Dehumanizing Terrorism Victims
For decades, Israel has been consistently losing the media war. The Foreign Ministry is rotten with cronyism and content in its inertia . Even if someone did want to make improvements, the Ministry lacks the infrastructure to make significant structural changes. So mainstream media outlets get away with subtly trying to deaden sympathy for Jewish victims:
Increment by increment, step by step, in almost every story that you read, the narrative is there for all to see: The Israeli victims don’t count. The palestinian victims always have names, ages, places of residence, and often a quote by a family member insisting their relative wasn’t a terrorist. The Israeli victims? No names.
And there's this:
CNN.com has an article today: Israel Suspends security efforts with Palestinians In this horrible example of so-called journalism, the three young people murdered by the Palestinians are mentioned only as "settlers", in the sub-headline and the body of the article. They can't bother mentioning that the three were young 'kids' minding their own business who were murdered in cold blood, much less their names or anything else about them. Just that they were settlers, with the connotation, I am sure, that they are the guilty parties here, not the animals who murdered them; calling them "settlers" instead of giving ANY details of who they were is just a bald attempt at dehumanizing these three young people.
The battle for the hearts and minds of the world is largely a battle for sympathy. Comparing the stories that mainstream outlets publish about Israeli victims with stories they publish about Palestinian terrorists consistently seem to demonstrate subtle and not so subtle differences in tone and content - differences which are almost never in Israel's favor. While we don't expect media writers to mask all their chic, progressive anti-Israel biases, it wouldn't hurt if many of them could try a little harder.
Increment by increment, step by step, in almost every story that you read, the narrative is there for all to see: The Israeli victims don’t count. The palestinian victims always have names, ages, places of residence, and often a quote by a family member insisting their relative wasn’t a terrorist. The Israeli victims? No names.
And there's this:
CNN.com has an article today: Israel Suspends security efforts with Palestinians In this horrible example of so-called journalism, the three young people murdered by the Palestinians are mentioned only as "settlers", in the sub-headline and the body of the article. They can't bother mentioning that the three were young 'kids' minding their own business who were murdered in cold blood, much less their names or anything else about them. Just that they were settlers, with the connotation, I am sure, that they are the guilty parties here, not the animals who murdered them; calling them "settlers" instead of giving ANY details of who they were is just a bald attempt at dehumanizing these three young people.
The battle for the hearts and minds of the world is largely a battle for sympathy. Comparing the stories that mainstream outlets publish about Israeli victims with stories they publish about Palestinian terrorists consistently seem to demonstrate subtle and not so subtle differences in tone and content - differences which are almost never in Israel's favor. While we don't expect media writers to mask all their chic, progressive anti-Israel biases, it wouldn't hurt if many of them could try a little harder.
