The New York Times instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to “avoid” using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept.
The memo also instructs reporters not to use the word Palestine “except in very rare cases” and to steer clear of the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by internally displaced Palestinians, who fled from other parts of Palestine during previous Israeli–Arab wars. The areas are recognized by the United Nations as refugee camps and house hundreds of thousands of registered refugees.
While the document is presented as an outline for maintaining objective journalistic principles in reporting on the Gaza war, several Times staffers told The Intercept that some of its contents show evidence of the paper’s deference to Israeli narratives.
Almost immediately after the October 7 attacks and the launch of Israel’s scorched-earth war against Gaza, tensions began to boil within the newsroom over the Times coverage. Some staffers said they believed the paper was going out of its way to defer to Israel’s narrative on the events and was not applying even standards in its coverage. Arguments began fomenting on internal Slack and other chat groups.
Gonna go on a slippery slope and say that if they can’t be trusted to properly report on a genocide, their other reported material should also not be held to any decent standard because there is clearly a lack of guidance and internal process to prevent poor media writing.
Not to mention there are so many better sources and OSINT stuff these days. Reuters and AP by themselves already provide the sourcing for most of these media outlets, might as well bypass the paraphrasing and potential for bias.
“Real journalism is publishing something that someone else does not want published; the rest is just public relations.”
Ergo today’s Web and the society as a whole are a death ground for journalism. It’s heavily disadvantaged and has no way of escaping.
Either it fights back successfully or we and our children will get a better understanding of philosophers who lived in despotic empires, like many periods of Chinese, Persian etc history.