How US Media feeds the Violence in Palestine

By Mike Whitney
Al-Jazeerah, March 4, 2005
Every newspaper in the nation (US) ran the same basic headline: “Four Dead in Israeli Blast” or “Terror Kills Four in Tel Aviv”.
The same held true for the major (US) TV News networks: “Four Israelis were killed today and fifty more were injured by a suicide bomber at a Tel Aviv discotheque”…etc
In many newspapers the story ran on the front page for a second straight day, this time featuring the spurious, unsupported claims of Israeli officials manipulating the tragedy to advance their own foreign policy ambitions. (This time the imagined enemy was Syria; next time it’ll be Iran.) Even the death of their own countryman is nothing more than a springboard to advance their strategies for regional gain. In America, we can sympathize with this type of behavior; the Bush administration is invariably motivated by the same cynical objectives.
Never the less, the gratuitous murder of 4 Israelis appeared exactly where it should, slapped up on the front page of every newspaper in the country. If only that standard of justice was demonstrated evenhandedly it would have some real meaning and affect a positive change for an increasingly tragic situation. Instead, the coverage, entirely slanted in its selective treatment of victims, becomes another propellant that keeps the fires of Middle East rage burning. The (US) media has become a major player in the Israeli-Palestinian disaster; a cheerleader who distorts the news according to its own political predisposition and fuels the conflict by keeping compromise and common sense well beyond the reach of the warring parties.
The media is the greatest facilitator of violence in the world today. It picks the “good guys” and the “bad guys” and creates the logic of victim-hood and reprisal. Its solitary function is to promote the sordid agenda of its corporate paymasters who regard violence as the most cost effective way of achieving their self-aggrandizing aims.When a Palestinian schoolgirl was brutally shot in the head some weeks ago, the story was omitted from the front page of every newspaper in the country (US).
Are Jewish children more valuable?
The Israeli officer, who shot her, proceeded to unload his entire clip at close range into her head; a flagrant and unforgivable act of sadism. If this isn’t terrorism, then terrorism has no meaning.
The story was begrudgingly consigned to America’s back pages. That’s where the reluctant press sticks the stories about the people who don’t count; whose lives are only reported for purposes of credibility, but are quickly dispatched to the ash heap where their tale won’t threaten the accepted narrative.
Nine Palestinians have been killed by the IDF since Sharon and his Palestinian counterpart, Abbas, agreed to a complete cessation of violence.Nine!
Not one of them was covered on the front page of an American newspaper. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said, “An end to the violence cannot be sustained when Palestinians are being killed by the Israeli Army on a daily basis.”
But, Abbas is wrong, because violence against Palestinians doesn’t count.
What possible difference could it make if Israel kills 9 Palestinians or 900? To the world at large Palestinians are the invisible people. They don’t exist. Their only reality is as an obstacle to the territorial aspirations of the people who DO COUNT; the people who can expect to see their children on the front page of the newspaper if they are blown up in some senseless act of revenge.
This is the world that the media has created; a virtual world where justice exists only for the few who have their own bullhorn to shout their story from the front page of America’s newspapers. No one else really matters. Their miserable lives can be snuffed out by an IDF bullet in Gaza or by a 500 lb. bomb in Falluja; it’s all the same. “We don’t do body counts” in Iraq, and the media won’t do them in Palestine. When deaths go unrecorded in the media, then the victims cease to be, and the violence is perpetuated.
The real cycle of violence originates with the media and the forces behind it. It’s within their power to show the checkpoints, the Wall, the jails, the brutality, the malnutrition, the unemployment, the assassinations and the all-encompassing occupation. They choose not to do so. Instead, their cameras focus entirely on the random acts of violence that feed the rationale for retaliation, subjugation and injustice.
The media’s bloody fingerprints are all over tragedy in the Middle East. The skewed coverage ensures that the violence will continue well into the future.