A CNN sign at the entrance to the CNN Center in Atlanta, Georgia (Shutterstock)
CNN, the once popular international cable network, and the prestigious New York Times, like the State of Israel, will never enjoy the legitimacy they once enjoyed on the world stage.
On January 4, 2024, The Intercept published a story revealing an internal CNN directive acknowledging that all of the network's news on Gaza and Israel was sent to CNN's Jerusalem bureau, where it was shaped by censorship. Israeli army.
With the exception of the British newspaper The Guardian, few, if any, Western media outlets reported the story.
Citing a CNN employee who described this as “journalistic misconduct,” the Guardian said: “CNN faces backlash from its employees over policies that have led to the regurgitation of Israeli propaganda and the silencing of voices.” and Palestinian views on the network’s coverage of the Israeli war on Gaza. Pressure from the top led to uncritical acceptance of Israeli claims and a “pro-Israel bias” in the coverage.
While civilians were being killed indiscriminately by heavy Israeli bombing, Israeli military observers insisted that CNN should write about Israeli bombs as “explosions” attributed to no one “so that the IDF would consider accepting or denying responsibility.”
Although a CNN spokesperson downplayed the revelation, saying CNN does not share the news transcript with the censor, and describing the network's interactions with the Israeli military as "minimal," a CNN employee confirmed that all Anything related to Israel and Palestine is “subject to approval by the Jerusalem office.”
If the office is not staffed, a select few carefully selected by the office will edit the copy “with very little margin.”
It turns out that CNN also hired a soldier from the IDF Spokesperson's Unit to cover the fallout from October 7.
A CNN employee described how the policy works in practice.
“War crimes” and “genocide” are taboo words.
But for knowledgeable, alternatively informed readers and viewers, this information about CNN was hardly breaking news.
The revelation thus provided damning confirmation of what media pundits and activists had observed since October 7: that the pro-Israel voice of the establishment media was evident.
Early on October 14, 2023, pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered outside the CNN office in Atlanta.
On social media, mainstream reports of the Gaza genocide have been ridiculed, ridiculed, and subject to harsh justifications for Israeli campaigns.
The American media constantly repeated the Israeli army's assertions that it was targeting "Hamas terrorists."
They said: Hamas leaders were hiding “in tunnels,” under Al-Shifa Hospital, and under residential buildings in densely populated areas.
While civilians were being killed indiscriminately by heavy Israeli bombing, Israeli military observers insisted that CNN should write about Israeli bombs as “explosions” attributed to no one “so that the IDF would consider accepting or denying responsibility.”
This language was known in many reports across the media spectrum, as newspapers and broadcasters used the passive voice, failing to identify the source of the bombs and who was dropping them.
For example, when a highly destructive 2,000-pound bomb hit the densely populated Jabalia refugee camp on October 31, the New York Times ran this headline: “Photos Show Explosion Causes Massive Damage in Gaza's Jabalia Neighborhood.”
The prestigious newspaper continued, pretending not to know anything about the “explosion” other than what could be seen from the photos: “Photos taken on Tuesday showed at least one large crater and significant building damage…the mysterious ‘explosion,’ the devastation, and the crater left in its wake.” It came out of nowhere, and only later did the newspaper identify Israel as the source.
Julia Connelly quoted Professor Sunny Singh of London Metropolitan University who noted that "Western media, not just CNN, were promoting Israeli propaganda throughout the 'Israeli attacks.'"
Israeli control over the narrative in the American media has also been documented through media research studies.
When examining three of the most influential American newspapers: the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, Adam Johnson and Osman Ali found that their reporting was strongly biased toward Israel.
They then analyzed more than 1,100 articles from the first six weeks of the conflict by identifying key terms and the context for their use.
They found that newspapers disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths, which were reported 16 times more often than Palestinians, a true reflection of the actual numbers of Palestinians killed far more than Israelis.
Newspapers also used highly emotional language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not the Palestinian deaths, which were reported dispassionately in the language of abstract numbers.
Palestinians rarely, and certainly never, “kill.”
“In most cases they had just died,” while the Israeli victims were “slaughtered” by Hamas.
However, the numbers of Palestinian casualties have diminished, adding to doubts about their accuracy;
Because it came from the Ministry of Health in Gaza.
In fact, every piece of information coming out of Gaza was met with suspicion.
Although the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees confirmed that the ministry's reports on casualties "have consistently proven credible in the past," US President Joe Biden has publicly questioned their accuracy, as has the Western press.
In fact, journalists are under intense pressure to question anything they learn from Palestinian sources.
As CNN news director David Lindsay told reporters in a November 2 memo: “Hamas representatives engage in inflammatory rhetoric and propaganda... We must be careful not to give them a platform.”
Another study by the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting-Fair looked at opinion pieces published by The New York Times and The Washington Post and found that they had "shifted the debate on Gaza toward an Israel-centered perspective."
In fact, 20% of the Washington Post's editorials are written by one person, David Ignatius, who admitted in one of his columns that he "sees this terrible conflict largely through Israel's eyes."
Those who have suffered most at the hands of the Israelis are children and journalists in Gaza, and these killings are perhaps the most indefensible.
Thus the country's most important newspapers avoided in-depth reporting on these deaths and thus refused to acknowledge the great importance that this loss of life required.
Of the more than 1,100 news articles Johnson and Ali studied, only two headlines appeared for the word “children,” relating to the children of Gaza.
In addition, Israel has killed more than 119 Palestinian journalists since the start of the Gaza siege, and the Israeli army has targeted many of these journalists, but “journalists” and other terms such as “correspondents” and “photographers” appear in only nine headlines of the articles reviewed. Study it.
The world watched the Israeli genocide in Gaza in real time on independent, alternative and social media, and on international broadcasters such as Al Jazeera.
But in the United States, as author Patrick Lawrence noted, the American public was being asked to “abandon their consciences, their idea of a moral order, and their respectability as Israel kills, starves, and disperses 2.3 million people and renders their lands uninhabitable.”
But at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, the scientist said “no.”
Lawrence describes US coverage of Gaza as “grossly lopsided and lopsided” in favor of Israel.
Referring directly to the New York Times, he described the report as "non-transparent."
Just as Israel will never regain its reputation, the American media has lost its credibility and international standing.
Because of its senseless repetition of Israeli genocidal messages that condoned and facilitated war crimes in Gaza.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.