Entry #3: Slanted Politics

War is an ongoing process in our world, even today. Though we don't see it in our own country, and thus don't think about it often, it still treks on in other countries. One of the most recent ones involves Israel and Palestine. The conflict between these two countries has been ongoing for many years, but has ramped up recently after a Palestinian terrorist group known as Hamas took action against Israel, and Israel responded with an all out attack against the entire country.

The support for Israel by higher up officials all over the world has been quite high, and many of those officials wish for the general populous to share that same opinion. This includes many new sites, such as CNN, were criticized heavily for doing so. While I cannot find any currently available articles from CNN that prove this, there are several articles detailing the fact that CNN was responsible for this behavior. In an article on The Gaurdian about journalistic malpractice, its stated that CNN was "facing a backlash from its own staff over editorial policies they say have led to a regurgitation of Israeli propaganda and the censoring of Palestinian perspectives in the network’s coverage of the war in Gaza" (McGreal). 

Image source: Wikimedia commons

Many of these articles have been faced with a large amount of backlash from the general populous due to their lack of fairness in covering the Palestinian perspectives. Many people in Palestine are facing the destruction of their homes, loss of family, and indiscriminate attacks brought upon them by the IDF in response to Hamas effecting the daily lives of uninvolved citizens. This perspective has been notably missing from many articles surrounding the topic. 

With Pro-Israel articles receiving the backlash they do, slanted journalism towards the subject now has to be a bit more subtle. One example of this is in the article Recognizing Bias when Israel is in the Headlines written by ADL Education. The article mostly goes over how to "recognize bias" in such articles, while purposefully excluding serious information regarding the topic. The most telling part of this article is its section about how oversimplification is harmful. Despite having this section, several sections go on to oversimplify the situation by not including any information regarding the details of the war.  Under its section about misinformation, its stated that "First person eye witness accounts of violence are often viewed through a lens of trauma, and investigations may later prove that events took place differently" (ADL Education). Eyewitness reports are often the only examples of unbiased information in a journalistic landscape where information and perspectives are being censored by the higher-ups. Disregarding them as "biased" is a severe oversimplification in the sense that it calls for extreme caution when viewing potentially the only recorded form of Palestinian perspectives. 

The most important thing to have when viewing articles about war is knowledge. Viewing multiple perspectives, allowing yourself to understand when true bias is being shown by the author or publisher of said information, and using your collection of multiple sources to form your opinion rather than one source. Slanted journalism is a major malpractice that can cause many people to have the wrong idea about something.