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Toxic Ideologies Are Conquering American Newsrooms

(JNS) Jonathan S. Tobin - For the last 40 years, activists have worked hard to monitor press coverage of the Middle East and to call out anti-Israel bias masquerading as objective news. With respect to coverage of the conflict with the Palestinians, accounts were frequently based on a false narrative in which the Jews were oppressors of downtrodden Arabs. Instead of presenting audiences with a coherent view of a century-long war against Zionism and an effort to destroy the one Jewish state on the planet, many served up stories about underdogs and bad guys. Taken out of the context of history and the Palestinians' repeated rejections of peace and an independent state in 2000, 2001 and 2008 because it would have meant accepting Israel's permanence, what you get is a caricature of reality that ignores anything beyond images of Palestinian victims, robbing Palestinians of any agency about their fate. As last month's act of front-page incitement against Israel on the part of the New York Times - which highlighted pictures of children allegedly killed by Israel - amply illustrated, anti-Israel bias has come out of the closet. A new mindset has discarded objectivity in favor of a belief that the duty of journalists is to advocate for a particular point of view. An open letter published this month and signed by 500 journalists called for a change in the way Israel is covered. The signers believe all stories should be told from the Palestinian point of view and, in their version of reality, everything Israel does is a "war crime."
2021-06-24 00:00:00
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