Weaponizing Journalism
How many times over the past decades have we been told that journalism is meant to “speak truth to power”? Oh, sweet, sweet lies and lullabies. Narrative opium for the masses. In fact, today, as always, mainstream journalism obviously protects power from truth. As Gaza is turned into rubble and its people starved in front of all our eyes on social media, the mainstream—especially in the West’s settler colonies like New Zealand, Australia, and the U.S.—acts as an accomplice to genocide.
A few days ago, I hosted a panel of New Zealand-based journalists—Eugene Doyle, Jeremy Rose, and Ramon Das—to discuss just that. The three explained in detail how state media like Radio New Zealand (RNZ) washes the sins of its complicity away by absolving itself from all guilt. How do they do it? Well, RNZ just wrote a report about its own coverage and declared that all is well! It’s really that simple for these media outlets that constantly shower each other (and in this case themselves) with praise. So, in addition to the lies like the “40 beheaded babies” and other BS that they report on when spoon-fed by western officialdom, they add to this strategic silence, soft language, and selective storytelling to whitewash the currently ongoing crime of crimes. Of course ,this is not just a New Zealand problem but the story of how the West launders genocide through the language of journalism.
Who Gets to be Human?
There’s a particularly disturbing term the RNZ report used to justify the coverage: “news proximity.” Israel, it claimed, is culturally closer to New Zealand than Palestine. Hence, it is justified that Israeli lives dominate headlines, and Palestinian lives vanish in footnotes—if they’re mentioned at all. Let’s call this what it is: racism in press-release form.
It means a pregnant Israeli woman killed during a shooting in the West Bank gets front-page coverage, but the hundreds of pregnant Palestinian women slaughtered by airstrikes don’t exist in the news cycle. It means one Israeli soldier’s grief gets airtime, while the cries of Gaza’s orphans never reach the mic. It’s offensive, yet methodical.
When you reduce genocide to “conflict,” you erase the perpetrator. If you flatten a 100-year project of ethnic cleansing into a messy feud between two equal sides, you play into exactly that narrative framework that then allows for reporting about the conflict as a “calamity” instead of a “crime”—which is the true nature of this genocide. And the racket keeps going. Media houses that claim objectivity and still enjoy way too much credibility in the West, like the BBC, Reuters, and The New York Times, function as points of reference for smaller national broadcasters like RNZ, which then uncritically reuse whatever narrative spin they find there. Rinse, repeat, and rebroadcast. Journalism that echoes so much, you forget who said it first. Or why.
Manufactured Consent in Real Time
The collective silence is what enables the genocide in the first place. When Israel bombs hospitals, kills journalists, and openly calls for ethnic cleansing, what would happen if that got reported truthfully? The myth of “the only democracy in the Middle East” would collapse immediately, just as all the other Western war lies collapsed eventually, from the Gulf of Tonkin to Saddam’s WMDs. Then we’re left staring at the fact that Western governments are bankrolling and defending a genocide. That’s a bit harder to explain on morning radio. Without media coverage, the whole façade would come down, and the populations in the West would demand a crackdown on the perpetrator, not the victim of this crime.
My panel actually pointed out another surreal example. When Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine, visited New Zealand, she got only a three-minute segment on national radio, but two of those minutes were handed to Israel’s official spokesperson. Albanese—live on studio—was given less than one minute to respond. That’s a press conference for the war machine, not a “discussion”. These people know exactly that if you give Mrs. Albanese enough space, she would win any real debate about this crime.
Meanwhile, more than 200 journalists have been killed in Gaza, but their deaths barely mentioned. On the contrary, their killers were supplied with weapons and airtime. Had Russia done this, it would be breaking news for weeks. But it was Israel, so the story died with them.
Fairness That Favours the Bombs
We all know that mainstream media loves to hide behind the semblance of “balance.” But when 200 Palestinians die for every Israeli, and the airtime ratio still favours the occupier. Even the few brave journalists who speak out are often sidelined or smeared. Just look at what happened to Glenn Greenwald the other day. But if you ask why we in the West still support the US, Germany, and the other bankrollers of this slaughter, you will be called “too emotional” or biased, or worse… anti-semitic for questioning the sainthood of the Israeli Defence Forces.
The press has been paid to look away and is really nothing but the propaganda wing of genocide. The only hope we have at this point is that Social Media and the people who are trying to build alternative outlets with it and around it figure out how to break through into the mainstream and achieve the media-cultural impact that the large publishing houses (used to) have. Real journalists, like the guests on my panel, must build the future of reporting. The current MSM system is not only hopeless but part of the machinery that keeps us trapped in endless warfare and genocide, generation after generation.
*
Click the share button below to email/forward this article. Follow us on Instagram and X and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost Global Research articles with proper attribution.
Pascal Lottaz is a Swiss academic in Japan, working at Kyoto University as an Associate Professor of the Graduate School of Law and the Hakubi Center on questions of neutrality in international relations.
Featured image is from the author
Global Research is a reader-funded media. We do not accept any funding from corporations or governments. Help us stay afloat. Click the image below to make a one-time or recurring donation.
Counter Information publish all articles following the Creative Commons rule creative commons. If you don't want your article to appear in this blog email me and I will remove it asap.
No comments:
Post a Comment