RECENTLY, the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) based in the United Kingdom released a report that carried empirical evidence based on the largest statistical analysis of the media coverage related to the atrocities committed in Israel on Oct 7, and Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people in the first month of the current wave of barbarism that has been unleashed by the Zionist state.
The CfMM report has debunked the double standards and hypocrisy of the Western media houses, which engendered Islamophobia and used utterly demonising language against the Palestinians.
Its analysis of the war coverage was done under six themes: contextualisation, framing, language, claims, the under- mining of Palestinian sources, and the misrepresentation of pro-Palestinian protests.
According to its research, the organi- sation unearthed that many news outlets opted to present news from an Israeli perspective, often with significant lapses, or rather deliberate misleading, in basic fact-checking and verification.
Significantly, the report has unveiled that Palestinian symbols, such as the Palestinian flag, were overwhelmingly ‘used to illustrate stories on anti-Semitism’. Similarly, it has also exposed numerous Islamophobic aspects of the coverage, such as the framing of pro-Palestinian support and protests as inherently dangerous and akin to ‘a terror threat’ often because of the Muslim presence among those taking part in the rallies.
Many editors, analysts and columnists, as the report further explored, repeatedly presented Islam as being ‘an anti-Semitic religion’, portraying it as the driving force behind the general Muslim sentiments related to Israel.
Rhetorical tools were intentionally used that led to the misrepresentation of the 75-year-old Israel-Palestine conflict as a ‘religious war’ between Jews and Muslims, rather than a simple matter of occupation and colonisation.
The Western media juggernaut has been influencing the worldview on Israel-Gaza conflict through its misinformation and disinformation factories, but Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestine has been so massive and outrageous that all hypocrisies and conspiracies are being exposed on a daily basis. And, yet, hypocrisy has prevailed over all the facts.
Zahid Ali Zohri
Gilgit-Baltistan
Published in Dawn, April 9th, 2024
