US corporate media hiding the horrors of Gaza

As the Gaza war enters its 12th month with no end in sight, the ongoing horrors continue to be normalized in US media and politics. The process has become so routine that we might not recognize how omission and distortion have constantly shaped views of events since the war began in October.

The Gaza war received a vast amount of US media attention, but how much the media actually communicated about the human realities was a whole other matter. Easy assumptions held that the news enabled media consumers to see what was really going on.

But the words and images reaching listeners, readers and viewers were a far cry from experiences of being in the war zone. The belief or unconscious notion that news media were conveying of the war’s realities ended up obscuring those realities all the more. And journalism’s inherent limitations were compounded by media biases.

In-depth content analysis by the Intercept found that coverage of the war’s first six weeks by the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times “showed a consistent bias against Palestinians.”

Those highly influential news outlets “disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict” and “used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians.”

For example: “The term ‘slaughter’ was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, and ‘massacre’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to 2. ‘Horrific’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4.”

During the first five months of the war, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post applied the word “brutal” or its variants far more often to actions by