Mainstream Media Bias Exposed Over Israel-Palestine Reporting
The USA's New York Times, and Australian public broadcaster, "your ABC", take the same dire credibility hit, in ways that reflect their similar and different cultural contexts.
I didn’t know what to think when I realised:
The same editorial censorship, narrowing words and concepts in reporting on Israel’s military action in Gaza, was happening at both the New York Times, and Australia’s ABC;
The same internal staff pushback to this pressure was happening in both offices;
That pushback, obviously going nowhere, has solidified into open revolt, with an overt leak at NYT, and Al Jazeera journalists knowing to pursue a Freedom of Information request at the ABC. I don’t have proof they were anonymously tipped, but draw your own conclusions about how they knew to pursue the FOI.
I’m not breaking news in terms of the direct reporting, but I believe I am the first to connect how closely these instances mirror each other in their dynamics, from the role each institution plays in its respective market, to the method of pressure applied, the exact terms too dangerous to status-quo narratives to be published, and the relative invisibility and lack of controversy of these stories in the mainstream news. I can say that confidently because no one in Australia has reported the Al Jazeera FOI story.
This last element shows that while independent media voices are quite robust in the US market for domestic and global issues, Australia’s independent voices are relatively weak. Someone much bigger than me here should have reported on these stories and invited us to ponder their similarities in journalistic offices half a world away from each other. It says a lot about the need for robust truth-telling in Australia in particular, when such a little bit goes such a long way.
This piece was developed as part of my first post, about the global media’s shifting language around Israel’s potential “pariah status”. (You can read it here.) To leave it in there would have been an epic case of burying the lead. This censorship issue is too distracting and powerful a statement about the state of global media reporting on Israel-Palestine in its own right, to be shuffled amongst the timeline of wider abuse of language and concepts reviewed there.
What is up, New York?
While the New York Times has been an institutional shield maintaining unquestioned US support for Israel over a controversial six months, not everyone at the New York Times is on board holding the line. That’s why there have been so many leaks, first of their own debunked 7 October reporting, now this. The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill detailed a leaked “internal memo”, that reveals how the influential outlet has been censoring its journalists, the outcry and regulation of power taking place on its internal Slack channels since November. The memo, by NYT “standards editor” Susan Wessling, presents “an outline for maintaining objective journalistic principles”, and says to avoid the words:
“genocide”
“ethnic cleansing”
“occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land
restrict use of “Palestine” except in very rare cases
“refugee camps” for camps in parts of Gaza where those from occupied territories or demolished blocks have been sent, despite being recognised by the UN, with hundreds of thousands of registered refugees
“Words like ‘slaughter,’ ‘massacre,’ and ‘carnage’ often convey more emotion than information. Think hard before using them in our own voice.”
You would be right to question, then, where you have heard or read that language in the media. As independent pundit Sabrina Salvati notes, “They had no problem using that language, when describing Russia’s war with Ukraine…and wanting to invoke emotion.”
Salvati explains the strategic purpose of this censorhip regime at the Times:
“When it comes to the Palestinian people, they don’t want to evoke emotion in their readers. And the reason they don’t want to do that, is they don’t want you to feel anything for the Palestinian people.” —Sabrina Salvati, 24 April 2024
As media consumers, we need to educate ourselves regarding the use of official language and the use of certain normalised concepts as Trojan horses for less transparent aims and effects. Of the memo overall, an anonymous NYT newsroom source said:
“It’s the kind of thing that looks professional and logical if you have no knowledge of the historical context of the Palestinian-Isareli conflict. But if you do know, it will be clear how apologetic it is to Israel.” —anonymous NYT newsroom source, quoted in The Intercept, 15 April 2024.
There is a fledgling revolt happening in the staff at the New York times, for this information to be leaked to the Intercept’s founding editor Scahill. Civil society is more vulnerable and fearful than it is sometimes described by aspirational idealists of modern democracy, but here it is starting to do its job. The disempowered unit in the system will use the logic of that system to fight back, creating a modicum of justice to answer pervasive injustice. Unlike your preferred heroic narrative, please note that there is not enough reversal, alliance and innovation to prevent or solve these systemic injustices. Losing is on the menu for the reformers out there (and at this keyboard). That injustice is simply evident in the lack of truthful reporting, the overt levels of control and expressions of power. Media reporting on Israel-Palestine at this time is a great example that maps and visualises how a tiny number of people’s interests are weighted over those of so many. And how fundamentally unequal our society is.
Where the bloody hell are you, Australia?
A very similar sequence to the NYT top-down censorship and subsequent leak has happened at Australia’s national public broadcaster, the ABC. The level of similarity is eerie, but perhaps not that surprising.
“In a summary of a meeting on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)’s coverage of the war, staff detailed concerns that coverage displayed pro-Israel bias, such as by accepting ‘Israeli facts and figures with no ifs or buts’ while questioning Palestinian viewpoints and avoiding the word ‘Palestine’ itself.” —anonymous staff report, related to an alleged November meeting with ~200 staff
This summary goes further than the NYT memo leak, as it describes methods of interpretation and framing in greater detail. It also addresses the issue of power and suppression of the voices of reputable international organisations:
“We’re worried the language we’re using in our coverage is askew, favoring the Israeli narrative over objective reporting. This is evident in our reluctance to use words such as ‘War crimes’, ‘Genocide’, ‘Ethnic cleansing’, ‘Apartheid’ and ‘Occupation’ to describe the various aspects of the Israeli practices in Gaza and the West Bank, even when the words are attributed to respectable organisations and sources,” staff said in the document, which is signed “Concerned ABC journalists and staff” and addressed to “managers and colleagues”.
The ABC staff meeting summary raises the same objections as did Salvati above, in relation to the NYT memo leak:
“Meanwhile, we’re quick to use ‘terrorist’, ‘barbaric’, ‘savage’ and ‘massacre’ when describing the October 7th attacks. Similarly, we regularly quote sources referring to highly contested claims made by Israel, but not those made by Palestinians and their supporters.”
We can’t be satisfied to call these terms and issues coincidental. We have to recognise strategy when we see it, in effect if we can’t prove top-down coordination. This is the kind of thing that disseminates from think tanks to government officials and media outlets. That work is a cooperation between government, big industry, and the security state. Unless credible allegations of falsified documents arise, some compelling retraction is issued or level of coercion proven, we now have a smoking gun on each continent.
This disturbing internal complaint at the ABC is happening against a background of related issues about how global power is affecting reporting of Israel-Palestine at the national broadcaster. The organisation is still reeling following revelations that lobbying by a group called “Lawyers for Israel”, resulted in the sacking of Lebanese-Australian ABC reporter Antoinette Lattouf, after she posted a Human Rights Watch video to her personal Instagram in December, deemed to be “controversial”. Lattouf has taken legal action that is bringing some healthy scrutiny to the broader issue, but can we even trust how it is reported? (No. No we cannot.) An episode of the ABC’s flagship current affairs program, Q+A, also came under fire as it failed the pub test, regarding its own mandate to a representative range of community views.
These instances point the way to the effective sheepdogging and boundary riding instruments that reduce the breadth of the Overton Window, the allowable range of discussion, in our culture and media industries. These issues are catalogued and interpreted with a longer view by me here.
ABC reporting is considered in the mainstream, by busy people who work too hard to pay attention, to be free of market forces, government bias and censorship. This perception has built intergenerational trust, comfort, and enthusiastic community support. Even though its board has been white-anted for years, stacked with people who want to reduce its circulation and shut it down. Even though it buys news from the same corporate global media news agencies that sit in the same self-interested network, that in turn dominates the military, food, pharmaceutical and media industries — Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse (AFP) — who keep their very particular self-interest in play at all times.
That we had to go across to Al-Jazeera to get this information is telling, and all the more disturbing. Murdoch’s Sky News (Murdoch’s Aussie version of Fox News), and independent voice The Saturday Paper, reflect consistent pro-Israel bias in their word choice and rhetoric, so the robust breadth of alternative voices is hard to find in my country. Likewise, don’t be surprised to find the Guardian sheepdogging the narrative in lockstep with the ABC and Murdoch presses. While the Financial Review enjoyed roasting the ABC over the issue of biased coverage in late 2023, with the headline “ABC clears itself of bias in Q&A program on Israel and Palestine”, it has likewise joined the din of silence over the illuminating meeting summary.
An effective contrast with US media mapping, it’s poignant we only discover this Australian media controversy because an international outlet, Al Jazeera, obtained the report via a Freedom of Information request in March:
While the broad thrust of concerns aired at the meeting was reported by Australian media in November, the document contains extensive detail about staff’s complaints and previously unpublicised examples of alleged pro-Israeli bias.
Why haven’t these revelations been reported even once on Australian shores? The issue had been “covered”, I guess — literally every Australian media outlet could fly under the radar of plausible deniability. This is one big reason why you should support independent media, and heck yes, this Substack.
Do you find this duplication of censorship tactics half a world away disturbing, or commonplace? How can this co-occurence be framed more innocently, in a way that still values facts? How should civil society respond — outside of the newsrooms that have clearly started to rebel? I want to know what you think about this revelation:
This post has been published concurrently with a broader one focusing on how mainstream global media shifts in relation to Israel’s potential pariah status. Go check it out: