There was inexplicable controversy this week when the New York Times sent a memo to its staff, reminding them of standard mainstream media guidelines regarding Israel and Palestine.
The NYT memo instructed reporters to avoid using words like “genocide”, “ethnic cleansing” and the “occupied territories” to describe things like genocide, ethnic cleansing and the occupied territories. It also instructed reporters to avoid the word “Palestine” because, as everyone knows, Palestine is not a real country. It was actually built on top of Israel in 1948 when 750,000 Jews were expelled from their land to make way for colonisers. Only an idiot would think such an event wouldn’t have a huge impact on the political situation in the region that lasts to this day.
The NYT memo explained that reporters should avoid using “incendiary language” that conveys more emotion than information, unless discussing an attack by Hamas, in which case the language should be as emotive as possible.
When describing Hamas, reporters should always refer to their fighters as “terrorists” because it’s perfectly fair to call the targeting of civilians “terrorism”. When discussing the actions of the IDF, reporters should avoid “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” because those words have specific legal definitions and would be accurate descriptions of what is taking place. Reporters should also avoid using the term “refugee camps” as “refugee” refers only to people we consider to be human beings.
It’s important to understand these balanced journalistic guidelines were issued to remove the occupation from the conversation and avoid the risk of the public becoming too sympathetic towards Palestinian babies who need skin grafts.
“Issuing guidance like this to ensure accuracy, consistency and nuance in how we cover the news is standard practice,” a spokesperson for the New York Times explained. “Across all our reporting, including complex events like this, we take care to ensure our language choices are sensitive, current and clear to our audiences.
“In the case of Israel and Palestine, we took into account bipartisan scientific research on the humanity of Palestinians that was carried out by a team of pro-genocide liberals and Christian conservatives who think the Earth is six thousand years old. They concluded Palestinians are not, in fact, human, and are much more closely related to the lefties who think the minimum wage should be $25 an hour and oppose genocide, even when Israel does it. We have adjusted the language in our reporting accordingly. This is why you will never see us use words like ‘slaughter’ and ‘massacre’ to describe the slaughter and massacre of Palestinians.”
The spokesperson countered the suggestion The New York Times was unsympathetic towards children who are shot in their mothers’ arms, insisting: “We feel sympathy for those children like we feel sympathy for a family of hedgehogs that’s killed when a new road is built. It’s so very sad, but we can’t let our emotions get in the way of progress, can we?”
I'm sure you will agree strict editorial guidelines are necessary to deter rogue reporters from providing an accurate description of reality that could arise from them using the words they want to use.
The most worrying aspect of this story is that the New York Times employs reporters who want to accurately describe reality and have been whining about the guidelines in their WhatsApp group. I can’t for the life of me understand why the NYT doesn’t exclusively employ shameless propagandists like myself who are more than happy to lie on behalf of warmongers, but then again, I am one of a kind, aren’t I?