(The Conversation) – Accusations about Israeli censorship of the media went mainstream in the US recently when the New York Times published an opinion piece headlined: The Israeli Censorship Regime is Growing. That Needs to Stop..

In the piece Jodie Ginsberg, the chief executive of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), wrote: “The high rate of journalists’ deaths and arrests, including a slew in the West Bank; laws allowing its government to shut down foreign news outlets deemed a security risk, which the prime minister has explicitly threatened to use against Al Jazeera; and its refusal to permit foreign journalists independent access to Gaza all speak to a leadership that is deliberately restricting press freedom. That is the hallmark of a dictatorship, not a democracy.”

As well as restrictions on media access to Gaza, particular broadcasters face other restrictions. At the start of April Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had proclaimed he would “act immediately to stop” Qatar-based broadcaster Al Jazeera’s operations inside Israel.

Israel’s parliament passed a bill allowing it to close Al Jazeera’s office in Israel, block its website and ban local channels from using its coverage. However ongoing ceasefire negotiations with Hamas, brokered through Qatar, were perhaps a bulwark against haste. The company is still broadcasting from Israel, but its future status is uncertain.

At the annual International Journalism Festival in Perugia on April 17-21, one of Al Jazeera’s former Gaza-based correspondents Youmna ElSayed, spoke of the dangers of covering the war as a Palestinian journalist, including the belief that she, along with others, had been targeted by the Israeli military. “Journalists were under fire from day one,” she said. Despite having little equipment and the destruction of media offices, “We did what we could to show the world what was really going on,” she said.

The CPJ said on April 20 that at least 97 journalists and media workers were among the more than 34,000 people killed since the war began.

ElSayed regretted leaving Gaza but said it was her only choice to save the lives of her children. She said: “This entire world would have known nothing, seen nothing of what has been happening in Gaza … if it wasn’t for those Palestinian journalists.”

She claimed that international journalists had given up on forcing the Israeli army to let them into Gaza. “This is something that is unprecedented and has not happened anywhere else in the world. But yet, international journalists have given up on that right.”

Access to Gaza

However, journalists’ organisations and the correspondents themselves have been lobbying for access to Gaza for months now. But the Israeli government appears to be not giving way.

“Eyeless in Gaza,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream, Dreamworld v. 3, PS Express, 2024

The BBC’s international editor Jeremy Bowen, also speaking in Perugia, confirmed that it had been a really difficult story to cover, principally, “because the main meat of it – which is what’s happening in Gaza, we can’t get close to”.

From a production point of view, he said sometimes it feels like, “climbing through mud trying to generate the material that’s necessary to put together a report for television news”. He added it was very hard “to be a TV reporter on a story that you can’t see yourself”.

The Israeli government says the number of international journalists given press accreditation to work in Israel since October 2023 is 3,400. This has given journalists access to the West Bank and enabled coverage of settler violence against the local Palestinian population, but not to Gaza.

But as I wrote in November, the only permitted trips into Gaza have been via Israel Defense Forces-controlled embeds (where the journalist travels with the military and therefore their ability to see or cover stories is restricted).

CNN’s Clarissa Ward was the first foreign journalist who made it into Gaza without the army, and she did this by accompanying an aid convoy supported by the United Arab Emirates in December 2023. During this two-hour trip to Rafah, where 2.3 million residents are now based, the area was bombed and she filmed operations in a field hospital, and talked to doctors and injured children.

With 20 years of war reporting under her belt, she concluded: “Like Grozny, Aleppo and Mariupol, Gaza will go down as one of the great horrors of modern warfare.”

From outside the country, media outlets keep trying to check and verify information on the bombings from the IDF by using geo-location and AI software to scan satellite imagery for bomb craters and destruction. In December this enabled the New York Times to conclude that “during the first six weeks of the war in Gaza, Israel routinely used one of its biggest and most destructive bombs in areas it designated safe for civilians”.

Israeli media coverage

Within Israel, the media are mostly publishing the IDF version of events unchallenged. According to Israeli journalist and activist Anat Saragusti: “Hebrew-speaking Israelis watching television news are not exposed at all to what’s going on in Gaza. We don’t see atrocities, the rubble, the destruction and the humanitarian crisis. The world sees something completely different.”

Meanwhile, the left-wing newspaper Haaretz (published in Hebrew and in English) has been threatened with financial penalties for “sabotaging Israel in wartime” through its more nuanced journalism. According to reporter Ido David Cohen, writing in December, it is the television news channels that present the most extreme example of censorship, as they have “devoted themselves to national morale, exclusively relying on official military statements and completely ignoring Palestinian casualties”.

In the same article, cultural commentator and academic David Gurevitz claimed the numbers of Palestinians killed remains an abstract concept for many Israelis: “The Israeli audience isn’t capable of accommodating two kinds of pain together, seeing and identifying with the human victim of the other side as such, and the media follow suit.”

This argument was backed up this month by Israeli journalist Yossi Klein who wrote: “The most taboo number in Israel is 34,000. You can’t talk about it, you can’t mention it, and if someone speaking on a panel accidentally blurts it out, they should add, disdainfully: ‘according to Palestinian sources’.”

Colleen Murrell, Full Professor in Journalism, Dublin City University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Outside the court, at most twenty people could be counted as being there to support Höcke at some point during the morning. In their conversations, they complained that the procedure against Höcke was politically motivated. This had been Höcke’s message from the very beginning. Meanwhile, around 600 demonstrators had protested against the radical right politician earlier on the morning, before the start of the judicial process. There will be hearings until mid-May, but it is already clear that the most severe punishment for Höcke would be the payment of a fine. 

Höcke, who rivals Donald Trump in his mastery of self-victimization, failed to explain in his initial “X” post why he had to appear before a court in Halle. The AfD politician, who can be openly described as a fascist according to a German court, had to answer for his use, on at least two occasions, of the slogan “Alles für Deutschland” (Everything for Germany). The phrase was employed by the paramilitary National Socialist group SA (“Sturmabteilung”, or Storm Division). Using National Socialist slogans and symbols is a punishable crime in Germany. 

Höcke, a former history teacher, promised he did not know the origins of the slogan. His repeated use of expressions with strong National Socialist connotations, such as “entartet” (degenerate) or “Volkstod” (death of the nation) in public speeches and his 2018 book, belie this claim. Furthermore, the German sociologist Andreas Kemper has long established that there are striking parallels between Höcke’s public statements and different articles that appeared under the pseudonym Landolf Ladig in neo-Nazi publications more than a decade ago. One of these articles argued that Germany had been forced into a “preventive war” in 1939. 

The lack of open support for Höcke in front of the court in Halle was all the more embarrassing because the radical right politician had been given an incredibly powerful loudspeaker by Elon Musk, the billionaire and owner of Twitter/ “X”  since October 2022. Musk reacted to Höcke’s “X” post denouncing what in his eyes was a restriction on freedom of speech and asked him, “What did you say?”. After Höcke explained he had said “Everything for Germany”, Musk asked why the phrase was illegal. “Because every patriot in Germany is defamed as a Nazi, as Germany has legal texts in its criminal code not found in any other democracy,” replied Höcke. He forgot to add that no other democracy is the successor state of a regime that killed 6 million Jewish people and set the European continent on fire, with up to 20 million deaths in six years in Europe alone. 

Al Jazeera English Video: “German far-right politician on trial for alleged use of banned Nazi slogan”

Höcke has made abundantly clear in public statements how he understands Germany’s National Socialist past. He has referred to the monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin as a “monument of shame” and said that history is not black-and-white when asked to comment about Nazism. Elon Musk’s apparent support for Höcke should not come as a surprise given their shared antisemitic and Islamophobic views. The South African businessman has launched antisemitic tropes against Hungarian-American billionaire and philanthropist George Soros. According to Musk, Soros “wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity.” The AfD, like so many other far-right movements around the world, has also targeted Soros. Furthermore, Musk recently espoused the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jewish communities push “hatred against Whites.” Musk’s Islamophobia does certainly not lag behind. The “X” owner agreed with a far-right blogger who said France has been conquered by Islam. Again, Musk’s Islamophobia is a perfect fit for the AfD. The party was accurately described as having “a manifestly anti-Muslim program” by an independent commission established after a right-wing terrorist killed nine people, who had originally come as migrants, in Hanau in February 2020. 

Musk and the AfD have supported each other in the past. In September 2023, the billionaire criticized the German government’s funding of NGOs rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean and called people to vote for the AfD. Three months later, the co-leader of the AfD, Alice Weidel, said Musk’s takeover of Twitter was good for “freedom of opinion in Germany.” One of the deputy leaders of the AfD group in the German parliament, Beatrix von Storch, has supported Musk in his ongoing confrontation with the Brazilian Justice Alexandre de Moraes. The judge is demanding that “X” close accounts spreading fake news in Brazil. Since then, Musk has become a hero for the Brazilian far-right backing former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. 

The mutual sympathies between Musk and German-speaking far-right radicals also extend to the Austrian political scene. According to Harald Vilimsky, a member of the European Parliament for the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), Musk’s overtake of Twitter represented an end to censorship. The FPÖ, founded in 1955, has a far longer history than the AfD, established in 2013. Their political programs, however, defend similar far-right positions and both parties are members of the Identity and Democracy Party group in the European Parliament, one of the two far-right groups at the European level.

Meanwhile, in March 2024, Martin Sellner, the leader of the radical right group Identitarian Movement in Austria, was interrupted by the local police while delivering one of his racist speeches in the small Swiss municipality of Tegerfelden, close to Germany. When Sellner posted about the police action against him, Musk replied by asking whether this was legal. Sellner, taking a page from Höcke’s self-victimization, said that “challenging illegal immigration is becoming increasingly riskier than immigrating illegally.” The local police were simply enforcing a legal provision that allows them to force people out of the region if they “behave in a prohibited manner.” Sadly enough, Sellner is used to spreading his racist propaganda with impunity.

Martin Sellner and the Identitarian Movement’s hatred against migrants knows no limits. This transnational group of radicals hired a ship in 2017 to prevent NGOs in the Mediterranean from assisting boats in distress. Once they ran into technical problems, the Identitarians were helped by Sea Eye, a German NGO that normally rescues migrants instead of radical racists. The Identitarians have directly benefited from Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. After Musk bought the company, Sellner’s account on the social platform, and also that of his Identitarian Movement, were reinstated. Twitter had blocked the accounts in 2020 as they violated the rules to prevent the promotion of terrorism and violent extremism that the social platform had in place back then. In his first post after his Twitter account was reinstated, Sellner explicitly thanked Musk for “making the platform more open again.” Sellner was denied entry to the United States in 2019 because he had a $1,700 donation from the right-wing terrorist who killed 51 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, also in 2019. 

In January 2024, the independent German investigative platform Correctiv reported that Sellner had presented his proposals for the deportation of millions of migrants with foreign citizenship and Germans with a migration background in a secret meeting in November 2023. The encounter in Potsdam, organized by two German businessmen, counted with the participation of Roland Hartwig (who at the time was the personal aide of the AfD co-leader Alice Weidel) and Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD parliamentary leader in Saxony-Anhalt. Some members of the “Werteunion” (Values Union), an ultra-conservative group within the center-right CDU, were also in attendance. The findings by Correctiv finally led the CDU to cut its ties to the “Werteunion”. 

The lack of open displays of support for Höcke in Halle last week was comforting. Even more positive were the mass protests against the far-right politician and the AfD in front of the court. However, recent polls in both Germany and Austria are reason for great concern. The AfD would currently receive around 18% of the votes and finish second in an election to the German parliament. Meanwhile, its Austrian counterpart, the FPÖ, would be close to 30% of the national vote and emerge as the strongest party. Austria will vote this autumn, whereas elections in Germany should take place at the end of 2025. 

In both Germany and Austria, as well as in other countries such as the United States and Brazil, the far-right is benefiting from Musk’s support and open-door policy to radicals on “X.” Needless to say, though, Musk is just offering a new platform to very old ideas. The far-right’s threat would hardly be less serious if the billionaire had a sudden political conversion. What to do, then? One of the banners at the demonstration against Höcke in Halle pointed to the holistic approach that will be needed to counter the far-right. The banner read “AfD Stoppen! Juristisch, Politisch, Gesellschaftlich.” In English: “Stopping AfD! Judicially, Politically, Socially.” 

Covering Two Too-Long Wars

( Tomdispatch.com ) – War, what is it good for? Well, the media for starters.

Shortly after the Biden administration responded to the killing of three American soldiers in a drone attack on a base in Jordan by bombing 85 Iran-connected targets in Iraq and Syria, the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) asked in a headline: “Is the press dragging America to war again?”

Again? I thought. Shouldn’t that be “still”?  

That headline was on a recent Media Today newsletter by Jon Allsop who regularly covers what could be considered the favorite topic of journalists: themselves. He was mulling over media criticism of how the government had (or hadn’t) disclosed information about that just-launched bombing campaign, as well as its goals, while considering the accusation that some news platforms were rooting for a wider regional war. CJR is a fair-minded publication, so Allsop warned against generalizing (as I’m about to do), pointing out that “asking questions about planned strikes isn’t the same as advocating them.” Yes, I thought, but when you focus your questions on that subject, as so many media reports did after those American deaths and before the Biden administration launched its attacks, not surprisingly it can have that effect.

As the death toll in Gaza passed 30,000, on-the-ground reporting on the increasingly impossible living conditions there was making Israel’s belligerence seem ever less defensible. Little wonder coverage in the American media focused ever more on prospects for a cease-fire. And seemingly in tandem with that possibility, coverage of anxiety over the course of the war in Ukraine returned to the digital equivalent of the front page, making me wonder whether the media requires at least one war to cheerlead for or fret about at any given time.

The situations in Ukraine and Gaza are anything but the same militarily, strategically, politically, morally, or journalistically, and there are timely reasons for focusing once again on Ukraine. It was, after all, the second anniversary of Russia’s February 24, 2022, invasion. Cue up the requisite assessments of the situation, with predictions about Ukraine’s military prospects ranging from grim to dire, and photos showing the hard, inglorious miseries of war. The U.N. verified that at least 10,582 Ukrainian civilians had been killed by late February, while estimates — assumed to be wild undercounts — put soldiers’ deaths at more than 45,000 for Russia and 31,000 for Ukraine, with tens of thousands more wounded on both sides.

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Add to the list of news pegs Donald Trump’s extortionate claim that, were he to win the presidency again, he would encourage Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to any NATO country that doesn’t ramp up its military funding to his standards; the opportunely revealed threat that Russia might put a nuclear weapon into orbit; and the suspicious death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and you’ve certainly got the attention of American news consumers. Meanwhile, funding for U.S. military aid to Ukraine has become a political football in Congress, whose dysfunction, while hardly new, was still headline-making.

So, war in Ukraine certainly counted as newsworthy, but beyond that there does seem to be something about war that journalists can’t resist and blind spots they can’t overcome.

The Wages of Fear

It’s an open debate whether the press, the mainstream media, the legacy media, whatever you want to call it, leads or follows public opinion. Polls show Americans increasingly go to social media and podcasts for their news. Only 5% of adults now prefer to get it from print publications and no one seems to trust any news outlet other than the Weather Channel very much. Yet, like it or not (and usually we don’t), the news media continue to influence what we know and how we think about world events, as they set the priorities, language, framework for, and spectrum of public discussion.

Even at a time when a scoop, or exclusive, seldom lasts more than a couple of minutes and news sources from around the world offer alternative reporting and viewpoints, it’s still the newsrooms of a handful of newspapers, magazines, and broadcast and cable channels that generate much of the news we consume on our various devices and apps. That’s especially true for international issues and even truer for the wars the U.S. gets itself involved in, distant as they are.

It’s not that journalists are a particularly callous or bloodthirsty lot. It’s that war makes good copy. Accounts like former war correspondent Chris Hedges’s anguished War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning attest to its seductions. As he wrote, “War is an enticing elixir. It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble.” That “us” includes politicians whom war spurs to soaring pledges of fealty to principles and journalists who thrive on quoting them.

“In the battle between democracy and autocracies, democracies are rising to the moment, and the world is clearly choosing the side of peace and security,” President Biden said of the just-begun Ukraine war in his 2022 State of the Union address. Never mind that his version of peace and security would be propped up by more than $44 billion in military assistance by the time he delivered his 2023 State of the Union address. The president, of course, reaffirmed then that, when tested, America would stand up for democracy. “For such defense matters to us because it keeps peace.” (I don’t quite get how war keeps peace, but we’re undoubtedly not supposed to probe such rhetoric too deeply.)

Not only was democracy imperiled, we were told, but so, too, were neighboring NATO countries. In March 2023, exercising his skill at engaging allies, Ukrainian President Zelensky said, “If we are no more, then, God forbid, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia will be next.” Eleven months later at the Munich Security Conference, Vice President Kamala Harris amplified the threat: “If we stand by while an aggressor invades its neighbor with impunity, they will keep going — and in the case of Putin, that means all of Europe would be threatened.” And, predictably, such war rhetoric reminded us again and again and again that history, that relentless scold, is watching.

Politicians say such things and journalists, of course, report them. Moreover, journalism’s portfolio isn’t history, but what’s happening now, giving us an eternal snapshot of an evanescent present. Not surprisingly, then, a complicated situation can quickly be reduced to a few catchphrases and, repeated often enough, such phrases become our only reality. (Just ask Donald Trump how that works, if you don’t believe me.) In the process, it can become an underlying and unchallenged assumption that the pathway to future security and peace is ineluctably through war. And when, according to your government and the media, you have democracy and history on your side, it’s hard to imagine an alternative like negotiating with the enemy as anything less than craven betrayal.

I don’t question that Ukraine’s sovereignty is in danger; or that a country under attack has a right to defend itself; or that Russian President Vladimir Putin will continue to live up to his reputation for provocation and brutality, offing his opponents by defenestration, poison, or means yet to be revealed. The Western commentariat has been fooled before and even Putin may not know what he’s going to do next. Still, there are knowledgeable sources who think that, even with a victory in Ukraine, he would leave NATO alone, at least for the foreseeable future. However, you’d have to read deep into most recent U.S. news stories on the topic to find that side of the argument.

Who Benefits?

On the New York Times podcast “The Daily,” diplomatic correspondent Steven Erlanger observed of European countries now increasing their military spending, “I mean, there’s nothing like scaring people to get them to do things.” And who benefits from a fearful political class and citizenry anywhere? How about the news media?

Reporting doesn’t necessarily intend to make us uneasy, alarmed, or generally bummed out, but that’s often its result. Such results are baked into our idea of news, which, to be news, must be ever-evolving. If you turn away, however anxious you may feel, the implication is that you’ll miss it. What that it you’ll miss is may not always be clear, but social media and its attendant technologies have trained us to thirst for a bottomless tumbler of “content” replenishing itself in lickety-split time. 

Fear is profitable not only for the media, but also, of course, for defense contractors. It may be a flaw in our natures or an instinctual reflex, but Americans respond to national anxieties, real or imagined, by arming themselves to the teeth, both personally and nationally, and their allies, too. In 2022, a typical year, this country spent more on “defense” than the next 10 countries combined and, in the two years since Russia invaded Ukraine, it has sent $46.3 billion in military assistance to that country alone (and that’s not even counting other spending related to that war).

And still, if you’re to believe the media, it’s not been faintly enough. Current reporting from Ukraine seldom fails to stress its army’s desperate need for more weapons, equipment, and ammunition. One opinion piece, headlined “This is no time to give up on Ukraine,” even resurrected the tired trope that the Ukrainians are being forced to fight with one arm tied behind their back. And assuming Congress finally passes the necessary appropriation bill, who must step up and produce that weaponry, equipment, and ammunition? Why, the giant American weapons manufacturers of the military-industrial-congressional complex, of course, and if they make a bundle in the process, that’s the definition of good business, right?

It isn’t all a one-way deal, you’ll be relieved to know. The U.S. military, having completed a classified year-long study, is using the Ukraine war to rethink its playbook. And not surprisingly, that war coincides all too well with American economic interests. Speaking at the U.N. Security Council’s 11th meeting on arms transfers to Ukraine last December, Ann Wright, a retired Army colonel, retired State Department official, and peace activist, quoted Secretary of State Antony Blinken as saying that 90% of what this country invested in Ukraine’s defense was spent in the United States, making it a boon for the American economy. “So this has also been a win-win that we need to continue,” he added all too tellingly.

“The ‘win-win’ is not for civilians in conflict areas,” Wright observed. “The win-win is for the military-industrial complex and the politicians and retired government officials who receive senior positions in the weapons industry after their retirements.”

But Enough About Ukraine, What About the U.S.?

By the way, that U.N. meeting wasn’t covered in the media. Why would you report on the 11th meeting of anything? But the Ukraine war remained a lead domestic story before its anniversary in part because of Congress’s deadlock over that supplemental aid package and the way support for and opposition to it tended to break down along ever fiercer and more Trumpian party lines. As a result, the media gets to treat the situation in Ukraine as another American political horserace to hell and back.

After Senate Republicans insisted that funding for Ukraine be tied to Mexican border-security changes and then killed an aid package that did just that, a number of them finally agreed to join Democrats in giving bipartisan approval to a stand-alone military aid bill that included $60.1 billion for Ukraine. That package passed the Senate with the support of 22 Republicans, six military veterans among them. But House Speaker Mike Johnson declined to bring the package to the floor, where it would undoubtedly pass, and instead sent everyone home for two weeks.

“The Republican-led House will not be jammed or forced into passing a foreign aid bill that was opposed by most Republican senators and does nothing to secure our own border,” Johnson said on Valentine’s Day. “The weight of history is on [Mike Johnson’s] shoulders,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer responded not long after, while on a visit to Ukraine.

And all of a sudden, with Republicans stalling and Trump bad-mouthing NATO, the media are talking about American isolationism, a wildly Trumpian America First phenomenon that hasn’t been truly fashionable here since 1941, when the attack on Pearl Harbor shifted the support of the American public — and the American press — toward internationalism. Of course, today’s “isolationists” are anything but doves. They want lots of money for weapons, too, but they want to put a lot of those weapons to use right here at home by militarizing the Texas border, big-time.

This may all seem topsy-turvy — once upon a time, Democrats talked peace dividends used for civic programs — until you recall that defense spending has long had bipartisan support in Congress, thanks to giant weapons makers who spread their largesse to politicians of every stripe in a staggering fashion.

Amid all of this, the American public seems to be rethinking its support for Ukraine. A healthy majority supported funding for the war there from the start, but over the last year that support has been weakening (as, far more quickly, has support for the war in Gaza). An October 2023 poll found that, for the first time, a plurality of those asked, 41%, thought the U.S. was doing too much to help Ukraine, while about two-thirds thought neither side was winning there. A poll from early February found, surprisingly enough, that 69% of respondents wanted the U.S. to urge Ukraine to negotiate with Russia as quickly as possible.

Polls, like journalism, show a single moment and can tell us only so much, but public sentiment and news coverage do interact, and, over time, both can influence public policy. No one other than a coalition of stalwart antiwar groups is yet truly beating the drums of peace, but there are reasons why both Ukraine and Russia could benefit from talking to each other now, not the least of which should be the recognition that this devastating war, like most wars, has gone on too long. So, in a roundabout and unintended way, it may end up that a group of American politicians who don’t give a damn about the wellbeing of Ukraine, following a man who gives a damn only about himself, could be the impetus for negotiations toward peace to begin.

Now, wouldn’t that be something worth reporting?

Copyright 2024 Nan Levinson

Imagine you share an Instagram post about an upcoming protest, but none of your hundreds of followers like it. Are none of your friends interested in it? Or have you been shadow banned?

Social media can be useful for political activists hoping to share information, calls to action and messages of solidarity. But throughout Israel’s war on Gaza, social media users have suspected they are being censored through “shadow banning” for sharing content about Palestine.

Shadow banning describes loss of visibility, low engagement and poor account growth on platforms like Instagram, TikTok and X (formerly Twitter). Users who believe they are shadow banned suspect platforms may be demoting or not recommending their content and profiles to the main discovery feeds. People are not notified of shadow banning: all they see is the poor engagement they are getting.

Human Rights Watch, an international human rights advocacy non-governmental organisation, has recently documented what it calls “systemic censorship” of Palestine content on Facebook and Instagram. After several accusations of shadow banning, Meta (Facebook and Instagram’s parent company) argued the issue was due to a “bug” and “had nothing to do with the subject matter of the content”.

I have been observing shadow bans both as a researcher and social media user since 2019. In addition to my work as an academic, I am a pole dancer and pole dance instructor. Instagram directly apologised to me and other pole dancers in 2019, saying they blocked a number of the hashtags we use “in error”. Based on my own experience, I conducted and published one of the very first academic studies on this practice.

Why platforms shadow ban

Content moderation is usually automated – carried out by algorithms and artificial intelligence. These systems may also, inadvertently or by design, pick up “borderline” controversial content when moderating at scale.

Photo by Ian Hutchinson on Unsplash

Most platforms are based in the US and govern even global content according to US law and values. Shadow banning is a case in point, typically targeting sex work, nudity and sexual expression prohibited by platforms’ community guidelines.

Moderation of nudity and sexuality has become more stringent since 2018, after the introduction of two US laws, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (Fosta) and Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act (Sesta), that aimed to crack down on online sex trafficking.

The laws followed campaigns by anti-pornography coalitions and made online platforms legally liable for enabling sex trafficking (a crime) and sex work (a job). Fearing legal action, platforms began over-censoring any content featuring nudity and sexuality around the world, including of legal sex work, to avoid breaching Fosta-Sesta.

Although censorship of nudity and sex work is heralded as a means to protect children and victims of non-consensual image sharing, it can have serious consequences for the livelihoods and wellbeing of sex workers and adult content creators, as well as for freedom of expression.

Platforms’ responses to these laws should have been a warning about what was to come for political speech.

Social media users reported conversations and information about Black Lives Matter protests were shadowbanned in 2020. Now journalistic, activist and fact-checking content about Palestine also appears to be affected by this censorship technique.

Platforms are unlikely to admit to a shadow ban or bias in their content moderation. But their stringent moderation of terrorism and violent content may be leading to posts about Palestine that is neither incitement to violence nor terror-related getting caught in censorship’s net.

How I proved I was shadow banned

For most social media users, shadow banning is difficult to prove. But as a researcher and a former social media manager, I was able to show it was happening to me.

As my passion for pole dancing (and posts about it) grew, I kept a record of my reach and follower numbers over several years. While my skills were improving and my follower count was growing, I noticed my posts were receiving fewer views. This decline came shortly after Fosta-Sesta was approved.

It wasn’t just me. Other pole dancers noticed that content from our favourite dancers was no longer appearing in our Instagram discovery feeds. Shadowbanning appeared to also apply to swathes of pole-dancing-related hashtags.

I was also able to show that when content surrounding one hashtag is censored, algorithms restrict similar content and words. This is one reason why some creators use “algospeak” editing content to trick the algorithm into not picking up words it would normally censor, as seen in anti-vaccine content throughout the pandemic.

Check if you are being shadow banned

TikTok and Twitter do not notify users that their account is shadow banned, but, as of 2022, Instagram does. By checking your “account status” in the app’s settings, you can see if your content has been marked as “non-recommendable” due to potential violations of Instagram’s content rules. This is also noticeable if other users have to type your full profile name for you to appear in search. In short, you are harder to find. In August 2023, X owner Elon Musk said that the company was working on a way for users to see if they had been affected by shadow bans, but no such function has been introduced. (The Conversation has contacted X for comment.)

The ability to see and appeal a shadow ban are positive changes, but mainly a cosmetic tweak to a freedom of expression problem that mostly targets marginalised groups. While Instagram may now be disclosing their decisions, the effect is the same: users posting about nudity, LGBTQ+ expression, protests and Palestine are often the ones to claim they are shadow banned.

Social media platforms are not just for fun, they’re a source of work and political organising, and a way to spread important information to a large audience. When these companies censor content, it can affect the mental health and the livelihoods of people who use it.

These latest instances of shadow banning show that platforms can pick a side in active crises, and may affect public opinion by hiding or showing certain content. This power over what is visible and what is not should concern us all.

Carolina Are, Innovation Fellow, Northumbria University, Newcastle

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

We all know how that story turns out. Media often functions as a propagandistic tool that turns the truth on its head. The best example of this upside-down image can be observed in the dichotomous journalism of Western media on Palestine and Ukraine. 

By legal and international definitions, Gaza and Ukraine bear many unquestionable similarities to one another — from suffering daily air strikes to the bombardment of civilian targets and the obstruction of humanitarian aid by an authoritarian power that seeks control over both respective territories. In Ukraine’s case, the West and its media newsrooms instantly and unanimously came to the support of Ukrainians and the vilification of Russia. Yet, in Palestine’s case, Western leaders, supported by their legions of media outlets, have practically condemned everyone from Hamas to Iran but have continuously refused to hold Israel accountable for any of its actions. 

In actuality, many Western media outlets keep on insisting that Ukraine and Israel are the victims that share similar aggressions from unlawful and heinous invaders. This narrative is sponsored by many Western leaders such as the United States President Joe Biden and the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who have both attempted to paint Ukraine and Israel as two democracies in a struggle against evil. How is Western media creating this narrative and why is it invested in spreading it?

In Western countries, much of the public has been taken in by this media narrative, especially during the first stages of the war on Gaza. According to Amer Aroggi, a Palestinian residing in Ukraine, while Ukraine and Gaza were both under air strikes from Russia and Israel, many Ukrainians showed their support and empathy towards Israel instead of Gaza. Aroggi argues that it was due to “massive propaganda.” 

While it seems incredible that media propaganda could distort reality to such an extent, the conclusion also seems unavoidable. In an interview on Sky News, Palestinian journalist Yara Eid confronted the Sky News reporter for her double standard and selective reporting on topics such as the aggression committed daily against Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank. There is nothing new about Western media’s tunnel vision. Back in 2008, throughout Israel’s Cast Lead operation, a study found that although Palestinians died at a rate “106 times greater than Israelis”  “the New York Times engaged in a practice of media bias that resulted in coverage of only 3% of Palestinian deaths in the headlines and first paragraphs.”

Other features of Western media coverage are decontextualization and overgeneralization. In his second interview on the Piers Morgan Show, Egyptian comedian Bassem Youssef criticized Western media on two major grounds — first, for their failure to contextualize events in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Without this context, Palestinians come across as simple aggressors who abruptly choose to attack Israel. Second, he lambasted the press for their attempt to depict Palestinians as mere generic Arabs who should seek refuge in other Arabic countries like Egypt and Jordan, denying them their peoplehood.

Piers Morgan Uncensored Video: “Piers Morgan vs Bassem Youssef Round 2 | Two-Hour Special Interview”

Yet another characteristic of journalistic malpractice has to do with sanitizing language. In 2021, many journalists came together to publish an open letter condemning American news outlets for their refusal to use terms such as “apartheid”, “ethnic cleansing”, and “genocide” to describe Israeli actions in Palestine. According to the letter, experts agree that these terms are appropriate to describe what’s happening in Palestine, but editors avoid them.

And no wonder. Chris McGreal at The Guardian reported this week that the American cable news channel CNN has for years essentially allowed the Israeli government to censor and shape its coverage of the Mideast, to the extent that professional correspondents working at the channel privately accuse it of “journalistic malpractice.”

The Hill Video: “CNN Staffers REVOLT Over ‘PRO-ISRAEL’ Slant Amounting to ‘JOURNALISTIC MALPRACTICE’: Report”

It isn’t only CNN. At the end of 2023, almost 1500 journalists from different newsrooms signed another open letter condemning the killing of journalists in Gaza by the Israeli military and the censorship and biased coverage of the war on Gaza by Western media. In this letter, journalists blame Western media outlets for biased reporting and spreading misinformation that, in their words, have “undermined Palestinian, Arab and Muslim perspectives, dismissing them as unreliable and have invoked inflammatory language that reinforces Islamophobic and racist tropes.”

All this isn’t even to take into account the way media shapes perceptions by simply not reporting important stories. Israeli indiscriminate bombing can kill hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza in a 24-hour period but this news may simply be ignored on channels such as CNN. If only 50% of Americans feel that Israel has gone too far in killing some 27,000 Palestinians after an attack that left a little over 1100 Israelis dead, it is in part because the 50% who do not feel this way watch channels such as Fox and CNN and have not seen the daily, intensive carnage, which is clearly visible on social media outlets such as TikTok favored by younger viewers.

These journalistic practices have distorted the conversation surrounding Gaza. But to say so still begs the question, why? What is the reasoning behind backing Ukraine and demonizing Palestinians?

To answer this question, we must revisit Chomsky and Herman’s book, where they claim that the Western media is conditioned to “Concentrate on the victims of enemy powers and forget about the victims of friends.” Hence, media outlets are not just reporters of what’s happening but “are subjective co-creators of the shifting global order in a bigger game of geopolitics”.

So as Eva Połońska-Kimunguyi points out,

“When the aggressor is Russia, the pronounced enemy of the liberal West, the media message generates anger at the atrocities committed, sympathy and solidarity towards the victims. When the liberal West drops bombs on Middle Eastern and African towns and populations, information silence descends on the media”.

In this case, when Israel, the ally of the US and the West in the Middle East commits war crimes, editors at the big media corporations seem to feel that their job is to paper over these atrocities to protect an ally. Let’s not forget that old video showing President Joe Biden proclaiming in the Senate “[Israel] is the best 3 billion dollar investment [the United States] made…were there not an Israel, the United States would have to invent an Israel to protect our interests in the region (Middle East).”

“It’s Israel’s way of intimidating and controlling news,” said one critic.

By Julia Conley | –

( Commondreams.org ) – CNN has long been criticized by media analysts and journalists for its deference to the Israeli government and the Israel Defense Forces in its coverage of the occupied Palestinian territories, and the cable network admitted Thursday that it follows a protocol that could give Israeli censors influence over its stories.

A spokesperson for the network confirmed to The Intercept that its news coverage about Israel and Palestine is run through and reviewed by the CNN Jerusalem bureau—which is subject to the IDF’s censor.

The censor restricts foreign news outlets from reporting on certain subjects of its choosing and outright censors articles or news segments if they don’t meet its guidelines.

Other news organizations often avoid the censor by reporting certain stories about the region through their news desks outside of Israel, The Intercept reported.

“The policy of running stories about Israel or the Palestinians past the Jerusalem bureau has been in place for years,” the spokesperson told the outlet. “It is simply down to the fact that there are many unique and complex local nuances that warrant extra scrutiny to make sure our reporting is as precise and accurate as possible.”

The spokesperson added that CNN does not share news copy with the censor and called the network’s interactions with the IDF “minimal.”

But James Zogby, founder of the Arab American Institute, said the IDF’s approach to censoring media outlets is “Israel’s way of intimidating and controlling news.”

A CNN staffer who spoke to The Intercept on condition of anonymity confirmed that the network’s longtime relationship with the censor has ensured CNN‘s coverage of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and attacks in the West Bank since October 7 favors Israel’s narratives.

“CNN’s Jeremy Diamond points toward Israeli military hardware in a field near Israel’s border with Gaza.
(Photo: screenshot/CNN)

“Every single Israel-Palestine-related line for reporting must seek approval from the [Jerusalem] bureau—or, when the bureau is not
staffed, from a select few handpicked by the bureau and senior management—from which lines are most often edited with a very specific nuance,” the staffer said.

Jerusalem bureau chief Richard Greene announced it had expanded its review team to include editors outside of Israel, calling the new policy “Jerusalem SecondEyes.” The expanded review process was ostensibly put in place to bring “more expert eyes” to CNN‘s reporting particularly when the Jerusalem news desk is not staffed.

In practice, the staff member told The Intercept, “‘War-crime’ and ‘genocide’ are taboo words. Israeli bombings in Gaza will be reported as ‘blasts’ attributed to nobody, until the Israeli military weighs in to either accept or deny responsibility. Quotes and information provided by Israeli army and government officials tend to be approved quickly, while those from Palestinians tend to be heavily scrutinized and slowly processed.”

Meanwhile, reporters are under intensifying pressure to question anything they learn from Palestinian sources, including casualty statistics from the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

The Ministry of Health is run by Hamas, which controls Gaza’s government. The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees said in October, as U.S. President Joe Biden was publicly questioning the accuracy of the ministry’s reporting on deaths and injuries, that its casualty statistics have “proven consistently credible in the past.”

Despite this, CNN‘s senior director of news standards and practices, David Lindsey, told journalists in a November 2 memo that “Hamas representatives are engaging in inflammatory rhetoric and propaganda… We should be careful not to give it a platform.”

Another email sent in October suggested that the network aimed to present the Ministry of Health’s casualty figures as questionable, with the News Standards and Practices division telling staffers, “Hamas controls the government in Gaza and we should describe the Ministry of Health as ‘Hamas-controlled’ whenever we are referring to casualty statistics or other claims related to the present conflict.”

Newsroom employees were advised to “remind our audiences of the immediate cause of this current conflict, namely the Hamas attack and mass murder and kidnap of Israeli civilians” on October 7.

At least 22,600 people have been confirmed killed in Gaza and 57,910 have been wounded in Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 7. Thousands more are feared dead under the rubble left behind by airstrikes. In Israel, the death toll from Hamas’ attack stands at 1,139.

Jim Naureckas, editor of the watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, noted that the Israeli government is controlling journalists’ reporting on Gaza as it’s been “credibly accused of singling out journalists for violent attacks in order to suppress information.”

“To give that government a heightened role in deciding what is news and what isn’t news is really disturbing,” he told The Intercept.

Meanwhile, pointed out author and academic Sunny Singh, even outside CNN, “every bit of reporting on Gaza in Western media outlets has been given unmerited weight which not granted to Palestinian reporters.”

“Western media—not just CNN—has been pushing Israeli propaganda all through” Israel’s attacks, said Singh.

Remember, though, that social media are shadowbanning sites that deal with issues like Palestine and are not a reliable way to get Informed Comment content.

It is more important than ever not only to support the site if you like its news analysis but to sign up for delivery of the daily postings by email so you don’t miss even one. Also, do share the postings with friends by email, since that is the one part of the internet that the billionaires haven’t ruined yet.

I asked the Wombo Dream app to generate an image expressing thanks to you for reading this site, and here’s what the robot came up with:

May 2024 bring you and yours many good things, and all of us better news about the Middle East.

Overhaul Flawed Policies; Improve Transparency

Human Rights Watch – (New York) – Meta’s content moderation policies and systems have increasingly silenced voices in support of Palestine on Instagram and Facebook in the wake of the hostilities between Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The 51-page report, “Meta’s Broken Promises: Systemic Censorship of Palestine Content on Instagram and Facebook,” documents a pattern of undue removal and suppression of protected speech including peaceful expression in support of Palestine and public debate about Palestinian human rights. Human Rights Watch found that the problem stems from flawed Meta policies and their inconsistent and erroneous implementation, overreliance on automated tools to moderate content, and undue government influence over content removals.

“Meta’s censorship of content in support of Palestine adds insult to injury at a time of unspeakable atrocities and repression already stifling Palestinians’ expression,” said Deborah Brown, acting associate technology and human rights director at Human Rights Watch. “Social media is an essential platform for people to bear witness and speak out against abuses while Meta’s censorship is furthering the erasure of Palestinians’ suffering.”

Human Rights Watch reviewed 1,050 cases of online censorship from over 60 countries. Though they are not necessarily a representative analysis of censorship, the cases are consistent with years of reporting and advocacy by Palestinian, regional, and international human rights organizations detailing Meta’s censorship of content supporting Palestinians.

After the Hamas-led attack in Israel on October 7, 2023, which killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, according to Israeli officials, Israeli attacks in Gaza have killed around 20,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. Unlawful Israeli restrictions on humanitarian aid have contributed to an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe for Gaza’s 2.2 million population, nearly half of whom are children.

© 2023 Human Rights Watch

Human Rights Watch identified six key patterns of censorship, each recurring in at least 100 instances: content removals, suspension or deletion of accounts, inability to engage with content, inability to follow or tag accounts, restrictions on the use of features such as Instagram/Facebook Live, and “shadow banning,” a term denoting a significant decrease in the visibility of an individual’s posts, stories, or account without notification. In over 300 cases, users were unable to appeal content or account removal because the appeal mechanism malfunctioned, leaving them with no effective access to a remedy.

In hundreds of the cases documented, Meta invoked its “Dangerous Organizations and Individuals” (DOI) policy, which fully incorporates the United States designated lists of “terrorist organizations.” Meta has cited these lists and applied them sweepingly to restrict legitimate speech around hostilities between Israel and Palestinian armed groups.

Meta also misapplied its policies on violent and graphic content, violence and incitement, hate speech, and nudity and sexual activity. It has inconsistently applied its “newsworthy allowance” policy, removing dozens of pieces of content documenting Palestinian injury and death that has news value, Human Rights Watch said.

Meta is aware that its enforcement of these policies is flawed. In a 2021 report, Human Rights Watch documented Facebook’s censorship of the discussion of rights issues pertaining to Israel and Palestine and warned that Meta was “silencing many people arbitrarily and without explanation.”

An independent investigation conducted by Business for Social Responsibility and commissioned by Meta found that the company’s content moderation in 2021 “appear[s] to have had an adverse human rights impact on the rights of Palestinian users,” adversely affecting “the ability of Palestinians to share information and insights about their experiences as they occurred.”

In 2022, in response to the investigation’s recommendations as well as guidance by Meta’s Oversight Board, Meta made a commitment to make a series of changes to its policies and their enforcement in content moderation. Almost two years later, though, Meta has not carried out its commitments, and the company has failed to meet its human rights responsibilities, Human Rights Watch found. Meta’s broken promises have replicated and amplified past patterns of abuse.

Human Rights Watch shared its findings with Meta and solicited Meta’s perspective. In response, Meta cited its human rights responsibility and core human rights principles as guiding its “immediate crisis response measures” since October 7.

To meet its human rights due diligence responsibilities, Meta should align its content moderation policies and practices with international human rights standards, ensuring that decisions to take content down are transparent, consistent, and not overly broad or biased.

Meta should permit protected expression, including about human rights abuses and political movements, on its platforms, Human Rights Watch said. It should begin by overhauling its “dangerous organizations and individuals” policy to make it consistent with international human rights standards. Meta should audit its “newsworthy allowance” policy to ensure that it does not remove content that is in the public interest and should ensure its equitable and non-discriminatory application. It should also conduct due diligence on the human rights impact of temporary changes to its recommendation algorithms it introduced in response to the recent hostilities.

“Instead of tired apologies and empty promises, Meta should demonstrate that it is serious about addressing Palestine-related censorship once and for all by taking concrete steps toward transparency and remediation,” Brown said.

Human Rights Watch

What a world! For eight weeks now, events in Israel and Gaza have been the story of the hour, day, week. And what exactly are we to make of that? 

Let’s start with the obvious: American media coverage of the horrors there has been nonstop since the Hamas slaughter of October 7th. In fact, it’s knocked Russia’s war in Ukraine, the one we were told was so essential to the future of democracy, off front pages (and their media equivalents) everywhere. And the coverage of recent protests has strikingly outpaced those of any other antiwar protests in this century. What the American news media do is, of course, only part of any story, but their recent protest focus contrasts vividly with how they’ve typically covered antiwar and peace actions and so reveals something about how we Americans are thinking about war and peace right now.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, American journalists did report on the outrage over that country’s actions and the outpouring of support for Ukraine, but in the endless months of conflict since then, they’ve paid almost no attention to actions calling for a negotiated settlement there, even as that war goes bloodily on and on. Neither was there much coverage of antiwar protests against Washington’s endless conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan after February 15, 2003, when (depending on whom you read) six to 15 million people took to the streets of 600 to 800 cities around the world in the largest one-day antiwar protest in history. There, too, even though antiwar veterans and peace groups continued to stage actions, the interest of American news outlets soon evaporated.

Admittedly, Camp Casey, a sprawling encampment of relatives and supporters of soldiers and veterans who wanted to stop the war in Iraq, which sprang up near a vacationing President George W. Bush in August 2005, temporarily caught the attention of a bored press corps idling in the heat. By spring 2008, however, when I was trying to drum up interest in Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan, a sizeable gathering of Americans who had fought in those two wars and were publicly testifying about their misguided actions there, I was dismissively told by a New York Times reporter, “If you read the New York Times, you would know that it doesn’t cover rallies.” 

A couple of summers ago, the Boston Globe and other local news outlets showed no interest in talking to anyone boarding buses in that city for the Poor People’s Campaign’s Moral March on Washington, which included antimilitarism in its platform. In contrast, when about 100 locals boarded buses for a pro-Israel rally in Washington this November, the Globe devoted 24 paragraphs to the story. (Granted, the pro-Israel-march buses loaded at Gillette Stadium, home to the Patriots football team, which is always news in these parts.) It’s common to gripe about insufficient reporting on a cause you care about, but for me — and I’ve covered antiwar actions since 2001 — it’s striking that the media, in their gatekeeper and agenda-setting roles, have been so eager to cover protests about Israel’s war in Gaza in ways they seldom did when it came to U.S. antiwar actions earlier in the century.

Does it matter if you throw a protest march and reporters don’t come? Yes, because the very point is to be noticed. The news media are a sphere where competing ideologies and aims play out in the open. So, the way marches and other actions are or aren’t covered helps shape public opinion, affirms or challenges received wisdom, creates a historical record, and — fingers crossed — helps define future political practices.

In this case, with the United States in a powerful position to influence the course of the war on Gaza, continued reporting on antiwar protests could help pressure President Biden to stop embracing (could there have been a worse optic?) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and demand a permanent ceasefire instead.

Why This Story Now?

Amid competing narratives, unverifiable information, intense emotions, and everything we still don’t know, it’s important to keep all the often-contradictory realities we do know in mind — and be suitably alarmed.

We know that the United States lavishes at least $3.8 billion yearly in military aid to Israel, along with Get Out of Jail Free cards when it comes to human-rights abuses. Josh Paul, a State Department official who resigned in protest over the way our weaponry was killing Gazans, reminded us of just that recently. (The U.S. has also given money to the Palestinian Authority Security Forces, but vastly less of it.)

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We also know that 1,200 Israeli civilians were slaughtered in the October 7th raids by the armed wing of Hamas, the most Jews killed at one time in that country’s history. And we know that about 240 others of all ages were kidnapped in those raids and held hostage.  

We know that nearly 16,000 Palestinian civilians have now been killed in Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza and that about 1.7 million Gazans, three-quarters of the population there, have been forced to flee their homes in search of ever more elusive safety. We know that, of about 2,000 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons without charge or trial, 240 were released in exchange for 105 Israeli hostages and that, in the same period, about 244 Palestinians and four Israelis were killed in clashes on the West Bank.

We’ve gotten little information on combatant casualties in Gaza, save occasional announcements from the Israeli military and a rare statement from Hamas, but that’s not unusual. In recent American wars, only independent organizations like icasualties and the Costs of War Project have tried to offer comprehensive reckonings of the damage done.

“Far too many” Palestinians have been killed, said Secretary of State Antony Blinken in early November, but how many is the right number when civilian deaths of any sort should be unacceptable? In the face of so much slaughter, destruction, and upheaval, the urge to choose sides, take a stand, make a statement, or man the barricades was compelling. And so it was hardly surprising, after the barbarity of October 7th, that rallies in sympathy with the Israeli hostages, against anti-Semitism, and even calling for revenge sprang up around the world. As many as 290,000 protestors gathered in solidarity with Israel on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on November 14th. But as the Israeli assault on Gaza escalated and civilian deaths soared, sympathies began to shift and protests here and elsewhere calling for a ceasefire and an end to the occupation of Gaza grew rapidly.

Meanwhile, staff and political appointees at the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and at least 40 other government agencies signed letters or memos calling for a ceasefire, as did at least 100 congressional staff members, who staged a walkout. People put up posters of Israeli hostages. Others tore them down. Businesses and institutions issued position papers and those that didn’t were pressured to do so. Even restaurants got into the act.

On university campuses, those sympathizing with various positions sprang into action and began to duke it out. Students for Justice in Palestine was kicked off certain campuses; some student protesters were vilified and doxxed, even losing future job offers; and alumni weighed in, threatening to withhold donations. All of this was heavily covered by news outlets, which thrive on stories about extreme positions staked out early, along with in-your-face actions, heavy-handed responses, the selective suppression of speech, and the influence of money on all of that.

So, obviously one explanation for the coverage is that the protests, marches, demonstrations, rallies, and disputes have been too big, widespread, and persistent to ignore, but it’s not that simple. (It never is, is it?)

We in the United States are, in some sense, close enough to the war in Gaza to make protest a reasonable response — thanks to the military funding provided to Israel, the historical relationship between the two countries, blood ties and friendships between many Americans and Israelis and/or Palestinians, and vivid parallels between the mistreatment of people of color in the U.S. and of Palestinians in Israel, Gaza, and on the West Bank. Yet the U.S. is also nearly 7,000 miles away and none of our own military is (at least as yet) on the ground there. Even with alarming upsurges in anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, life in America is, for most of us, still comparatively safe. So is most political action.

Over the past decade or so, we’ve also become increasingly accustomed to such concerted political actions — Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, March for Our Lives, student walkouts for climate change, and picket lines for industrial strikes (often led by young activists). And despite the difficulties and dangers of reporting from Gaza — at least 63 journalists and media workers have been killed in the war so far — an established press corps in Israel and surrounding countries has made both the nightmare of the October 7th attacks and the increasingly horrific war conditions in Gaza all too vivid to Americans.

Inside/Outside the Frame

There’s a journalistic adage that goes: If your mother says she loves you, check it out. A corollary might be: If your mother says you’re perfect, consider the source. Good journalism, in other words, involves constant verification and an instinct for skepticism.

But journalism isn’t stenography and journalists tip their hands all the time. They make choices about what’s news and how to frame it; what to include, emphasize, or omit; who gets quoted and who’s considered a reliable source or expert. It’s clearly their job to inform us as fully, honestly, and fairly as possible so we can make our own moral decisions, including about whether and what to protest.

“The only way to tell this story is to tell it truthfully,” wrote David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, as he began his multifaceted report on a trip to Israel shortly after October 7th, “and to know that you will fail.” You can watch journalists trying to get it right — the protests, the war, the horrors, the consequences — to do justice to the story and the people at its heart. And yet they fail for many reasons. (How could they not?)

Sometimes, it’s the pressure of social media and the 24/7 news cycle, which promotes a rush to publish before necessary information is in. Sometimes, it’s because the topic is complex and requires a backstory and context most Americans (even journalists) don’t already know. Worse yet, it’s hard to fit such complexity into short paragraphs, concise lead sentences, and even more concise headlines, which are often all the news that its consumers have the time to take in.

Sometimes it’s that word-packages — displaced, surgical strikes, humanitarian crisis — become so routine we essentially stop noticing. The camera, too, can be an aid or a weapon, and even grammar comes into play, as in the difference between Israeli civilians were killed (by stated or implied actors), while Palestinians civilians died, as if by some unknown force or their folly in being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I’ve been hung up lately on the word horrors and its variations: horrible, horrific, horrifying. Examples of their use in such media coverage are legion. The writer in me wants to come up with a fresh word that would really allow us to absorb and truly consider the — yes! — horrors of what’s now happening in Gaza. Then I recall these two lines from Pablo Neruda’s searing poem about the Spanish civil war:

“and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children’s blood.”

This war, like all war, is indeed horrible.

Sometimes the coverage problem is what’s pejoratively called bothsideism or, more generously, balance. But assuming there are only two sides to every story misses the reality that most stories have many sides. The protesters in recent demonstrations, for instance, embraced a remarkable range of demands, intentions, and sympathies, but reporting was so much easier if positions were clear-cut and uniform. So, coverage has tended toward a Manichaean view of the hostilities and those demonstrating about them: pro or con, allies or enemies, Zionist or anti-Semite, good for America and Joe Biden or a blow to democracy everywhere and the Democratic Party in particular. Such a way of reporting, however, closes down so many other possibilities.

This is particularly apparent when political demonstrations against atrocities like those committed in Israel on October 7th and in Gaza (and the West Bank) thereafter are seen mainly as a spectacle in which reporters count the numbers, repeat the slogans, and focus on a random few who supposedly represent the whole. Individual stories may humanize an issue and draw eyes to an article. Such reporting, however, can also play into a particularly American version of dissent in which the individual resister becomes the story, not the resistance movement. Such a skew can make political protests seem more like a series of individual temper tantrums, at best tolerable outlets for sometimes justified anger, and not much more.

What doesn’t make it inside such a news-media framework is revealing. In this country, as an issue, peace itself has been ceded to the left, which effectively means banished. But imagine, for a moment, what a different world we might be in if our news platforms were to set up peace beats alongside their war beats. What if the opinions of peace workers were as routinely sought out as retired generals and politicians in the pockets of arms manufacturers? What if it was considered a crucial part of the news to explore the complexities of, possible conditions for, and likelihood of peace, rather than presenting it as just the absence of war or a zero-sum game? What if our reporting explored moral issues along with economic and political ones and maybe even figured out how to make peace seem as exciting and newsworthy as war?

I’m not so naïve as to think that a shift in the business of news coverage here in America would end years of animosity and violence in the Middle East. Still, over time it could reorient our thinking about militarism and, given this embattled and battered planet of ours, that doesn’t seem — to me, as least — like such a bad idea.

Copyright 2023 Nan Levinson