Reporting on a genocide: Questions for the legacy media

 

By Angela Smith

Dec 20, 2024

We are now 14 months into Israel’s live-streamed genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Why have you failed so dismally to report Israel’s blatant, murderous campaign of annihilation with any depth or rigour?

Why haven’t you brought moral clarity, journalistic integrity, and humanity to your reporting? Is it fear of losing advertisers and readers; fear of being smeared as antisemitic by Israel’s apologists; or fear of losing access to government ministers and their opposition counterparts?

Why do you report Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza as if it is a conventional war between two sides, a “complex conflict”, not a barbaric attack on civilians in a territory that it illegally occupies?

Why have you normalised and minimised the atrocities, the catastrophic scale of death and destruction, the war crimes, and flagrant violations of international law?

Why have you adopted a “two-sides”, “balanced” approach, regardless of the truth and the evidence? Why do you provide moral cover for Israel’s war crimes by foregrounding those who regurgitate Israel’s propaganda, myths and lies?

Given the scale of the atrocities, the mass slaughter, wilful starvation, ethnic cleansing, and indiscriminate bombing of civilian infrastructure, why do your journalists and commissioned opinion writers constantly repeat the misinformation that Israel is acting in self-defence? This is legally and morally wrong. As the ICJ has found, Israel is illegally occupying Gaza, and as such has a duty to protect Palestinian civilians, not blow them to smithereens. Aside from the legal situation, calling Israel’s barbarism self-defence requires a suspension of reason.

Why haven’t you contextualised the events leading up to the 7 October attacks by Hamas militants? Why do you assign journalists to report on Gaza when they have little or no background in the Middle East region?

What is the reason for your selective and sanitised reporting? Why haven’t you reported Israel’s numerous atrocities, or reported them in any depth and within a framework of international law? These horrors include premature babies left to die and decompose in their NICU beds after Israeli forces evacuated the hospital; starving girls crushed to death while queuing for bread; and torture and abuse of detainees. Why haven’t you reported on the numerous video clips, many filmed by Israeli soldiers and posted on social media, that show soldiers committing or witnessing horrific acts including blowing up civilian infrastructure; a tank running over Palestinians; a soldier watching a dog eat a corpse; an army bulldozer destroying food packages from a humanitarian aid agency; and shooting Palestinians holding a white flag.

Given Israel’s ban on Western media entering Gaza, why haven’t you made full use of the on-the-ground expertise of Palestinian journalists (those whom Israel hasn’t killed), and other Palestinian and Arab commentators and experts?

Why haven’t you reported, or reported in any depth, the evidence and conclusions of genocide historians including Jewish-Israeli ones such as Omer Bartov, legal scholars, human rights organisations, and UN experts that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza? Why haven’t you reported on the vast database of war crimes collected by Israeli historian Lee Mordechai, who also concluded that Israel is committing genocide? Mordechai’s report “Witnessing the Gaza War” should be required reading for all journalists, particularly the section on the failures of Western media to bring rigour to its reporting.

Why do you purport to be objective in your reporting when every decision you make has a subjective element including what to report, the storylines, the phraseology and prominence of headlines and articles, from whom you seek comment, who you commission to write opinion pieces, the images you use, and even the readers’ letters you choose to publish?

Why do you pay more attention to the comments of conservative Jewish organisations that defend Israel’s actions, while giving less prominence to the views of Palestinian and liberal Jewish organisations?

Why do you discredit critics of Israel as antisemitic?

Why do your journalists malign peaceful protesters showing solidarity with human suffering? Why do you uncritically repeat the claims of some Jewish organisations that the protesters are antisemitic? Why don’t you interview the Jewish speakers at the rallies who condemn Israel’s atrocities and the Jewish protesters holding placards attesting to their solidarity with Palestinians?

Israel is blowing up the global norms built after 1945 and is doing so with impunity. Why have you failed to hold your governments to account for their platitudes, euphemisms, obfuscation, and minimisation of Israel’s barbarism, and their failure to take any meaningful action to prevent, punish, and stop Israel’s atrocities as they are legally obliged to do as member states of the UN?

The Western legacy media’s failure to inform its readers and viewers of some of the worst crimes of this century contrasts with the many excellent online sources that report with rigour and depth. In the Museum of the Gaza Genocide, there will be a special section reserved for the Western legacy media and its gross failures in reporting on the live-streamed genocide. A genocide forewarned from its inception by the genocidal statements of Israeli leaders, members of the Knesset, and top echelons of the military.

People will ask how Israel was able to carry out its murderous campaign of mass slaughter with impunity as the entire world watched on. They will wonder how different the response of governments and the media would have been had Israelis been the victims of the genocide.

You won’t be able to say you didn’t know.

https://johnmenadue.com/reporting-on-a-genocide-questions-for-the-legacy-media/