These two emphasize Israel as attacking “Hamas,” despite the fact that the strikes were totally indiscriminate and (as you know) mostly killed civilians. It also describes the talks as “stalling” as if this were some kind of natural disaster or unexplained event, despite the fact that it was due entirely to Israel continuing to massacre Palestinian civilians. This is pretty characteristic of most mainstream press coverage of Gaza:
This one talks about Israel’s borders “shifting” as if it is just some kind of natural process that happens sometimes, instead of the result of aggressive imperial expansion.
This is from the (pretty excellent) twitter bot that tracks edits to the NYT’s headlines and abstracts. Red is original text, green is the edit, and white is what stayed. You can see the wild shift in emphasis that the edit created. The locus of action shifts from Israeli police attacking Palestinian families to “militants” firing rockets and Israel being forced to respond. Police no longer attacked “families,” but rather “protesters.” This is a particularly egregious and obvious example of propaganda.
Standard operating procedure that we’ve seen a ton by now: when Israelis are killed, we use the active voice and directly name who killed them. When it’s Palestinians, it’s all passive voice and vagueness like it was an act of god.
Just bog-standard propaganda doing character assassination of a black person and buffing the image of a white conservative one. This image is called “angel vs. no-angel” in my file. This is important to both justify the police murder of Blake and also absolve Rittenhouse of any potential wrongdoing.
A classic case showing the difference in coverage (in the same publication!) of two extremely similar events a few years apart (though as the image notes, the USSR fired on a civilian plane illegally flying in their airspace, while the US fired on one legally flying in another country’s airspace). When the USSR does it, it’s just murder. When the US does it, we have to carefully examine how this accidental tragedy could have occurred.
A particularly egregious one from the AP. Both of these were in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina in 2005. In both cases, they were civilians taking food from flooded grocery stores in order to survive after the government completely botched all levels of both the run-up to the hurricane and the relief efforts. When it’s a Black person, taking food from an abandoned and flooded grocery store is “looting.” When it’s a white person, they just “found” the food.
There were lots of interesting contrasts between the press’ coverage of the Gaza genocide vs. the war in Ukraine. Most mainstream media outlets will subtly (or not-so-subtly) bias readers toward their preferred actor in a conflict by using active, inflammatory language (“murder,” “kill,” etc.) to describe the actions of Palestinians or Russians, but using passive “natural disaster” language to describe the actions of Israelis or Ukrainians (“deaths,” etc.). They will also usually directly name Russia or Palestine as the agent when they conduct strikes, but will avoid doing so with Israel or Ukraine. You can also see this same dynamic already playing out with Iran.
I keep a whole file of these for the rhetoric class I teach. This is gold.
You don’t happen to have any other screenshots of glaring examples, do you? I would love to share this one and others with my mom.
A few more:
These two emphasize Israel as attacking “Hamas,” despite the fact that the strikes were totally indiscriminate and (as you know) mostly killed civilians. It also describes the talks as “stalling” as if this were some kind of natural disaster or unexplained event, despite the fact that it was due entirely to Israel continuing to massacre Palestinian civilians. This is pretty characteristic of most mainstream press coverage of Gaza:
This one talks about Israel’s borders “shifting” as if it is just some kind of natural process that happens sometimes, instead of the result of aggressive imperial expansion.
This is from the (pretty excellent) twitter bot that tracks edits to the NYT’s headlines and abstracts. Red is original text, green is the edit, and white is what stayed. You can see the wild shift in emphasis that the edit created. The locus of action shifts from Israeli police attacking Palestinian families to “militants” firing rockets and Israel being forced to respond. Police no longer attacked “families,” but rather “protesters.” This is a particularly egregious and obvious example of propaganda.
Standard operating procedure that we’ve seen a ton by now: when Israelis are killed, we use the active voice and directly name who killed them. When it’s Palestinians, it’s all passive voice and vagueness like it was an act of god.
ETA: Here’s a new one from today!
Just bog-standard propaganda doing character assassination of a black person and buffing the image of a white conservative one. This image is called “angel vs. no-angel” in my file. This is important to both justify the police murder of Blake and also absolve Rittenhouse of any potential wrongdoing.
A classic case showing the difference in coverage (in the same publication!) of two extremely similar events a few years apart (though as the image notes, the USSR fired on a civilian plane illegally flying in their airspace, while the US fired on one legally flying in another country’s airspace). When the USSR does it, it’s just murder. When the US does it, we have to carefully examine how this accidental tragedy could have occurred.
A particularly egregious one from the AP. Both of these were in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina in 2005. In both cases, they were civilians taking food from flooded grocery stores in order to survive after the government completely botched all levels of both the run-up to the hurricane and the relief efforts. When it’s a Black person, taking food from an abandoned and flooded grocery store is “looting.” When it’s a white person, they just “found” the food.
There were lots of interesting contrasts between the press’ coverage of the Gaza genocide vs. the war in Ukraine. Most mainstream media outlets will subtly (or not-so-subtly) bias readers toward their preferred actor in a conflict by using active, inflammatory language (“murder,” “kill,” etc.) to describe the actions of Palestinians or Russians, but using passive “natural disaster” language to describe the actions of Israelis or Ukrainians (“deaths,” etc.). They will also usually directly name Russia or Palestine as the agent when they conduct strikes, but will avoid doing so with Israel or Ukraine. You can also see this same dynamic already playing out with Iran.
Rate limited for now; will add more later.
Yep, tons. I’ll post some of the good ones when I get to work tomorrow.