Unfortunately, the New York Times is easily the most important U.S. media outlet covering Israel/Palestine, and its influence continues to grow. Regional American newspapers stagnate or shrink, and they have long since closed their reporting bureaus in the Mideast. U.S. cable news timidly continues to follow the Times’s lead, with the honorable exceptions of journalists like Ayman Mohyeldin and Ali Velshi at MSNBC.
So it’s time for another up-to-date dissection of ongoing Times bias. Let’s start with the outbreak of polio in Gaza, in this August 30 report. It begins:
War and disease have been cruelly intertwined for as long as humans have confronted one another on the battlefield, and in the Gaza Strip, polio is now stalking a population that for nearly 11 months has been on the run from relentless bombardment.
Notice how “polio” — not Israel’s murderous military, is “stalking the population.” The beginning of that sentence is even worse: “War and disease have been cruelly intertwined as long as humans have confronted one another on the battlefield. . .” No mention of Israel’s deliberate destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system for nearly a year now, and no mention that its military is deliberately depriving civilians of food and water, which surely weakens their resistance to disease. The article later does include some oblique criticism of the Israeli response, although it nowhere explains why it took six weeks after the illness was detected to implement short cease-fires to re-start vaccinations.
The tone was set in the report’s first sentence: the polio outbreak in Gaza is more or less a natural disaster for which no one is to blame.
Let’s now turn to how the Times reported on Israel’s massive ongoing military attack in occupied West Bank Palestine, which started August 28. One of the paper’s first reports would have been ludicrous if it weren’t so tragic. Here’s the headline:
Where to start? First: Who was killed? Israeli soldiers? Palestinian resistance fighters? Palestinian civilians? The Times headline writer cleverly hid who killed whom. Next: What does “Amid” mean here? Were these (unspecific) deaths some kind of accident? And finally: Why leave out “Occupied West Bank Palestine?
Here’s an accurate headline, using the same number of words: Israel Invades Occupied Palestinian West Bank, Kills 10 Palestinians. Victims May Be Civilians.