The best part is when it comes from our own "newspaper of record" i.e. with the extraordinarily dubious "mass rape" article the NYT published. They finally dismissed the one Israel-connected reporter who had liked tweets calling for a brutal response against Gaza, but that of course has seen about one billionth the attention that her original claims continue to receive.
You also get stuff like the POTUS repeating lies like "40 beheaded babies" and "a mother and child had kerosene poured on them" with none of the usual media freakout you usually see over "misinformation."
I have struggled to even look at my News app anymore.
Next to articles about the protests or other things, there are the articles about the hostages or something else that just feels like a propaganda piece aimed at one thing.
The wiki article on Media Coverage of the Iraq War[0] is an enlightening read. Most of the same tactics for manufacturing consent that the mainstream media used during the Iraq War are still being used in today's conflicts.
> An investigation by the New York Times discovered that top Pentagon officials met with news analysts where they gave the analysts 'special information' and then tried to convince them to speak favorably about the Iraq war. The discovery was based on 8000 pages of secret information that had been revealed to The New York Times through a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act. The article states that top Pentagon officials would invite news analysts to secret meetings, and urge the analysts to speak positively of the war. Often, the US would give "classified information," trips, and contracts to the news analysts.
> You also get stuff like the POTUS repeating lies like "40 beheaded babies" and "a mother and child had kerosene poured on them" with none of the usual media freakout you usually see over "misinformation."
Yeah. The politicians who repeated this also never apologized for inflaming tensions without any evidence or investigation whatsoever. But anything Israel is accused of, requires thorough investigation by Israel (or sometimes independently - without ever mentioning Israel will not allow independent investigators into Gaza), before we can even think about trusting the people they're killing currently, regardless of affiliation.
And you see that 20 children 15 and younger were killed in total, and out of them 10 by rockets, which starts to paint very different picture. So militants killed 20-36 children depending on how you wish to define a child, out of 1200 people in total. So that's 1.7-3% of killed victims.
On the other hand, you get at least 16 000 killed children by Israel in just the last 8 months. 60 a day at least.
And you can see 10-5 a day individually just scrolling through video posts on telegram https://t.me/eyeonpal/
And we're supposed to think that Hamas are child killing monsters and Israel is not and somehow uniquely righteous. Yeah, right. Just the math alone on this doesn't compute for me, at all.
What if I told you modern forms of propaganda are more sophisticated than the mere blunt force repetition of a single obvious and consistent message? When is the NYT willing to stretch truth and credulity, and when is it not? What is the likely net effect of a world-weary, cynical (and false) both-sidesism as applied to the Israel/Palestine war?
Ah yes, a public company is somehow conducting a super sophisticated and secretive propaganda campaign.
I guess you're not a fan of Occam's razor? The simplest explanation here seems pretty straightforward, and no, it doesn't involve some NYT conspiratorial behavior.
> The analysis found that, as of November 24, the New York Times had described Israeli deaths as a “massacre” on 53 occasions and those of Palestinians just once. The ratio for the use of “slaughter” was 22 to 1, even as the documented number of Palestinians killed climbed to around 15,000.
You could copy this paragraph verbatim into Manufacturing Consent and it would fit in perfectly.
They were told to not used those words because they are disputed and not consider facts, pretty sure they can and still use those words in opinion pieces.
Spouting off someone's talking points without verification makes you propaganda. It's just a question on if it's due to an agenda or incompetence. It's one of those.
I agree, but to be a "propaganda outlet" that intent does not need to be by the republisher. If some news outlet is just reprinting garbage without thought they are culpable for spreading someone else's propaganda through negligence.
This line of propaganda is kind of infuriating. Separate from this incident, Israel bombed afaik every hospital in Gaza. They claimed Hamas was operating inside them or under them and produced absolutely zero credible evidence of it. They killed a lot of doctors and patients. But if they start out polluting minds with the claim that one time at the Al Ahli parking lot, there was an Islamic Jihad rocket once, they then by extension use that to imply that Hamas is somehow responsible for all the deaths in hospitals that happen by Israeli hands on every other day.
You are changing the subject, I'm just disputing that NYtimes is Israel propaganda, I'm not claiming anything about the righteousness of Israeli actions.
My personal opinion of NYT is that their record is mixed on the subject.
If you'll allow me to change the subject to one that is less presently divisive to provide an instructive example, NYT's conduct in the lead-up to the Iraq war is a great example of where they acted as a pro-war propaganda mouth piece, and maybe the institution doesn't deserve our total trust.
I don't want to go back and forth because it's off topic for HN. If you have seen images of destroyed hospitals and you're saying this, it seems insane to me. What you're saying is on the level of genocide denial. Ps. My family was targeted by the Holocaust too.
You and I have different definitions. I'm saying they're commiting mass murder in hospitals and you're saying they don't do it with air strikes. So I guess it's good then.
> I'm saying they're commiting mass murder in hospitals and you're saying they don't do it with air strikes. So I guess it's good then.
I didn't say it was good.
This thread was about whether NYT is biased or not, with the specific mention of them incorrectly stating a hospital was bombed. You then said that it's infuriating that people are correcting this and that this is propaganda, because every hospital has been bombed.
There is an actual, objective truth here - have hospitals, and especially have all hospitals in Gaza, been bombed, or not. You can decide it doesn't matter, because bombing a hospital is equivalent to raiding a hospital, that's a valid inference. But:
1. I think the truth matters. It always matters, and it especially matters when talking about something complex and divisive.
2. I think that the reason most people say things like "all Gazan Hospitals were bombed", even though it's not true, is because they know that that sounds worse than stating what actually happened.
I don't know what is more clear-cut propaganda than saying things that are not true to deliberately make the truth appear worse.
Look, I understand we don't agree. I understand you think I'm just nitpicking or something over things that don't matter, just to pretend "no genocide is taking place" or something.
I disagree. I think the truth matters. If you think I'm wrong on the facts, I want to be proven wrong - I've been wrong before, and after I'm shown the truth, I stopped saying the wrong thing. I think that's the basic level any person should operate at - not deliberately saying things that are untrue.
But if you think I'm right on the facts, but they don't matter - then I think we have a very different idea of what's important and what isn't.
The common reporting is that all hospitals in Gaza have been destroyed. I saw that written in mainstream media just today. I've seen it dozens of times. I've seen the word "bomb" used, but I am not an expert in explosives or artillery.
If you deny this, then no, you are not correct on the facts. If you want to split hairs with me about what specific mechanism Israel used to destroy those hospitals, I frankly do not think it matters. But I believe you are likely splitting hairs on that in bad faith as means of genocide denial.
> It seems to me the the NYTimes is trying to be somewhat objective
"Somewhat" is doing some heavy lifting here. The NY Times internal pro-Israeli editorial guidelines were leaked. NY Times is a pro-Israel biased source:
CNN even sends all stories to Israel to be approved/disapproved and/or edited to ensure pro-Israel bias, so I guess NY Times is at least better than CNN:
Israel also has put fear of god into US government officials through their lobby group, AIPAC (the only foreign lobby group of its kind that is not required by the U.S. to register as a foreign agent). While no fan of former president Reagan, he called the Israeli attacks on Lebanon a "holocaust" and stopped Israeli atrocities against Lebanon by threatening cutting off US aide. Now all our representatives line up behind Israel in their perpetration of genocide-- especial Biden.
> The real problem here isn't the POTUS repeating some rumour that was going around.
It wasn't “a rumor going around”, it was Israeli state propaganda which both started and continued for a long timw to be pushed by Israeli state organs (official sources like the Foreign Ministry, not just proxies.)
You also get stuff like the POTUS repeating lies like "40 beheaded babies" and "a mother and child had kerosene poured on them" with none of the usual media freakout you usually see over "misinformation."