A War’s Brutality Invades Our Screens: The Coverage From Israel So FarPublished 10/12/23
Joe Concha
The war between Hamas and Israel has produced arguably some of the most graphic, shocking images the public has seen from any conflict in the age of social media. There are reports of decapitated babies and of the elderly, women and children — all non-combatants — being executed in their homes and on the streets or taken hostage.
Devastation, death and horror have dominated TV screens in America and around the world, and likely will for the foreseeable future. Twenty-two Americans are among the more than 2,000 dead since this conflict began, according to the latest U.S. official statements, with at least 17 to 20 Americans missing and thought to have been taken hostage.
Media coverage in the U.S. has been appropriately wall-to-wall since Hamas began killing civilians last Saturday. As a whole, the coverage has been solid, with war correspondents showing bravery and focus in reporting facts on the ground at their own peril, deserving of praise and awe. But there have been some missteps and media malfeasance worth noting, including:
The decision to provide Mustafa Barghouti, the leader of the Palestinian National Initiative, a West Bank political party, with an unchallenged national and international platform.
This began in earnest Sunday morning on Fareed Zakaria's CNN program. At one point, Zakaria pointedly and appropriately asked Barghouti about attacks on civilians by Hamas but then allowed him two straight minutes to tell what can only be called lies.
"Hamas mainly attacked military establishments, military installations," Barghouti falsely claimed. "And most of the people they have arrested and taken as war prisoners are military people. I do not accept [they are] attacking any civilian."
Zakaria, despite his own network’s vivid reporting and video to the contrary, mistakenly allowed this propaganda to go unchallenged. Other outlets also booked Barghouti, including ABC News Australia, where he made another stunning claim, saying that "nobody will be executed" by Hamas — even though Hamas said it will execute hostages on video if Israel bombs Gazans’ homes.
There has been pointed criticism and argument over Hamas being described as a "militant group” rather than as a terrorist organization. This criticism came to a noteworthy head on MSNBC during an exchange between the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, and MSNBC's Morning Joe.
“I am angry with a world that allowed the dehumanization of Israelis and sanitized the terrorism of Hamas,” Greenblatt said. “I must say, I love this show, and I love this network, but I’ve got to ask: Who’s writing the scripts? Hamas — the people who did this — they are not fighters, they are not militants, and I’m looking right at the camera: They are terrorists.”
The BBC, too, has been called out by British officials and others for not labeling Hamas as a terrorist organization. The British news organization's guidelines state that the word "terrorist" can be a "barrier rather than an aid" to educating and informing viewers.
"We should not adopt other people's language as our own," the BBC said in response. "Our responsibility is to remain objective and report in ways that enable our audiences to make their own assessments about who is doing what to whom.”
Marie van der Zyl, who serves as president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said the BBC's stance is "insulting to the many British Jews whose friends and families are currently under attack by genocidally antisemitic terrorists and performs a profound disservice to millions of viewers."
Canada's oldest news organization, the CBC, is facing heat after an internal memo was leaked that instructed reporters not to use the word "terrorist" in their reporting.
"Do not refer to militants, soldiers or anyone else as ‘terrorists,’" wrote George Achi, the CBC's director of journalistic standards, in that internal memo. "The notion of terrorism remains heavily politicized and is part of the story."
When men, women and children are dragged from their homes and killed or kidnapped, that's terrorism carried out by terrorists. For these news outlets to take such a stance is maddening.
The U.S. government has listed Hamas as a terrorist organization since 1997, although the Director of National Intelligence’s counterterrorism guide to foreign terrorist organizations also refers to Hamas as “the largest and most capable militant group in the Palestinian territories and one of the territories two major political parties” before adding the State Department’s designation of Hamas as a “foreign terrorist organization.”
Hamas is using social media in the most insidious way to carry out a fear campaign.
Hamas has used the smartphones of some of their victims to record their murders or kidnappings, then posted the videos on the social media accounts of the phones’ owners.
“A terrorist broke into her home, murdered her, took her phone, photographed the horror and posted it on her Facebook wall. That’s how we found out,” Israeli citizen Mor Bayder wrote on her Facebook page regarding the murder of her grandmother in the village of Nir Oz, according to a chilling report in the New York Post and other media.
“My grandmother, my whole world, the light of my life," Bayder added. "The pillar of my life, in my family’s life."
“A big part of the strategy of inciting terror is not just the attack … but also depends on their ability to incite fear in especially online spaces,” Graham Brookie, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, explained to Politico.
“A group like Hamas has, unfortunately, a lot of experience in creating this content. And they know that it needs to be an important part of their strategy to produce, essentially, terror propaganda," he concluded.
Biden has not taken one question from reporters since the war began.
Given that there are 22 Americans reported dead and more than 17 missing, the president has an obligation to the American people to field questions from reporters. Biden has held two press events, one on Saturday and the other on Tuesday, but walked away from the podium both times as reporters shouted questions.
As we've seen over the past 30 months, taking questions from the press has been mostly a foreign concept. It has been nearly one year since Biden has done a solo press conference on U.S. soil, and he has yet to do any interviews with a newspaper reporter since taking office.
At a time of such world instability — including the wars in Ukraine and, now, in Israel and Gaza — accountability is demanded of our leaders more than ever. But the administration still continues to shield Joe Biden more than any president we've seen in the modern era.
War is hell. And given the brutality of the murders of civilians, this is a hell the likes of which most of us have never seen on our phones or television screens.
For the foreseeable future, that jarring reality will continue to dominate programming and the news cycle.
https://themessenger.com/opinion/israel-war-hamas-media-coverage-graphic-images-social-media-terror
