures of them.’”

FAIR has documented the abuse of “clash” in the
Israeli/Palestinian context time and time again: In 2018 Gaza, Israeli
troops fired at unarmed protestors 100 meters away. No Israelis
perished, but 30 Palestinians were murdered. That was not a
“clash,” as establishment media would have you believe; that was a
mass shooting (FAIR.org, 5/1/18
[[link removed]]).
During the funeral for Shireen Abu Akleh, the reporter who was
assassinated by Israeli gunfire, the IDF beat mourners, charged at
them with horses and batons, and deployed stun grenades and tear gas.
The procession was so rocked by the attacks that they nearly dropped
Abu Akleh’s casket. That was not a clash, that was a senseless act
of cruelty (FAIR.org, 7/2/22
[[link removed]]).
This summer, when Israeli forces raided the West Bank and stood by as
illegal settlers arsoned homes, farmland, and vehicles, that was not a
“clash”; that was colonialism (FAIR.org, 7/6/23
[[link removed]]).

The choice to use “clash”—and other comparably hazy descriptors
of regional violence, like “tension,” “conflict,” and
“strife”—is bad journalism. Such designations lack substance,
disorient readers, and above all spin a spurious storyline whereby
Israelis and Palestinians inflict and withstand equivalent bloodshed.
(According to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem
[[link removed]],
3,584 Palestinians have been murdered by Israeli security forces since
January 19, 2009, while 196 Israelis have been killed by Palestinians
during the same period.)

AMEJA’s media resource guide reminds journalists that the occupation
“is not a conflict between states, but rather between Israel, which
has one of the most advanced militaries in the world, and the
Palestinians, who have no formal army.”

But when such a power imbalance is inadequately acknowledged
[[link removed]],
“clash” and its misleading corollaries will not sound out of
place, and readers will not have the context necessary to separate the
perpetrators from the victims of violence.

3. Linguistic Gymnastics

The passive voice—or, as William Schneider describes
[[link removed]] it,
the “past exonerative” tense—is a grammatical construction that
describes events without assigning responsibility
[[link removed]].
Such sentence structures pervade coverage of the Israeli occupation.

In her 2021 investigation
[[link removed]] into
coverage of the first and second intifadas, Holly M. Jackson
identified disproportionate use of the passive voice—i.e., “the
man was bitten” rather than “the dog bit the man”—as one of
the defining linguistic features of _New York Times_ reporting on
the uprisings. The _Times_ used the passive voice to talk about
Palestinians twice as often as it did Israelis, which demonstrated the
paper’s “clear patterns of bias against Palestinians.”

While Jackson’s study only examined_ New York Times_ coverage
during the intifadas, passive voice remains a common grammatical cop
out—still permeating national newspaper headlines in recent months:

* “At Least Five Palestinians Killed in Clashes After Israeli Raid
in West Bank” (_New York Times_, 6/19/23
[[link removed]])
* “Two Palestinians Killed in Separate Episodes in Latest West
Bank Violence” (_AP_, 8/4/23
[[link removed]])
* “Israeli Forces Say Three Palestinians Killed in Occupied West
Bank” (_CNN_, 8/7/23
[[link removed].])

Other times, raids are miraculously carried out on their own, violence
randomly erupts and missiles are inexplicably fired. The
now-amended _New York Times_ headline “Missile at Beachside Gaza
Cafe Finds Patrons Poised for World Cup” (7/10/14
[[link removed]])
begged the question: Who fired the missile that, as if it had a mind
of its own
[[link removed]],
“found” Palestinian World Cup spectators?

Similarly, _The Washington Post_ piece “Yet Another Palestinian
Journalist Dies on the Job” (5/12/22
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leaves the reader puzzled. How exactly did Shireen Abu Akleh
[[link removed]]—left
unnamed in the title—die?

Headlines that omit the Israeli subject are unjustifiably
[[link removed]] exculpatory,
because editors know exactly who the assailant is.

4. Newsworthy and Unnewsworthy Deaths

Operation Cast Lead
[[link removed]],
Israel’s three-week military assault on Gaza in 2008, was carnage.
According to Amnesty International
[[link removed]] andB’Tselem
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the attack claimed 13 Israeli lives (four of which were killed by
Israeli fire), while Palestine’s death toll was nearly 1,400—300
of which were children. Yet the media response was far from
proportional.

In a 2010 study [[link removed]] of _New York
Times _coverage of Operation Cast Lead, Jonas Caballero found that
the _Times_ covered 431% of Israeli deaths—meaning each Israeli
fatality was reported an average of four times—while reporting a
mere 17% of Palestinian deaths. This means that Israeli deaths were
covered at 25 times the rate Palestinian ones were.

The _Times_ is not an outlier. FAIR’s examination
(_Extra!_, 11–12/01
[[link removed]]) of six months’
worth of _NPR_ Israel/Palestine broadcasting during the Second
Intifada determined that 81% of Israeli fatalities were reported on,
while Palestinian deaths were acknowledged just 34% of the time. The
disparity only widened when Palestinian victims were minors:

Of the 30 Palestinian civilians under the age of 18 that were killed,
six were reported on _NPR_—only 20%. By contrast, the network
reported on 17 of the 19 Israeli minors who were killed, or 89%…
Apparently being a minor makes your death more newsworthy to NPR if
you are Israeli, but less newsworthy if you are Palestinian.

Media also erase or downplay Palestinian deaths in the language of
their headlines. When _The New York Times_ (11/16/14
[[link removed]])
ran a story entitled “Palestinian Shot by Israeli Troops at Gaza
Border” it did not seem to occur to the editor that specifying the
age of the victim would be important. The Palestinian in question was
a 10-year-old boy. In another headline, “More Than 30 Dead in Gaza
and Israel as Fighting Quickly Escalates,” the _Times_ (5/11/21
[[link removed].])
neatly obscures that 35 out of the “more than 30 dead” were
Palestinian, while five were Israeli.

5. Sidelining International Law

Attempts to insulate Israel from condemnation also manifest themselves
in establishment media’s reluctance to identify the country’s
breaches of international law (FAIR.org, 12/8/17
[[link removed]]).

In Operation Cast Lead coverage, FAIR (_Extra!_, 2/09
[[link removed]])
noted that—despite the blatant illegality
[[link removed]] of
Israel’s assaults on Palestine’s civilian
infrastructure—international law was seldom newsworthy. By January
13, 2009, only two evening news programs (_NBC Nightly News_, 1/8/09,
1/11/09) had broached the legality of the Israeli military offensive.
But, only one of those TV segments (_Nightly News_, 1/8/09)
reprimanded Israel—the other (_Nightly News_, 1/11/09) defended the
illegal use of white phosphorus, which was being deployed on refugee
camps.

Meanwhile, just one daily newspaper (_USA Today_, 1/7/08
[[link removed]])
mentioned international law. But that single reference—embedded in
an op-ed by a spokesperson from the Israeli embassy in
Washington—was directed at Hamas violations, rather than Israeli
ones.

When it comes to reporting on the unlawful establishment of Israeli
settlements, media are no better
[[link removed]].
Colonizing occupied territories violates both Article 49
[[link removed]] of the Fourth
Geneva Convention and Security Council Resolution 446
[[link removed]], yet outlets
like _NPR_, _CNN_ and _The New York Times_ have a history of
concealing Israeli criminality by benevolently branding settlements as
“neighborhoods” (FAIR.org, 8/1/02
[[link removed]], 10/10/14
[[link removed]]).

Such charitable descriptions have also been extended to settlers
themselves. In an October 2009
[[link removed]]_Extra!_ piece,
Julie Hollar investigated a bevy of articles that characterized
settlers as “law-abiding,” “soft-spoken,” “gentle,” and
“normal.” One tone-deaf _Christian Science Monitor_ headline
(8/9/09
[[link removed]])
even read: “Young Israeli Settlers Go Hippie? Far Out, Man!” As
Hollar observed, “ethnic cleansing
[[link removed]] could hardly hope
for a friendlier hearing.”

Even when news media have characterized settlements and settlers as
engaging in unlawful colonial practices, they have done so
reluctantly. In 2021, Israeli settlement expansion in Sheikh Jarrah
culminated in an unlawful campaign of mass expulsion. A _New York
Times _(5/7/21
[[link removed]])
article on the crisis waited until the 39th paragraph before
suggesting that Israel was acting criminally. Similarly, while
describing Benjamin Netanyahu’s increasingly aggressive
[[link removed]] settlement
policies, _Associated Press_ (6/18/23
[[link removed]])
buried the lead by avoiding the “illegal” designation until the
middle of the piece.

It’s important to bring up the rule of law not only when Israel is
actively injuring innocents or erecting colonial communities. The
ceaseless maltreatment of Palestinians constitutes—according
to Amnesty International
[[link removed]], B’Tselem
[[link removed]],
and Human Rights Watch
[[link removed]]—apartheid.
Apartheid is a crime against humanity
[[link removed])%2C%20paragraph%204)).,%E2%80%9D%20are%20international%20crimes%20(art.],
yet news media avoid acknowledging the human rights community’s
consensus (FAIR.org, 7/21/23
[[link removed]], 2/3/22
[[link removed]], 4/26/19
[[link removed]]).
As FAIR (5/23/23
[[link removed]])
pointed out, it is a journalistic duty to do so:

The dominant and overriding context of anything that happens in
Israel/Palestine is the fact that the state of Israel is running an
apartheid regime in the entirety of the territory it controls. Any
obfuscation or equivocation of that fact serves only to downplay the
severity of Israeli crimes and the U.S. complicity in them.

6. Reversing Victim and Victimizer

As Gregory Shupak (FAIR.org, 5/18/21
[[link removed]])
wrote:

Only the Israeli side has ethnically cleansed and turned millions…
into refugees by preventing [Palestinians] from exercising their right
to return to their homes. Israel is the only side subjecting anyone to
apartheid and military occupation.

Nevertheless, U.S. media enter into fantastical rationalizations to
make the Israeli aggressor appear to be the victim. Blaming
Palestinians for their suffering and dispossession has become one of
the prime ways to accomplish this feat.

A 2018 FAIR report (5/17/18
[[link removed]])
analyzed coverage of the deadly Great March of Return
[[link removed]]—protests
that erupted in response to Israel’s illegal land, air, and sea
blockade on the Gaza Strip. The ongoing siege bans the import of raw
materials and significantly curtails the movement of people and goods.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (6/14/10) deplores the
blockade: “The whole of Gaza’s civilian population is being
punished for acts for which they bear no responsibility.”

Despite the ICRC indictment, FAIR found that established media held
besieged Palestinians accountable for Israel’s reign of terror
[[link removed]] following
anti-blockade demonstrations. _The New York Times_ (5/14/18
[[link removed]])
editorial board went so far as to suggest that Palestinians (and not
the siege-imposing Israel) were the only obstacles to peace:

Led too long by men who were corrupt or violent or both, the
Palestinians have failed and failed again to make their own best
efforts toward peace. Even now, Gazans are undermining their own cause
by resorting to violence, rather than keeping their protests strictly
peaceful.

Casting Palestinians as incorrigible savages is also easier when U.S.
media use defensive language to excuse the bulk of Israeli violence
(FAIR.org, 2/2/09
[[link removed]], 7/10/14
[[link removed]]).
FAIR (5/1/02
[[link removed]])
conducted a survey into _ABC_, _CBS, _and_ NBC_’s use of the
word “retaliation”—a term that “lays responsibil­ity for the
cycle of violence at the doorstep of the party being ‘retaliated’
against, since they presumably initiated the conflict.” Of the 150
mentions of “retaliation” and its analogs between September 2000
and March 17, 2002, 79% referred to Israeli violence. A total of 12%
were ambiguous, or encompassed both sides. A mere 9% framed
Palestinian violence as a retaliatory response.

Greg Philo and Mike Berry’s books _Bad News From Israel_
[[link removed]] and _More
Bad News From Israel_
[[link removed]] posit
that television’s “Palestinian action/Israeli retaliation” trope
has a “significant effect” on how the public remember events and
allot blame (FAIR.org, 8/21/20
[[link removed]]).
When Palestinians are consistently portrayed as the aggressive party
and Israel as the defensive one, U.S. news media are “effectively
legitimizing Israeli actions.”

Coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine celebrates
[[link removed]] the
efforts of Ukrainian resistance. With the anti-imperial Palestinian
struggle, however, news media refuse to extend the same favor
(FAIR.org, 7/6/23
[[link removed]]),
thus creating a

media landscape where certain groups are entitled to self-defense, and
others are doomed to be the victims of “reprisal” attacks. It
tells the world that… Palestinians living under apartheid have no
right to react to the almost daily raids, growing illegal settlements,
and ballooning settler hostility.

***

Malcolm X once declared
[[link removed]], “If
you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people
who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the
oppressing.” As stories about Israel/Palestine continue to bombard
our screens and daily papers, readers and journalists alike need to
remain aware of the pro-Israel pitfalls that pockmark establishment
news coverage. Then maybe one day we can move towards a future where
ChatGPT answers “yes” when users like Abusaada ask it whether
Palestinians deserve to be free.

_Lara-Nour Walton is a summer 2023 FAIR intern. She is a junior in
Columbia University's Dual BA with Sciences Po Paris, concentrating in
political science, history, and Middle Eastern studies._

* Isreal/Palestine
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* Media Bias
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