CNN and MSNBC’s first 100 days of reporting on Israel’s war on Gaza showed a consistent double standard in its coverage, with Palestinians receiving far less sympathetic and humanizing coverage than either Israelis during the same period or Ukrainians during the first 100 days after Russia’s invasion, a Nation analysis of major media coverage has found.
Finding 1:
Sympathetic victims like journalists, refugees, and children are mentioned more in Ukraine than in Gaza, despite a significantly wider gap in casualties and human suffering.
Finding 2:
On CNN and MSNBC, emotive words such as “brutal,” “massacre,” “slaughter, “barbaric,” and “savage” were overwhelmingly used to describe the killing of Israelis and Ukrainians, and almost never used to describe the killing of Palestinians.
Finding 3:
CNN and MSNBC covered the impact of Russia’s invasion on civilians twice as often as they did the impact of Israel’s bombing and siege of Gaza on civilians, despite the latter having a death toll five times that of the former.
Plus the massacre that started everything was so horrific, it made a clear good guy - bad guy effect in the immediate aftermath. Same as Russia looking like the bad guys invading Ukraine, especially with Zelensky being a charismatic good guy.
Those of us watching from a far, seeing it only on our screens, try to categorize what we see. And decide who we align with.
The problem is that Israel is complicated on a good day, most of us don’t have anywhere close to basic understanding of what’s going on politically there. Then add in the weird religious stuff. (For instance, my dad thinks Israel is ordained by God and therefore the government there is not corrupt, but also thinks Jewish people should convert to Christianity?)
So people feel like they can’t criticize Israel (because God) and also can’t comprehend that bad things are being done by the “good guys” to innocent people. And the innocent people are also of yet another religion that they’ve been taught to fear- so…
And politicians and journalists are also stuck because if they are too critical of Israel, it fuels antisemitism, at least here in the US.
I don’t have a solution, other than for someone smarter than me to figure out how to explain it in simple terms, that can be fed in short segments to the population along with the on the ground reporting. But that would still have to compete with the dissonance in messaging coming from churches.