How Dishonest Media Could Be Made Honest

Yet another mendacious article appeared today in the Washington Post about civilian deaths in Gaza.

“More than 40,000 killed in Israel’s war in Gaza,” the title read. Not the actual “Israel-Hamas war”, but “Israel’s war”, as if it were being fought only by one side, Israel — and was started gratuitously by Israel.

The title did at least add, “Health Ministry says”. The rest of the article similar mixes deceptions with some grains of truth that have to be mentioned nowadays to look credible; and responds against the grains of truth, as if to want to prevent them from getting taken seriously.

A Disclaimer to Make Lies Truthful

To present its articles on Gaza honestly, the Post would have preface most of them with a disclaimer like this:

“It is our social norm in the media to put as much blame as we can on Israel for deaths in this war. That is the justification for this article.

“Of course it’s not just Israel that we exist to dump blame on. It’s the entire Global Right. Israel is a part of the West, and the West is the core of the Global Right, never mind that you pedantics can call us hypocrites and argue that the West is the part of the world that developed and sustain the norms that we on the Left claim to own for as our exclusive property. The Left is the Power and the Global Hierarchy. Deconstructing the Global Hierarchy is the definition of the Left. We define it as the necessary strategy for achieving all our values in the world, so that’s what it is. Dumping on Israel and the West is what has to be done. It justifies our existence. It’s how we get counted by each other as ‘the good people’ of the world.

“We have written this article in full conformity with this principle. The highest of principles.

“We make only the minimal concessions we’re forced to make to the facts that stand in the way of dumping on Israel. We admit, for example, that Hamas conflates military with civilian deaths. But we do this as a concession. We don’t explain that, back in 2014, Hamas ordered its health ministry to conflate military deaths under civilian deaths, for the purpose of enabling us in the media to exaggerate the civilian count and whip up global hatred of Israel. Or that we conformed rigorously to Hamas’ wish for years. It’s only in the last few months that the fact of the conflation got out too far anyway, despite our failure to talk about it all these years. So we’ve been forced to admit it. But we figured out how to manage this problem. We admit the point, then we immediately ‘counterpoint’ it and say that the recorded deaths are probably an undercount – something that’s true in most wars, but we blame it on Israel anyway — and are probably mostly civilians, probably mostly women and children. We never mention that lots of Gazan women and children are taught and trained to be terrorists. We never mention that many people have been killed by Hamas-PIJ themselves and their rockets. This way we can still safely obfuscate reality, even while admitting a small piece of it.

Totally ignoring the relevant criterion

“Through it all, we avoid any mention of the relevant criterion – which is the civilian : military death ratio, not the raw count.  We won’t tell you the relevant ratio. You’d have to look elsewhere to find that out.

“And to do that, you might have to go to unacceptable sources, ones that you and we have always deplored and told each other that’s they’re to be excluded from consideration. But there’s nowhere else than a serious attempt is made at estimating this ratio?

“What are their estimates of the civilian : combatant death ratio in Gaza? The range from 1:1 to 2:1 — in either case, much lower in this war than in nearly all other urban wars. We can’t tell you that, since we constantly insinuate here that the ratio must be higher.

“You might think we might make an attempt at a “better”, i.e. more anti-Israel, estimate. We might even try to honestly analyze and clarify the ratio, the way genuine new media would.

“But the “best”, most anti-Israel ratio we would be able come with, selective using the juiciest, most implausible options on the statistics, would be maybe 5:1 – still making Israel as humane as the other Western militaries, and a lot more humane than the non-Western ones.

“We couldn’t go on raging against Israel if we said that. So better not to tell at all.

“This death ratio is lower, to be sure, only among Gazans. Among Israelis, dozens of times more civilians have been killed than combatants. That’s the goal of Hamas, after all: to kill Jews. But it’s not our job in the media to get upset about that. Our job is to fan beliefs around the world about Israeli doing ‘indiscriminate’, ‘disproportionate’ killing of civilians. And keep saying this, no matter how much we have to lie.

“We’ve been talking like this since day one, for ten months on end. We’ve nurtured a powerful “anti-Zionist”, “anti-colonial”, anti-Western movement worldwide this way.

“And that’s our purpose in life. We won’t stop lying on behalf of the Truth.

“You need to understand that the Truth is not about petty facts. It’s about the narrative that belongs to the progressive people of the world, the ones we recognize mutually as being by definition the intelligent people and the ones are bringing progress to the world. We all have a duty uphold this collective truth narrative. It’s our job as journalists for the respectable media. It’s what makes us an Us. It’s what makes us good people.

“And it also makes us a Power in the world. It makes us able to raise up the masses for The Movement.

“Besides, it’s our obligatory social game to uphold the narrative and talk its talking points. It’s what we praise each other for doing. It’s what we damn and exclude others for not doing.

“Now you’re one of the good people, aren’t you? So do the right thing. Play it safe. Stick with us.”

P.S.

“Dear reader: If for some reason you don’t like all this, you had better think hard about your options before you do something foolish. Do you really want to go to sources you have all always deplored and joined us in silencing and excluding from civilized company — and just to get some information on the civilian and military deaths? Remember, it’s taboo to look at those sources. It’s crossing the line. You’ll be a Them, one of the bad guys. People will start deploring you as a Them, someone helping the Israelis kill more civilians and commit Genocide. There’ll be no turning back. It’ll taint you forever. You’ll be throwing away your lifetime investment in being an Us.”

More people are seeing through the media

The number of “Thems” in the world has grown greatly, thanks to this attitude of the media. More people than ever see their mendacity. And more than ever are repulsed by their methods of exclusion and “cancelation”.

But the number of anti-Semites has grown even more greatly. Most people still prefer to keep feeling safe. That means staying inside the socially hegemonic “Us” at all cost, no matter how hideous the lies that have to be repeated and the cruelties that have to be enforced for it.

And so polarization keeps growing. The stakes of elections keep getting higher.