An internal style memo from New York Times editors tells reporters not to use words like “genocide” or “Palestine” when covering Israel’s war on Gaza.

The New York Times instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to “avoid” using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept.

The memo also instructs reporters not to use the word Palestine “except in very rare cases” and to steer clear of the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by internally displaced Palestinians, who fled from other parts of Palestine during previous Israeli–Arab wars. The areas are recognized by the United Nations as refugee camps and house hundreds of thousands of registered refugees.

While the document is presented as an outline for maintaining objective journalistic principles in reporting on the Gaza war, several Times staffers told The Intercept that some of its contents show evidence of the paper’s deference to Israeli narratives.

Almost immediately after the October 7 attacks and the launch of Israel’s scorched-earth war against Gaza, tensions began to boil within the newsroom over the Times coverage. Some staffers said they believed the paper was going out of its way to defer to Israel’s narrative on the events and was not applying even standards in its coverage. Arguments began fomenting on internal Slack and other chat groups.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 year ago

    If they won (and it’s a common theory, a bit forgotten in 2024, that they would if not for falsifications), how different would it be?

    Presumably, we wouldn’t have seen the wholesale nationalization and subsequent fire sale of Russian state assets. It can’t be overstated how badly Russia was basically looted, after they deregulated their export markets and had large parts of their economy liquidated by foreign investors.

    And oil prices hiking up in early 00s were not Putin’s doing, so Russia still would have that period of growth.

    The “Russia is an oversized gas station” line wasn’t exactly untrue back in the mid-00s.

    But the oil price jump was the direct result of our Iraq invasion. And the Iraq invasion was largely possible only after the US no longer had a USSR operating on a global scale as a counterweight. Also, Russian energy exports were a bandaid on a bleeding gut wound.

    Its very possible that a CPRF-run Russia wouldn’t be a net energy exporter but a manufacturing hub attempting to rival Germany and Japan. Far easier to believe a Russia that maintained its universities and laboratories and manufacturing hubs followed China’s lead into the 21st century as a consumer production giant, rather than simply sending out big hoses full of fossil fuels.

    Which means there are no rules except for “might makes right”. As we can see from Israel’s actions now.

    It was harder to see when might was something western states projected outward to make things our flavor of right. Much more apparent when we’re on the back foot and other countries are using their own boutique domestic medias to justify a war to their people.

    The issue with this is that it won’t bleed Russia dry, while its military will become more competent.

    That’s something Europeans simply don’t want to believe, because they still assume Russians are inferior and incompetent.