Western media: whitewashing Israeli genocide and manufacturing consent
Palestinians holding shrouded bodies at Al-Aqsa hospital in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, on 10 July 2024
Jamal Kanj writes in The Palestine Chronicle on 19 November 2024:
A UN Special Committee has characterized Israel’s war in Gaza as genocide, while Western “free” media has abandoned its ethical responsibility to cover and or report objectively on the conduct of Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon.
Western corporate media outlets, without exception, acquiesced to Israeli directives barring reporters from entering Gaza. Journalists embedded with the Israeli army report only what Israel permits them to observe, creating one sided heavily filtered narrative.
The programmed absence has deprived Western public of critical information to show what UNICEF describes as the most dangerous place in the world for children. Disregarding these realities, corporate Western media outlets often dehumanize Palestinians, dismissing their grievance while overtly empathizing with the Israelis.
Case in point, they extensively cover the relocation of hundreds of Israeli families, while offering little to no coverage on the Scholasticide of the 625,000 Palestinian children who are unable to attend school for a second year because Israel has damaged or destroyed 85% of Gaza’s schools.
Similarly, they disregard UN documented Israel’s use of “starvation as a weapon of war . . . destroying vital water, sanitation and food systems,” and neglect the plight of 90% of Gaza’s internally displaced population, many of whom have been forced to relocate nine or ten times. In addition, the media’s intentional omission of the destruction of the entire higher education system, with 100% of Gaza’s 12 universities demolished, leaving 88,000 students unable to continue their studies.
Just as with the systematic destruction of Gaza’s educational system, the “free” media has failed to critically report on Israel’s deliberate strategy to dismantle Gaza’s healthcare system. According to former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, this strategy involved “relentless and intentional attacks on medical personnel and facilities,” including the killing, detention, and torture of medical staff as part of a “concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system.”