Tag Archives: media bias

propaganda and the media’s Israel-Palestine coverage

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This FAIR article lists some propaganda techniques it says the media uses to bias Israel-Palestine coverage. I am not taking a political stand here on the basis of my limited knowledge of these issues, but rather taking note of the propaganda techniques themselves. It is a useful skill in today’s world to be able to spot propaganda. The bold-faced headers are my paraphrasing of what the article presents, while the remaining text is my own analysis.

  1. Disproportionately presenting position statements made by one side or the other, or interviewing individuals representing one side or the other. Corporations and governments are well aware that “press releases” become pre-packaged news for the cash strapped and possibly lazy media to use with minimal effort. So the better organized side with deeper pockets is going to get more coverage. Sure there are journalistic ethics, but economics is the stronger force, so it becomes an arms race where everybody hires “communications” specialists and competes to get their version of a story out. The news coverage then goes to the highest bidder.
  2. Using words that do not assign blame for violence, such as “clash” rather than “assault”. We see examples in the local U.S. media too, where street violence is caused by “criminals” or “gangs” but vehicular homicide, negligent road design, and non-enforcement of traffic safety laws are portrayed as “accidents”.
  3. Excessive use of the passive voice. “People were killed” used more often when talking about violence affecting one side or the other.
  4. Covering deaths on one side much more than the other, or not covering deaths on one side at all. We certainly see this with U.S. coverage of our foreign wars and local violence. I think there is also just a sensationalist aspect to this where unfamiliar acts of violence (a horrific suburban school shooting) are covered disproportionately to all the other acts of violence around us (again, deaths in and around motor vehicles possibly being the most glaring.) I think the media could combat this somewhat by giving more facts and figures on death and violence to give context to the more sensational, anecdotal stories. And a lot of this could be automated pretty easily. For example, if the media is covering the latest incident involving an autonomous vehicle, AI could very easily put national crime, violence, and transportation safety data stats at their fingertips. This is routinely done in the sports world (this is the 18th time such and such a combination of random events has happened on a Thursday in June is 1976…).
  5. “Sidelining international law”. In the case of Israel, there is somewhat of an international consensus that some of the government’s actions are illegal. Palestine is also recognized as a state by quite a few UN member states. We don’t hear much about this in the U.S. media. Again, it is not hard to have facts and figures provided by international non-governmental agencies handy. Although, in the U.S. we have propaganda causing us to discount information coming from the UN.
  6. “Reversing victim and victimizer”. This has to do at least partially with how “protests”, “demonstrations”, “looting”, and “riots” are covered. In the U.S., one example of this was the Hurricane Katrina coverage, although I think the media coverage of the 2020 George Floyd protests was a bit more even-handed. There is a certain element of media and corporate self-licking ice cream cone on this though, where they all stand around in a circle patting each other’s backs while continuing to rig elections for the rich and powerful and not deliver concrete benefits and services to the working people of this country.

Project Censored Top 25 Stories of 2021

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Let’s see what Project Censored has come up with as their top 25 “censored” stories of 2021. “Censored” has a broad definition here which includes “under-reported”. News stories are under-reported when there is no market for them in our mostly profit-driven media. Anyway, here are a handful that caught my eye:

  • “Coastal darkening” – I hadn’t heard this term, but it encompasses organic matter in the water (from farms and urban runoff and wastewater), algal blooms, and sediment stirred up by human activity. These are all forms of water pollution scientists and engineers have been familiar with for a long time. Solutions are known, but the scale of the problem and cost of dealing with it is difficult. Our industrialized, urbanized, heavily populated civilization creates these forms of pollution. We should appreciate that a lot of money and hard work go on behind the scenes to make these problems much, much less bad than they would be if nothing was done – wastewater treatment, etc. But still, the scale of the problem is daunting to solve completely and we prefer to pay in environmental damage which affects everybody a little bit rather than divert the money and effort it would require to solve them completely. Under the basic economic principle of scarcity, something else would have to give if we did this, at least in the near- to medium-term. In the long term, there is a virtuous cycle where once we get started, technology tends to improve and we learn by doing. But cynical politicians elected on 2-4 year cycles are not going to pitch these ideas to the public, even if they understand them.
  • The pollutants mentioned above (organic matter, nutrients, etc.) are yucky but at least biodegradable. Another article is about microplastics and PFAS in the ocean. They are going to be there until the end of time now, but we could start working on trying not to add more of them.
  • “tens of thousands of satellites” – driven by civilian communications but inevitably useful for military applications. Companies like SpaceX are getting billions of dollars of military-industrial-complex money.
  • factory farming creates a risk for future pandemics – the article is about “U.S. factory farming”, but even if we invented it, it is being done all over the world, and the scale of what is done in Asia dwarfs anything the U.S. or Europe does at this point
  • things are not good for Amazon (the rain forest)
  • You could think of the social cost of past carbon emissions by industrial economies as a kind of debt owed to countries that are less industrialized or have industrialized more recently. That would mean that they have taken up much more than their fair share of the atmosphere’s and ocean’s ability to absorb emissions over time. The US, UK and Europe would probably prefer to focus on their share of current annual emissions rather than their share of cumulative emissions since they got the first lumps of coal in their Christmas stockings and burned them a couple centuries ago.
  • The sky is up, the Earth is down, and US drug prices are still insane. The article estimates the human toll of this in terms of premature deaths.

yes, media bias exists

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I didn’t really believe in media bias until the 2003 Iraq invasion, when it was just so blatantly obvious it couldn’t be ignored. But this article explains how Bernie Sanders can be right that subtler but still insidious forms of bias and censorship exist. I recently listened to a podcast (which I can’t find again…) on how relevant Noam Chomsky’s book Manufacturing Consent remains today, and I am as sold now as when I originally read it. Here’s a summary of his “five filters” along with my personal take.

The five points are a direct quote by the way. Shame on this awful version of WordPress that I can’t figure out how to make a block quote.

1. Media Ownership—The endgame of all mass media orgs is profit. “It is in their interest to push for whatever guarantees that profit.”

  • My take: this is what Bernie Sanders is talking about. Employees of any orgnanization are unlikely to challenge the interests of their owners and managers. They have to feed their families and pay their bills. They don’t have to lie, they can just avoid certain topics.

2. Advertising—Media costs more than consumers will pay: Advertisers fill the gap. What do advertisers pay for? Access to audiences. “It isn’t just that the media is selling you a product. They’re also selling advertisers a product: you.”

  • A business does not want to lose its advertisers. No mystery here. They don’t have to lie, they can just avoid certain topics.

3. Media Elite—“Journalism cannot be a check on power, because the very system encourages complicity. Governments, corporations, and big institutions know how to influence the media. They feed it scoops and interviews with supposed experts. They make themselves crucial to the process of journalism. If you want to challenge power, you’ll be pushed to the margins…. You won’t be getting in. You’ll have lost your access.”

  • I believe part of this is laziness and penny pinching. Publishing government and corporate press releases with minimal editing is just easy and cheap. But government and corporations can lean on the press when they want to, as we saw most clearly during the Iraq invasion.

4. Flack—“When the story is inconvenient for the powers that be, you’ll see the flack machine in action: discrediting sources, trashing stories, and diverting the conversation.”

  • Trump has made this more obvious and ugly, but it was there before.

5. The Common Enemy—“To manufacture consent, you need an enemy, a target: Communism, terrorists, immigrants… a boogeyman to fear helps corral public opinion.”

  • Don’t forget Muslims and Mexicans.