What you might have missed this week in global media, the media mindset, and rising antisemitism

What you may have missed this week if you rely on the international media:

1. Hamas in its own words promises to ‘repeat the October 7th again and again until Israel is destroyed.’
2. Hamas in its own words says that protecting civilians is the job of UN and Israel, not itself.
3. Hamas in its own words says that the tunnels are allowed only for their fighters and cannot be used for civilian protection.
4. Israel presents proof that Hamas fire rockets from behind cover of civilian sites:
5. Israel presents proof that Hamas HQ is below the largest hospital in Gaza
6. Israel presents proof that Hamas is taking fuel from hospitals

Systematically under-reporting facts that prove Israel’s side of the story is one key way in which media bias works.

What it means is you will not hear a simple clear formulation of Israel’s case, whereas you will hear simple clear formulations of the Hamas case over and over again, i.e. ”Israel is colonizing Palestine, committing genocide against the Palestinian people, and Hamas represents the Palestinian people resisting their own genocide.”

What we should be hearing is that Israel is fighting a war of self-defense against an enemy that:

• rejects any presence of Jewish people in their historic homeland
• deliberately targets Israeli civilians
• deliberately attacks behind the cover of Palestinian civilians
• deliberately exposes Palestinian civilians to danger, and
• deliberately diverts humanitarian supplies away from Palestinian civilians to use for its atrocities against Israeli civilians

Suppressing the facts that support this narrative are lies of omission and makes global media complicit in terror and rising antisemitism.

Why does media under-report these facts?

Sometimes there is genuine overt bias.

But even with the ‘great global media groups’ that strive for balance, you hear time and again – and this is key to understanding the media’s mindset – that a story is newsworthy to the extent it fits into the ‘wider narrative’.

For much of the world’s global media outlets, it is this ‘wider narrative’ that is the root of the bias.

Because the ‘wider narrative’ has already been pre-defined – to repeat: ‘Israel is colonizing Palestine, committing genocide against the Palestinian people, and Hamas represents Palestinians resisting their own genocide’.

So if there is an explosion at a hospital, and the terrorists report it one way, and Israel reports it another, you lead with whichever perspective has best fit with this wider narrative.

And even if it is later refuted, your retraction is not a full retraction but a ‘yes, but…’ retraction, because, after all, there is the ‘wider narrative’, and while this incident may turn out not to fit, there are lots of other incidents that do, and even in this incident, they were only firing rockets because they are resisting their own genocide, and because, being oppressed, naturally they only have low quality rockets so they can’t be responsible when one doesn’t work properly, and because, when Palestinian civilians are killed en masse by other Palestinians, or by Syrians, or by Lebanese, or by Jordanians, it’s really not so bad, not so worthy of our outrage, because in the ‘wider narrative’ the Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese and Jordanians are not trying to colonize Palestine or commit genocide like the Israelis are….

And if you are the Archbishop of Canterbury, the UK’s leading cleric, a person of great moral stature known to be a friend of the Jewish community, you trust the source – ‘global balanced media’ – so you (unwittingly) retweet the claim – and now the ‘wider narrative’, the ‘big lie’, is enlarged accordingly because if even the Archbishop of Canterbury, if even this great friend of the Jewish community says so…