#Palestine #Gaza #Israel #HumanRights #Genocide #Media #News #Propaganda #Journalism #MediaManipulation: "In garish contrast to the clear identification of Russian barbarity in Ukraine, the passive voice is the preferred mode in Western reports of Israeli atrocities, making it harder to see who is doing what to whom, and in what circumstances. (“The lonely death of Gaza man with Down’s syndrome” was the initial headline of a BBC report on Israeli soldiers unleashing an attack dog on a disabled Palestinian and then leaving him to die.) The New York Times’ report on a grim landmark, the killing by Israel of thirty thousand Palestinians, overwhelmingly women and children, was headlined “Lives Ended in Gaza.” A more recent report on the Israeli regime of starvation by the Associated Press is titled “A 10-month-old Palestinian baby suddenly stopped crawling. Polio had struck Gaza.”
Unverified reports, eventually exposed as false, of beheaded Israeli babies were given prominence by journalists as well as the US President. They have together drawn a veil of silence over the multiple documented reports of rape and torture in Israeli prisons. An article in the Atlantic, presently edited by a former IDF operative and peddler of a notoriously false report about Iraq, could argue, even after the murder of thousands of children in Gaza, that “it is possible to kill children legally.”
Certainly, the Western media’s account of Israel’s “self-defense” yet again exposes the radical discrepancy between what is said by mainstream journalists in the West and what the rest of us see happening in the world. I cannot avoid a sense of deja vu, and an old question: is it still possible to enlarge cognitive capacity within the dwindling kingdom of Western journalism—the enchanted realm in which I have profitably spent most of my own life?"
https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-last-days-of-mankind/
#MediaIndustry
"Today, each one of the assumptions that underpinned western policymaking and journalism for nearly three decades lie shattered. We live in a world where the future of democracy is not assured even in Europe and America, let alone India. Western-style capitalism has generated far too much inequality and now engenders a vicious backlash. Demagogues and despotic leaders are in the ascendant. Most disturbingly, white nationalism is yet again, after a long hiatus, the explicit ideology of mainstream political parties on both sides of the Atlantic.
At a time of widespread economic distress, ethnonationalists in the United States and United Kingdom as well as Germany, France, Hungary, Poland and Italy are united by their antipathy to immigrants, and targeting of institutions deemed insufficiently patriotic or indulgent of sexual, ethnic and racial minorities. This bleak scenario can be further elaborated. The main economic ideologies of endless growth and global prosperity have come up against environmental constraints and technological innovation, as well as built-in limits, and look unsustainable.
Editors and writers in hallowed periodicals were never mentally prepared for the collapse of their ideology of capitalist globalization and the rapid diminishment of Western power, legitimacy, and prestige. They were too attached, by national and class origin, and training, to the intellectual assumptions developed during the unchallenged hegemony of the West. Personally too implicated in the death-agonies of the old world, they cannot now feel the birth-pangs of the new. Indeed, they struggle to comprehend their own societies as these drastically change around them; they obsess over mere symptoms of a splintered social consensus such as “culture wars” and end up wringing meaning out of abstractions like “populism,” “democratic backsliding,” and “crisis of liberalism.”"