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5 months agoWhat kind of news outfit writes a story about US-India relations without bothering to interview anyone in the Indian or American governments?
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Joined 9 months ago
Cake day: October 9th, 2023
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No different than buying an iPhone from a country that is persecuting Uyghirs.
Finland isn’t funding the IDF, either
Depends. “Retaliation” is not necessarily military. Russia could retaliate by seizing property from Latvians living in Russia, and NATO would not respond.
Why are you so insistent that the MSM has no bias against Palestinians?
I don’t insist that, at all. Maybe they do.
I’m just evaluating the Intercept’s methodology, which is garbage. So the article doesn’t persuade me in either direction, and like you I’ll have to do my own research.
similar rises
No, the article doesn’t even attempt to measure the rises, much less show that they were similar.
humanize the deaths on the Israeli side.
No, the Intercept is again looking for an axe to grind. For example:
The Gaza Health Ministry said Friday that 1,799 people have been killed in the territory, including more than 580 under the age of 18 and 351 women. Hamas’s assault last Saturday killed more than 1,300 people in Israel, including women, children and young music festivalgoers.
Here the Israeli children are uncounted. Is that an example of anti-Israeli bias? No, because despite counting only Palestinian children the media made the mistake of describing their methodology: children are those under 18. Less precise language would be better. Does “children” even appear elsewhere in that article?
“We have wounded, we have elderly, we have children who are in hospitals,” she said.
Clearly those are Israeli children. No? They are Palestinian? Yeah but this was 10/13 so what about all the mentions of Israeli children still in hospitals? None? The same article only mentions Palestinian “children” in hospitals? Ok, well the Intercept will have to report that as a counterpoint. Just kidding, this is the Intercept after all:
The aforementioned front-page New York Times report and a Washington Post column are rare exceptions to the dearth of coverage about Palestinian children.
The Intercept is worse than lazy, they think their readers are too dumb to remember the news.
Just the first six hits from just one Google search:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/03/gaza-premature-babies-dead-nasr/
The rest of the article is also flawed.
For instance “[the media] mentioned antisemitism more than Islamophobia”. This presupposes that antisemitism should not be mentioned more than Islamophobia. But why?
If I said “The media mentioned Islamophobia more than Francophobia” then that’s not an example of bias, because Islamophobia has been newsworthy for years and nobody pays attention to the French.
So is antisemitism more newsworthy than Islamophobia? Maybe so, given the Stefanik hearings. Maybe not. But the Intercept hasn’t even considered this.
Likewise, they count usage of words like “massacre” and “slaughter”. But what is that supposed to prove? The Intercept presupposes an unbiased source would not associate “massacre” with Hamas more than Israelis, but why?
Finally, the Intercept wonders why “children” is not used more often in reporting. Here’s one possibility: the media treated dead adults and dead children equally, lumping them together in “total dead”. They are not singling groups out in a way that the Intercept would prefer. That’s the opposite of bias.
Thought experiment: if the media constantly reported “X deaths, of whom Y were Christians” wouldn’t that be kind of creepy? Why does someone’s religion even matter when tallying the dead? Well, the same could be said of someone’s age.
The Intercept is measuring “bias” by comparing the ratio of Palestinians/Israeli deaths to the ratio of using the words “Palestinian” and “Israeli” in the media.
Which means according to the Intercept, if CNN writes “There have been 20000 Palestinian deaths and 1000 Israeli deaths” then this is another example of bias, because CNN only used “Palestinian” once in that sentence. Which is nonsense.
I did read the article. I think the methods are questionable. Making a graph doesn’t mean the methods are sound.
For example:
For every two Palestinian deaths, Palestinians are mentioned once. For every Israeli death, Israelis are mentioned eight times — or a rate 16 times more per death that of Palestinians.
In other words “There have been 20000 Palestinian deaths and 1000 Israeli deaths” is considered biased, and that sentence should have used the word “Palestinian” twenty times because there were twenty times as many deaths.
The open-source analysis focuses on the first six weeks of the conflict, from the October 7 Hamas-led attacks that killed 1,139 Israelis and foreign workers to November 24, the beginning of the weeklong “humanitarian truce” agreed to by both parties to facilitate hostage exchanges. During this period, 14,800 Palestinians, including more than 6,000 children, were killed by Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. Today, the Palestinian death toll is over 22,000.
This paragraph mentions Palestinian deaths three times but Israeli deaths once. Therefore the Intercept is biased, according to the Intercept.
Yes, it’s a good reminder that the faraway places like Iran share a lot in common with Texas.
Imagine Medicare?
At least an Indian official doesn’t pretend to be a neutral observer. A Russian official, on the other hand…