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Cake day: June 20th, 2023
  • StrongHorseWeakNeigh@lemmy.worldtoWorld News@lemmy.world•Coverage of Gaza War in the New York Times and Other Major Newspapers Heavily Favored Israel, Analysis ShowsEnglish
    1·
    7 months ago

    For instance “[the media] mentioned antisemitism more than Islamophobia”. This presupposes that antisemitism should not be mentioned more than Islamophobia. But why?

    If I said “The media mentioned Islamophobia more than Francophobia” then that’s not an example of bias, because Islamophobia has been newsworthy for years and nobody pays attention to the French.

    So is antisemitism more newsworthy than Islamophobia? Maybe so, given the Stefanik hearings. Maybe not. But the Intercept hasn’t even considered this.

    The article clearly considers the increased rise in reporting on antisemitic actions vs Islamophobic actions taking place since the beginning of the war and shows clearly that the big three MSM corps much prefer to report on antisemitic actions as opposed to Islamophobic actions despite similar rises of incidents against both groups since the beginning of the war.

    Likewise, they count usage of words like “massacre” and “slaughter”. But what is that supposed to prove? The Intercept presupposes an unbiased source would not associate “massacre” with Hamas more than Israelis, but why?

    The article claims, and in my opinion sufficiently proves, that the MSM is attempting to garner more sympathy for the Israeli side as opposed to the Palestinians by using more emotive and personal language to refer to the deaths of Israelis and uses more cold, clinical language when speaking of Palestinian deaths.

    Finally, the Intercept wonders why “children” is not used more often in reporting. Here’s one possibility: the media treated dead adults and dead children equally, lumping them together in “total dead”. They are not singling groups out in a way that the Intercept would prefer. That’s the opposite of bias.

    Except the Intercept does show that “children” is used in the reporting in this conflict and is used specifically more often when talking about Israeli deaths in order to humanize the deaths on the Israeli side. The reporting from the MSM very specifically uses less human language to refer to the deaths of Palestinian children.

    Thought experiment: if the media constantly reported “X deaths, of whom Y were Christians” wouldn’t that be kind of creepy? Why does someone’s religion even matter when tallying the dead? Well, the same could be said of someone’s age.

    This is just an insane take. It’s obvious why it’s important to report on the number of children killed in a conflict.