CNN and MSNBC’s first 100 days of reporting on Israel’s war on Gaza showed a consistent double standard in its coverage, with Palestinians receiving far less sympathetic and humanizing coverage than either Israelis during the same period or Ukrainians during the first 100 days after Russia’s invasion, a Nation analysis of major media coverage has found.
Finding 1:
Sympathetic victims like journalists, refugees, and children are mentioned more in Ukraine than in Gaza, despite a significantly wider gap in casualties and human suffering.
Finding 2:
On CNN and MSNBC, emotive words such as “brutal,” “massacre,” “slaughter, “barbaric,” and “savage” were overwhelmingly used to describe the killing of Israelis and Ukrainians, and almost never used to describe the killing of Palestinians.
Finding 3:
CNN and MSNBC covered the impact of Russia’s invasion on civilians twice as often as they did the impact of Israel’s bombing and siege of Gaza on civilians, despite the latter having a death toll five times that of the former.
I wonder how much of this bias is even conscious on their part. They’ve grown up in a country where leaders on both the left and the right constantly talk about both how Israel is a necessary ally and being told to constantly worry about terrorism.
I’m not justifying it by any means. They should be looking into their unconscious biases. I’m just interested to know.
Totally agreed, however in the context of news, it is a deliberate editorial choice. Money speaks through the editorial boards of these corporate news organizations.
They are groups of individuals at various stages on their corporate ladders, some of them are very aware but they do what their management tells them or get another job.
Left and right? Liberals are not leftists. They’re both right wing parties.
Thanks for missing the point.
News media is highly produced. I’d have a harder time believing these words aren’t being carefully chosen for their impact.
I can’t speak for the national level, but I’ve worked in local news media and no it isn’t, it’s a shit show.
Right–everyone in the world is just winging it. Some of them are winging it in ways that create dead children.
I mean I don’t know if they are winging it higher up and we never dealt with this sort of subject since it was local news. For all I know, it was designed to be this way on that level.
All I can say was at the level where I was, it was absolute chaos all the time and the producers basically spent most of their time on the phone trying to find something to fill that noontime half hour and then frantically writing the script.