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The tnyt title looks accurate to me: it says Israel is striking Lebanon AND that Israel is casting these strikes as pre-emptive.
The title is not saying that tnyt believes that the strikes are actually pre-emptive, instead it’s reporting that Israel claims that the strikes are pre-emptive. Which is accurate, since Israel does in fact claim that.
The Guardian is clearly quoting. Judging an article by its title is like judging a book by its cover: clearly misguided.
Yup, kind of like when we torture people and they call it ‘enhanced interrogation’.
Give something a sanitized term and people will run with it.
I never saw “pre-emptive” as an absolving term. You just decided to strike first: it’s relatively free from any connotations of propriety in my mind.
“Pre-emptive” and “self-defense” are objectively true here. Hezbollah initiated its current conflict with Israel and continues to launch attacks; Israel is fighting defensively and destruction of Hezbollah assets prevents future attacks on Israel.
(You might believe that Hezbollah is justified in attacking Israel, but it’s still the attacker and Israel is still the defender.)
Israel attacked Lebanon first not the other way around.
The strikes - whether you agree with them or not and regardless of your political posture - are genuinely seen as militarily preemptive. Israel apparently expected a large Hezbollah attack and tried to get in there first. They “preempted” any such attack. The Guardian employs actual speech marks - so it’s not an opinion but a quote. Newspapers can report what people say, even if the editorial policy is contrary to what gets reported. Linguistically the headli(n)es are correct. (I haven’t taken sides in the Israel-Gaza conflict as I know both sides are currently led by scum who have no qualms about slaughtering innocent people for their own personal gain and have no interest in any meaningful peace.)
The strikes are only pre-emptive if we put on white-nationalism glasses and take away Lebanon’s right to defend itself. Israel attacked Beirut first. TheGuardian quotes IDF propaganda but Hezbollah just “fires rockets”.
I haven’t taken sides in the Israel-Gaza conflict
…
Can I borrow your “white-nationalism glasses” and reread my OED? Perhaps the text will read differently… Whilst I applaud your passion and presumably heartfelt desire for this conflict to stop you can’t just redefine words on a whim. Language doesn’t generally work like that.
If you haven’t picked a side after 10 months of Genocide I can understand you’re not very passionate about the conflict. For more info see
To reiterate: both sides are led/ruled by murderous scum. I “picked my side” over twenty years ago when I traveled with an NGO in the area. The side I picked back then? The civilians. Both Israeli and Palestinian. Forget you and your holier than though attitude. If you think genocide has only been going on for ten months then you are so out of the loop regarding the entire region that your opinion has now become worthless.
Every party wants a peace solution except israel for the past 75 years. You’re talking like a school director which gets mad at the bullied kid when he finally fights back against the bully. While doing nothing while the kid was being bullied.
The West Bank has been trying to do peace with israel for many years. Even Hamas has stated they are open to a 2 state solution. Who isn’t open to peace? Only israel.
“While doing nothing while the kid was being bullied.”? Uh… not exactly. I’ve lost friends and colleagues to both sides and you have the fucking audacity to accuse me of taking the Zionist point of view? You’re just pissed-off that your bullshit making up meanings to pre-existing words was called out. That’s all I did. I made a simple linguistic observation and without you having any idea who I am, who I’ve worked with, where I’m from and where my family are from you’ve jumped to the most inaccurate assumption you could have. Well done, genius. Round of applause for you, you absolute doughnut.
It’s understandable, in an environment where they don’t control all the information that readers have access to, propagandists have to use framing techniques from PR, Marketing and Politics to push out a certain impression of trustworthiness and maximizing empathy towards one side, since they can’t just use outright lies without getting caught like propagandists in places like Russia can (mind you, the NYT has definitelly been caught repeating IDF lies).
At least this time around they didn’t use the trick of the Passive Voice (for example: “Massive strikes land in Lebanon”).
That propaganda trick is a pretty common one in the “reporting” of these news sources when they talk about Israeli bombings of civilians in Gaza (which are generally reported as “deaths in Gaza” as if they were just due to natural causes rather than being murders).
Mind you the “verbatum” and undisputed quoting of IDF claims on the title as exemplified here is also a pretty commonly used propaganda techniques by these newsmedia outlets.
Since a lot of users don’t seem to have caught on yet:
The Intercept collected more than 1,000 articles from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times about Israel’s war on Gaza and tallied up the usages of certain key terms and the context in which they were used. The tallies reveal a gross imbalance in the way Israelis and pro-Israel figures are covered versus Palestinians and pro-Palestinian voices — with usages that favor Israeli narratives over Palestinian ones.
The term “slaughter” was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, and “massacre” was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to 2. “Horrific” was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4.
Only two headlines out of over 1,100 news articles in the study mention the word “children” related to Gazan children. In a notable exception, the New York Times ran a late-November front-page story on the historic pace of killings of Palestinian women and children, though the headline featured neither group.
Overall, Israel’s killings in Gaza are not given proportionate coverage in either scope or emotional weight as the deaths of Israelis on October 7. These killings are mostly presented as arbitrarily high, abstract figures. Nor are the killings described using emotive language like “massacre,” “slaughter,” or “horrific.” Hamas’s killings of Israeli civilians are consistently portrayed as part of the group’s strategy, whereas Palestinian civilian killings are covered almost as if they were a series of one-off mistakes, made thousands of times, despite numerous points of evidence indicating Israel’s intent to harm civilians and civilian infrastructure.
Lots of us know this. Lots of us can also see that the 4 titles that you posted are not an example of this.
Some of those article titles that you are trying to paint as inaccurate, are in fact highly accurate. I can’t find anything wrong with the titles of the guardian and the new York Times that you posted. They are reporting a thing that happened and a thing that was said. They make it very clear that the “pre-emptive” thing is a claim of Israel and not a fact.
Unlike your claim in the OP, The Guardian also doesn’t have a credibility of high on that shitty mbfc site, but only “mixed”.
As I’ve explained above, reliably giving prominence to the quotes of one source promotes that one source and those quotes as it subconsciously it makes it seem more important to the reader.
This is a technique used for Propaganda when the propagandist doesn’t control the information space of the reader: since outright lies would easily be caught when readers have easy access to other newsmedia, the promotion of one side over the other by the propagandist is instead done by portraying it as more important by quoting it more often, giving more prominence to those quotes and never challenging them.
It’s interesting the number of concerned posters popping out if the woodwork here repeating the pretty old falacy commonly harped by such news media that “they are stating those are quotes hence they’re giving fair coverage” which is an obvious oversimplification of how impressions are made on others and hence of how opinions are made by even the most junior professional in PR, Marketing or Politics.
Lots of us know this. Lots of us can also see that the 4 titles that you posted are not an example of this.
Why is Hezbollah not defending themselves against a large scale israeli attack?
Why is Hezbollah not launching a “pre-emptive” attack?
Why is Hezbollah not "launching rockets ‘in self defense’?
Because loaded language is used in favor of israel, not against it.
Your alternative titles really highlight how little you value factuality.
Hezbollah did not claim to be launching a pre-emptive attack. And claiming that they launched a pre-emptive attack after they were already attacked is … Weird.
No one is reporting that Hezbollah was launching these rockets in self defence, because Hezbollah has already let it be known that their attack was a retaliation for the murder of one of their commanders in july.
No news source worth their salt is going to use those titles, because it’s straight up inventing alternate facts.
Your 4 examples of what you want to portray as “non credible reporting” are professionals. Unlike you, they’re not just going to invent news to push their narrative. Yes they have their biases, but unlike your alternate facts, their reporting is based on actual facts.
While I acknowledge that the MBFC does have some right wing bias, I think it serves its purpose. Aka to flag literal propaganda “news” sites.
The titles are literally accurate in the image. Israel is (unethically) launching preemptive strikes.
If you look at the .ml news communities that don’t use MBFC you will see that way too many news stories are from literally Russia Today, Southern China Morning Post, and other extremely biased to a very particular agenda publications.
I think people are trying to tie MBFC to being Zionist just so the bot will be dropped and it will be easier for them to normalize things like Russia Today outside of .ml spaces.
MBFC is ran by Zionists and rates Zionist propaganda outlets as accurate.
Example: https://unwatch.org/
IDK, NYT has it’s issues but I don’t see anything wrong with their headline on this. They’re pretty explicit (possibly even skeptical given the other coverage of this…) that that’s what israel is calling these strikes. What else should they have said?
Oh wait hang on, “Israel assures west that IDF are ‘working closely’ with amrrican appointed DEI council to ensure no demographic group is unfairly left out of genocidal campaign”. They probably could have gone with that. Fucking hell, the only thing that makes my blood boil more than this
limpwristededit: wrist slap-y journalistic coverage is the literal cauldron of blood the IDF keeps scooting out of frame every time biden facetimes them…The word pre-emptive implies self-defense.
Israel is “preemptively attacking” the entire region.
“Casting attacks as” implies they are reporting on what the IDF is claiming though, and doesn’t confer additional editorial meaning beyond that. Of those four it’s the only one with a semblance of journalistic integrity.
Far too many people only skim the headline and maybe the first paragraph of the article and then assume they don’t need to know anything more.
To include the perspective of Israel in a headline purporting to be neutral is instilling a bias in the mind of such readers no matter how many quotation marks and “Israel says” they use and they KNOW IT for a fact.
When it comes to Israel, the NYT has about as much neutrality and journalistic integrity as they do wrt cops: almost none.
You’re blaming them for malice in what should be fairly attributed to the stupidity and laziness of the general population, though. If you seriously think they should be writing their headlines with the idea of summarizing the Lebanon/Israel situation in one sentence, you’re either an absolutely incredible writier, not their target audience or a straw man made up to illustrate my disagreement with your point.
Including a reference to the statements made by israel in the headline of an article about what israel has said is not unreasonable, regardless of your personal opinion about how that might reflect their bias. It stands that the NYT, of all those headlines, is the only one that doesn’t openly bias themselves towards israel by directly quoting the IDF, and even reflects reasonable skepticism on the statements made by the IDF. If you don’t understand that, it’s not really their fault.
You’re blaming them for malice in what should be fairly attributed to the stupidity and laziness of the general population, though
No. The first rule of storytelling, whether it be fiction or journalism, is “know your audience”. The NYT knows their audience and chooses to deliberately mislead people.
If you seriously think they should be writing their headlines with the idea of summarizing the Lebanon/Israel situation in one sentence
That’s not what I’m saying, no. What I’m decrying is their deliberate decision to influence perceptions by including a biased perspective in the headline rather than just a concise summation of what objectively happened.
you’re either an absolutely incredible writier, not their target audience or a straw man made up to illustrate my disagreement with your point.
Pretty ironic that you would accuse me of constructing a strawman in the same sentence wherein you just constructed one yourself, however hypothetical you might have dressed it up.
Including a reference to the statements made by israel in the headline of an article about what israel has said is not unreasonable
Yeah, you’re fundamentally missing what the article is about. It’s about what the IDF has DONE. Or at least it would have been if the NYT weren’t failing their profession by acting as stenographers for a genocidal and notoriously dishonest regime.
regardless of your personal opinion about how that might reflect their bias
My opinion, while clear to anyone paying attention, has nothing to do with the fact that including the official IDF version of events in the headline shows clear bias. That’s just objectively true, and would also be if the version of the story was that of Hamas or even the ones whose side I’m ACTUALLY on: the innocent civilians caught between a terrorist group and a genocidal apartheid regime.
It stands that the NYT, of all those headlines, is the only one that doesn’t openly bias themselves towards israel by directly quoting the IDF
That’s the opposite of the truth. To directly quote them in the headline is as naked a bias that they could possibly show, short of the times where they go a step further and don’t even treat it as a quote but just unassailable truth. Like in that awful “Screams Without Words” propaganda piece they still haven’t retracted.
and even reflects reasonable skepticism
Putting quotation marks around a quote isn’t expressing skepticism. It’s the bare minimum of ass covering required to not risk getting sued for repeating the words of others as their own.
If you don’t understand that
Clearly I’m not the one failing to understand anything, and neither are the NYT. If they were completely new to how journalism works and didn’t have an editor, like you, I might have considered it an honest mistake.
They AREN’T new, though, and they DO have a (presumably highly skilled and experienced since it’s one of the most prestigious jobs in journalism anywhere) editor, though, so there’s no way that they aren’t aware of what such a headline is and does.
To quote the otherwise completely irrelevant Maude Lebowski: don’t be fatuous, Jeffrey.
Clearly I’m not the one failing to understand anything
Pretty ironic that you would accuse me of constructing a strawman in the same sentence wherein you just constructed one yourself, however hypothetical you might have dressed it up.
Yes, that was me discrediting my own argument with self deprecating humor, a common literary device used to highlight the doubt I have in my own outlandish claim and imply that a less hyperbolic take is probably correct. Look, I’m going to be honest here: a huge point by point breakdown is the #1 sign of someone not arguing in good faith - it’s basically just a Gish-gallop. I read through everything, but you did nothing to engage with the substance of my comment, you just went through and presented opinions derived from anecdotally lived experience as though they are founded and incontrovertible fact.
My opinion, while clear to anyone paying attention, has nothing to do with the fact that including the official IDF version of events in the headline shows clear bias.
It stands that the NYT, of all those headlines, is the only one that doesn’t openly bias themselves towards israel by directly quoting the IDF
The simple truth is that, due I suspect to unfamiliarity, you do not understand the usage of passive voice or quotation in journalism. You keep demonstrating that, in your vigor to present your own perspective as though it’s somehow anathema to my point and will ward off understanding or introspection with the billowing fumes of vacuous crap, you are more eager to fight the good fight than you are to put in the effort to affect a change in yourself or another. To clarify: Having a conversation with you is pointless, and I am quite sure you’re aware of that. You are not attempting to influence me, you’re just attempting to rebut me and any other poster that presents a point counter to the one you hold, and that is tedious.
And yes, I am aware that my words aren’t going to sway you here, doubtlessly doing nothing but to drive you further into the defensive enclave we all retreat to when the Specter of Error looms nigh over our opinions, so perhaps presenting your own words in a new light will get through to you:
I don’t think it works that way
It does.
… Now just how in hell is this a constructive way of responding to someone?
No. No it doesn’t. Preemption - in the military sense - could be used both offensively and defensively. If you are about to invade a country you could preemptively attack their parliament and barracks’ to make your invasion easier.
