COMMENTARY, ISRAEL, MEDIA, PALESTINE, PROPAGANDA, SAUDI ARABIA, WAR CRIMES, YEMEN
Shielding the Nation Starving Gaza
The editors of The New York Times know exactly what they’re doing when they cover Israel’s deliberate starvation of Palestinian civilians as though it’s a weather report, writes Caitlin Johnstone.
New York Times building. (Joe Lauria)
By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com.au
Listen to Tim Foley reading this article.
The mass media are printing some amazingly depraved headlines about a new U.N.-backed report on starvation in Gaza from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, who says half the enclave’s population is now at the highest-possible threat level for starvation.
The New York Times has a real corker out titled “Famine Is Projected for Northern Gaza, Experts Say,” subtitled “A global authority on food security said that in the coming months, as many as 1.1 million people in Gaza could face the severest levels of hunger.”
A casual news consumer could get multiple paragraphs into this article assuming that people in a place called Gaza are suffering from some kind of famine caused by natural events, like a drought or something.
Not until paragraph four would they encounter the word “Israeli,” and not until paragraph five would they encounter the line “Israeli’s bombardment and a near-total blockade.”
At a time when only 20 percent of news readers ever make it past the headline of a given story, this is an extremely destructive and propagandistic act of journalistic malpractice.
The editors of The New York Times know exactly what they’re doing by packaging a story about Israel’s deliberate starvation of Palestinian civilians like it’s a troubling prediction about the weather.
Contrast The New York Times’ headline with that of Al Jazeera’s report on the same story: “Gaza headed towards famine amid Israeli aid curbs: What to know.”
That’s the normal way to present a story about a deliberately inflicted famine upon an imperiled population. If a population was being deliberately starved by siege warfare from a nation like Russia, China or Iran, we may be absolutely certain that the name of that nation would appear in the headline.
But because the Western media exist to generate propaganda and not to report the news, we get headlines like “Gaza faces famine during Ramadan, the holy month of fasting” from the BBC, and “Famine in northern Gaza is imminent as more than 1 million people face ‘catastrophic’ levels of hunger, new report warns” from CNN and “Famine imminent in northern Gaza, says U.N.-backed report” from Reuters, and “‘Catastrophic levels of hunger’ in Gaza mean famine is imminent, says aid coalition” from The Guardian.
[See: Borrell Openly Blames Israel for Gaza Famine]
We saw this with Saudi Arabia’s U.S.-backed starvation of Yemen as well. When the mass media talked about Yemen at all (usually they just ignored it), editors consistently obfuscated the fact that this was a population being deliberately starved by a cruel blockade and the deliberate targeting of food infrastructure. The fact that it was being made possible by the United States was almost never mentioned.
This is a very good example of how Western propaganda works, by the way. The mainstream Western press don’t generally make up whole-cloth lies (though they will uncritically print claims made by western government agencies who have an extensive history of lying); what they do is rely on half-truths, distortions and lies by omission to give their audiences a wildly slanted picture of what’s going on in the world.
By always going out of their way to tell you an enemy of the U.S.-centralized empire is committing an atrocity the millisecond it looks like they might be, while being furtive and obfuscatory about the crimes of the U.S. and its allies, they give their audience a skewed understanding of who is and is not committing the real evils in our world.
This doesn’t typically happen as a result of any grand monolithic conspiracy; it’s mostly just the natural consequence of having all the major news platforms controlled by wealthy and powerful people who each have a vested interest in manufacturing consent for the status quo upon which their wealth and power are premised.
The oligarchs control the media, and they hire the executives who run the media, and the executives hire the editors who write the headlines and guide the reporters to report a certain way, and this gives rise to a system where everyone working for the outlet conducts themselves in a way that just so happens to suit the powerful people on top.
Then before you know it you’ve got editors at The New York Times — a paper that’s been published by the same family for over a century — packaging a story about starvation caused by an Israeli siege to look like it’s a story about an innocent crop failure.
Odds are nobody told them to do that; they just learned over the years that that’s how you rise to the top in an outlet like The New York Times.
Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes. For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.
This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com.au and re-published with permission.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
So true. How do they live with themselves?
“This doesn’t typically happen as a result of any grand monolithic conspiracy”
This case is not typical. Since 1948 the mainstream media has been hiding the facts about Israel’s practice of terrorism against the Palestinians, by mass murder, mass land theft, and various lesser tactics of harrassment and destruction. The mainstream media’s censorship in favor of Israel today is a clear continuation of this longstanding pattern.
For example, Glen Greenwald makes a solid case that the sudden move to ban TikTok has nothing to do with possible security threats from China. That is a cover story. The real goal is to shut down the extensive criticism of Israel occurring on TikTok.
Bipartisan House Vote Pushes Deep State TikTok Ban—Who Really Benefits? w/ Michael Tracey | SYSTEM UPDATE #242
hxxps://rumble.com/v4j9vyc-system-update-show-242.html
I have taught courses in the statistical analysis of data. When we have a specific situation in which a vast number of coincidences go in the same direction, and not a random distribution of directions, then these are probably not coincidences.
In my view we have long passed that point with the censorship favoring Israel. We have an overwhelming amount of evidence for a highly coordinated, hence centrally controlled, effort to censor facts on Israel’s behalf.
In the current case, wherein it appears that Israel is planning to kill a huge number of Palestinians all at once by mass starvation, censoring for Israel must also overcome the natural human revulsion at Israel’s grotesquely inhumane actions. This implies that the controlling entity behind this highly coordinated censorship also has a strong level of control over the various censoring entities.
The u.s. is the only country that has the power to bring these zionazis to heal; and it is way past due. If biden wants to get reelected, this is his only option, but he has to be careful to not be branded and antisemite. Good luck with that joe.
“This doesn’t typically happen as a result of any grand monolithic conspiracy; it’s mostly just the natural consequence of having all the major news platforms controlled by wealthy and powerful people who each have a vested interest in manufacturing consent for the status quo upon which their wealth and power are premised.”
As usual, spot on. And yet there is something different about reality when it involves Israel and the US. Slaughter US soldiers on the US Liberty without paying any price – done. Buy the votes of almost everyone in the US Congress by holding the purse strings to their continued political existence – done. Induce pariahcide on anyone disagreeing with your policies above all Constitutional rights of free speech – done. And yet, for all their atrocities, the US is completely complicit with the Israeli in all these things. It has to be more than just power games, money or nihilism. I think it is the patina of Christianity, of belief against all reasons for belief more than anything else. Zionism is a tribal mentality – it certainly has nothing to do with the Christian religion. Everyone should remember that fact when they consider the atrocities committed by Israel especially. But just as the late twentieth century saw the rise of fundamentalism in many major religions at the same time, it may be that we need our gold-plated Puritanism more than we need our constitutional government. The Christian fascists need Israel more than they need the US.
Forgive me, but even the word “amid” is a kind of journalistic malpractice in my view. In my opinion, it suggests something is happening *alongside* another horrific event, rather than a direct cause/effect relationship. “Israel murdering civilians using starvation as weapon” would be better. But maybe that’s just me.
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/03/20/shielding-the-nation-starving-gaza/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=90f6ca5a-4c18-4752-b5ad-ef86ba8f3cc8