As usual, I watched the NBC Evening News last night, even though some of its reporting has seemed slanted against Israel. Since I wrote about the Guardian article yesterday, though, I’ve become more sensitized to how the media uses language to express political opinions—even in supposedly objective news reports.
Here’s a video showing all the NBC Evening News from last night, but you don’t have to watch it all unless you want to see bodycam video of a clearly inebriated Justin Timberlake being arrested for DUI (17:05). The part that made me prick up my ears is at 4:07, when the news shows cute little Lebanese Muslim kids getting presents at the end of Ramadan. But they are not in their homes. The narration says this (bolding is mine):
While across the Muslim world, the end of Ramadan means presents for children. These kids are among the one million people displaced in Lebanon by Israel’s expanding offensive against Hezbollah.
The rest of the short segment seems designed to evoke the viewers’ sympathy for Lebanese people—especially the kids—displaced by the wicked Jewish state. And indeed, it’s sad that people have to flee their homes. HOWEVER, the report neglects to mention that there had been a cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah that largely held until March 2 of this year. Then, on March 2, three days after the U.S. and Israel struck Iran, Hezbollah in fired a barrage of missiles and drones from Lebanon at northern Israel, explicitly saying that this was in response to the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and what Hezbollah called were “repeated Israeli aggressions” (there were minor attacks by both sides during the ceasefire, with UNIFIL and the Lebanese government failing to rein in Hezbollah, as they are supposed to. Israel responded big time, but to construe that as an “expanding offensive” minimizes the defensive nature of Israel’s attacks, designed to stop Hezbollah’s rockets and drones for once and for all.
Again, it’s a small remark, but a telling one. “Expanding offensive” implies that Israel started the attacks in Lebanon going on now. It didn’t, just as Israel didn’t start the war with Hamas on October 7.
But at the end you might want to see the inevitable “there’s-good-news-tonight” segment (several nice pieces starting at 18:05, with an especially moving bit at 19:54 as a woman is assigned to take the final call from an Air Force officer as he leaves the military—an officer who happens to be her dad). As the world is falling apart, nearly all the major television news stations like to leave viewers with a good taste in their mouths.
Indeed. If you watch carefully, this kind of framing of the news is visible almost everywhere. It’s inevitable that news is selective. There is selection of what constitutes a news story and what doesn’t. (Purportedly hungry Palestinian children is news, but Israeli’s killed on October 7 is not.) There is selection of how to portray events when they are reported—as in this case. (Portrayed are children displaced by Israeli actions, but not portrayed are thousands of Israelis displaced from their homes in northern Israel thanks to Hezbollah.)
I don’t think that “pure” news exists, but it is exasperating to see the biased reporting and framing. Maybe news has always bordered on propaganda, but I’ve become very aware of it over the past decade or so.
And yes. Always end on a good note. CBS does this as well with a feature they call “The Good Stuff.” I’d rather watch commercials.
I’m not sure how you can claim that the October 7 massacre was not news. I watched it covered in depth for many, many days, with continued reporting on the hostages.
The Oct. 7 pogrom by Hamas was covered extensively. But Hezbollah’s rocket and artillery attacks, beginning the very next day, were reported very sparingly. Moreover, these attacks, which are by definition cross-border aggression, are typically framed as a kind of natural event, like stormy weather.
A timeline is at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Israel%E2%80%93Hezbollah_conflict_(8_October_%E2%80%93_23_November_2023)#8_October
Good points
The father-daughter segment was indeed heartwarming. I’ll note that the man was retiring from a law enforcement career, in which he served for over twenty years following his Air Force duty.
Thank you, Jerry, for noting some subtle techniques that effectively slant the news when it is not blatantly biased. As Norman notes, this is an ongoing problem across stories and outlets. I’m confident that a portion of this is simply personal and group biases from an ideological monoculture that unconsciously work their way into the framing. But I’m sure many of us have seen far too many examples in which crucial information is either omitted or buried deep in the story; relevant questions are not asked; assertions are portrayed as fact when granted the imprimatur of expert opinion; and on it goes. Of course, the cumulative effect always points in one political direction. I am pointing out nothing new, but I constantly return to this point: when I continually see such nudges, distortions, and fabrications on subjects with which I am knowledgeable, why would I ever trust the reporting on subjects about which I am not?
And of course more than 100,000 Israelis from the north were displaced from their homes during (at least) two years of persistent Hezballah rocket attacks which originated in southern Lebanon….but I do not recall that being widely broadcast in the US or worldwide. ToI covered.
This slant is of course characteristic of NPR as well. Reports of Israeli action against Hezbollah rarely mention the latter’s rocket and artillery attacks on northern Israel, or that these incessant aggressions forced ~96,000 Israelis to leave their own homes.
The MSM reporting rarely mentions that the “resistance” actions of entirely Lebanese, Yemeni, or Iranian outfits are resistance against the existence of Israel— in the same manner that Russia currently resists the existence of Ukraine, and that the Third Reich resisted the existence of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and then various other nations in Europe.
Has a Russia-led military alliance, claiming to be defensive in nature, been expanding westward into Europe during the three decades up to 2022?
I don’t know, but I’m sure you’ll tell us.
It sure did a lot of that beginning in oh, about 1944 and stayed there for four and half decades.
Here is a long Twitter thread comparing how the BBC reported two different incidents, one a (false) claim that an Israeli missile had hit a hospital causing mass casualties, and the other an actual instance of mass casualties at a hospital in Kabul caused by a strike by Pakistan.
I don’t have twitter, so I can’t follow the thread. But I can tell you that the original articles blaming Israel for those hospital casualties were featured in many news outlets, long before any investigations were begun, much less completed. And when the results came out (that the explosion was due to a Palestinian missile), some news outlets did post corrections, usually on page 16 or some such, while the original article blaming Israel was, of course, page one news. And other sources did not even bother posting a correction at all. In any event, the damage was done.
It is still possible to find statements of politicians and such people saying that Israel targets hospitals with missiles, and citing that incident. As we all know, narrative trumps truth these days.
From my article last week:
“Often the bias is unseen: Israeli responses to Palestinian violence is all that is reported so Israel is made to look like the aggressor without the predicate incidents publicized: in Hamas ceasefire breaks this very month, in rockets, stabbings, shootings and car rammings. We only get to see the Israeli response.”
THIS.. for a generation, is why people view Israel the way they do. That and the academic left believing the 1960s Soviet “Palestine/Nakba” bs and teaching it to polisci students (like myself 30 years ago) since the 60s. Lying about Israel is a long held tradition in western unis and (thus) media.
D.A.
NYC
https://democracychronicles.org/why-is-the-media-and-mob-so-anti-israel/
Anecdote (hoping I am not violating Da Roolz).
I used to subscribe to Harper’s magazine. Several years ago, there appeared an article by someone purporting to have seen an IDF unit stationed along the Gaza border shooting Gazans as target practice. This was in a time of relative quiet on that border, not an active shooting conflict.
I wrote to the editor asking to be put in touch with the author, because if he could supply the date, time, and exact place of the incident, the unit could be identified, and I could guarantee a serious IDF investigation of that incident. I was in a position to do so: such behavior is a serious violation of the IDF Code of Conduct.
The editor (Lewis Lapham, IIRC) did not respond. Obviously, if he had real concerns about such behavior, he would have wanted to see it stopped.
Glad you risked a Roolz violation to report that to us. Thanks.