Giving the Truth Scope: Mass Media in the Information Age
Independent media and citizen journalism are often lambasted as inaccurate or biased in comparison with the so-called accuracy of more mainstream media sources…
The Israel-Hamas conflict has been rife with examples of mainstream media bias and manipulation, so Murder Pop has assembled some of them in order to demonstrate the many ways in which mainstream media uses dishonesty as a tool of its trade, sometimes through sly framing and sometimes by cutting off the people they’re interviewing because they don’t like what their witness is saying, like this first example from the Arabic television version of Al-Jazeera.
Al-Jazeera TV asks this wounded Palestinian to give his eyewitness testimony; the man, still in the hospital, says, “What’s happening is criminal! Why is the resistance [Hamas] hiding among us? Why don’t they go to hell and hide there? They are not resistance!”
The so-called journalist from Al-Jazeera cuts him off even as the witness hobbles behind him, attempting to continue sharing his criticisms of his local government, even though doing so could get him killed.
At BBC News, shortly after the IDF said that it entered a hospital with medical teams and Arabic translators in order to help people in need while they rid the hospital of Hamas, BBC reports that the IDF has entered the hospital and is targeting medical teams and Arabic speakers.
You may recall these images below from a prior Murder Pop article in which we forensically examine the Al Ahli hospital bombing; The New York Times ran this front page story and was forced to update its headline several times as the newspaper came under heavy criticism and quickly realized that it didn’t know what it thought it knew.
The number of dead initially announced was also questioned, and according to the AFP, Agence France-Presse, appears to have been between 10 and 50, not 500. US intelligence estimates were higher, suggesting at least 100 people were killed in the Gaza hospital explosion. The New York Times, updating its headline after mistakenly taking the word of Hamas on the source of the blast, instead takes the word of the Hamas controlled Gaza Ministry of Health on death counts.
This framing is more than dishonest; it is the New York Times accepting the word of a terrorist organization, not bothering to check the veracity of that word, realizing that they’ve done so, and then doing it a second and third time as they correct the first and second.
The New York Times eventually published an editor’s note admitting to errors in their coverage of the Gaza Hospital Explosion, explaining,
"The early versions of the coverage — and the prominence it received in a headline, news alert and social media channels — relied too heavily on claims by Hamas, and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified," the note reads. "The report left readers with an incorrect impression about what was known and how credible the account was."
In the same prior Murder Pop article, we discussed this Al-Jazeera segment on the same incident. Many people seem to be unaware that Al-Jazeera is the state owned media company of the Qatari government, an Islamic monarchy that helps fund Hamas.
Al-Jazeera ran this story ostensibly refuting claims that a Palestinian rocket hit the Al Ahli hospital in Gaza, insisting that Israel’s “Iron Dome” shot the rocket down; unfortunately for Al-Jazeera, the Iron Dome doesn’t shoot projectiles down as they launch, it shoots them down as they fall towards their targets.
In an unfortunate coincidence for Al-Jazeera, Al-Jazeera broadcasts video which contradicts its own report. A live broadcast from Al-Jazeera shows both the explosion at the hospital and the events which lead up to it, capturing video of rockets being fired towards Israel moments before an explosion at the hospital directly beneath its flight path.
Meanwhile, CNN tells the story of a man’s arrest for manslaughter after he assaults a Jewish man on the head with a megaphone, killing him. This is how anyone would describe the story, I’m sure:
Like the New York Times before them, CNN’s updated, renovated headline was not really much of an improvement over what had come before it:
In a study that was published in 2005, researchers assessed the effect that false reports and their corrections/retractions in the media had on people's memory in relation to the search for Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq during War. The study led to three conclusions:
The repetition of false stories, even if they are subsequently corrected, can create false memories in a substantial proportion of a given audience.
Once the information is published, subsequent corrections do not alter people's beliefs unless they are suspicious about the claims to begin with.
When people do ultimately ignore corrections, they do so regardless of their knowledge that the corrections exist.
Murder Pop Notes this is especially true of headlines, as most news readers do not read the vast majority of stories. Instead, they scan headlines, only willing to spend time reading the articles that interest them the most, and likely never seeing corrections related to stories they have little interest in and do not follow or read about in any meaningful or significant way.
Stay skeptical.