Western coverage of Gaza: A textbook case of coloniser’s journalism | Media | Al Jazeera
▻https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/2/2/western-coverage-of-gaza-a-textbook-case-of-colonisers-journalism
On August 6, 2022, more than a year before Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, in a particularly egregious break from good journalism, The New York Times buried the lede on the deaths of six Palestinian children in its report on a “flare” in “Israel-Gaza fighting”.
In the report, the journalists waited until the second paragraph to mention that six children were among those killed by Israeli strikes in the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza and without even breaking the sentence added that “Israel said some civilian deaths were the result of militants stashing weapons in residential areas” and “in at least one case, a misfired Palestinian rocket killed civilians, including children, in northern Gaza”.
In journalism schools this is identified as “breathless” reporting. And it turned out to be wrong reporting too. Ten days later, the Israeli military finally admitted that it was behind the strikes that killed those children in Jabalia.
The New York Times did not report this bit as breathlessly.
I could call it unprofessional – which would be true as the coverage of this conflict in Western media has clearly been shaped by ideology rather than rigorous fact-checking. Such an assessment, however, would gloss over a deeper, more profound problem within Western journalism: coloniality.