Good slogans have people nodding their heads in agreement because they recognise an underlying truth in the words.  

I have a worn-out t-shirt which carries the slogan, “The first casualty of war is truth — the rest are mostly civilians”.

If you find yourself nodding in agreement it’s possibly because you have found it deeply shocking to find this slogan validated repeatedly in almost eight months of Israel’s war on Gaza.

The mainstream news sources which bring us the “truth” are strongly Eurocentric. Virtually all the reporting in our mainstream media comes via three American or European news agencies — AP, Reuters and the BBC — or from major US or UK based newspapers such as The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Washington Post or The New York Times. 

This reporting centres on Israeli narratives, Israeli reasoning, Israeli explanations and Israeli justifications for what they are doing to Palestinians. Israeli spokespeople are front and centre and quoted extensively and directly.

Palestinian voices, when they are covered, are usually at the margins. On television in particular Palestinians are most often portrayed as the incoherent victims of overwhelming grief.

In the mainstream media Israel’s perverted lies dominate. 

Riddled with examples
The last seven months is riddled with examples. Just two days after the October 7 attack on Israel, pro-Palestinian protesters were accused of chanting “Gas the Jews” outside the Sydney Opera House.

The story was carried around the world through mainstream media as a nasty anti-semitic slur on Palestinians and their supporters. Four months later, after an intensive investigation New South Wales police concluded it never happened. The words were never chanted.

However the Radio New Zealand website today still carries a Reuters report saying “A rally outside the Sydney Opera House two days after the Hamas attack had ignited heated debate after a small group were filmed chanting “Gas the Jews”.

Even if RNZ did the right thing and removed the report now the old adage is true: “A lie is halfway around the world before the truth has got its trousers on”. Four months later and the police report is not news but the damage has been done as the pro-Israel lobby intended.

The same tactic has been used at protests on US university campuses. A couple of weeks ago at Northeastern University a pro-Israel counter protester was caught on video shouting “Kill the Jews” in an apparent attempt to provoke police into breaking up the pro-Palestine protest.

The university ordered the protest to be closed down saying “the action was taken after some protesters resorted to virulent antisemitic slurs, including ‘Kill the Jews’”. The nastiest of lies told for the nastiest of reasons — protecting a state committing genocide.

Similarly, unverified claims of “beheaded babies” raced around the world after the October 7 attack on Israel and were even repeated by US President Joe Biden. They were false.

No baby beheaded
Even the Israeli military confirmed no baby was beheaded and yet despite this bare-faced disinformation the Israeli ambassador to New Zealand was able to repeat the lie, along with several others, in a recent TVNZ interview on Q&A without being challenged.

War propaganda such as this is deliberate and designed to ramp up anger and soften us up to accept war and the most savage brutality and blatant war crimes against the Palestinian people.

Recall for a moment the lurid claims from 1990 that Iraqi soldiers had removed babies from incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals and left them to die on the floor. It was false but helped the US convince the public that war against Iraq was justified.

Twelve years later the US and UK were peddling false claims about Iraq having “weapons of mass destruction” to successfully pressure other countries to join their war on Iraq.

Perhaps the most cynical misinformation to come out of the war on Gaza so far appeared in the hours following the finding of the International Court of Justice that South Africa had presented a plausible case that Israel was committing genocide.

Israel smartly released a short report claiming 12 employees of UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) had taken part in the October 7 attack on Gaza. The distraction was spectacularly successful.

Western media fell over themselves to highlight the report and bury the ICJ findings with most Western countries, New Zealand included, stopping or suspending funding for the UN agency.

Independent probe
eedless to say an independent investigation out a couple of weeks ago shows Israel has failed to support its claims about UNRWA staff involved in the October 7 attacks. It doesn’t need forensic analysis to tell us Israel released this fact-free report to divert attention from their war crimes which have now killed over 36,000 Palestinians — the majority being women and children.

The problem goes deeper than manufactured stories. For many Western journalists the problem starts not with what they see and hear but with what their news editors allow them to say.

A leaked memo to New York Times journalists covering the war tells them they are to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to avoid using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land.

They have even been instructed not to use the word Palestine “except in very rare cases” or the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza settled by Palestinian refugees driven off their land by Israeli armed militias in the Nakba of 1947–49.

These reporting restrictions are a blatant denial of Palestinian history and cut across accurate descriptions under international law which recognises Palestinians as refugees and the occupied Palestinian territories as precisely what they are — under military occupation by Israel.

People reading articles on Gaza from The New York Times have no idea the story has been “shaped” for us with a pro-Israel bias.

These restrictions on journalists also typically cover how Palestinians are portrayed in Western media. Every Palestinian teenager who throws a stone at Israeli soldiers is called a “militant” or worse and Palestinians who take up arms to fight the Israeli occupation of their land, as is their right under international law, are described as “terrorists” when they should be described as resistance fighters.

The heavy pro-Israel bias in Western media reporting is an important reason Israel’s military occupation of Palestine, and the ongoing violence which results from it, has continued for so long.

The answer to all of this is people power — join the weekly global protests in your centre against Israel’s settler colonial project with its apartheid policies against Palestinians.

And give the mainstream media a wide berth on this issue.

John Minto is national chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA). This article was first published by The Daily Blog and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with the author’s permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Last week’s leaked New York Times staff directive, as to what words can and cannot be used to describe the carnage Israel is raining on Palestinians, is proof positive, since those reports are published verbatim here in New Zealand, that our understanding of the conflict is carefully managed to always reflect a pro-Israel bias.

Forget the humanity of 120,000 dead and wounded Palestinians and countless others facing famine and disease sheltering in tents or what’s left of destroyed buildings, even internationally recognised terms and phrases such as “genocide,” “occupied territory,” “ethnic cleansing” and even “refugee camps” are discouraged, along with “slaughter”, “massacre” and “carnage”.

Though such language restrictions are claimed to be in the interests of “fairness”, an earlier investigation showed that between October 7 and November 14, The Times used the word “massacre” 53 times when it referred to Israelis being killed by Palestinians and only once in reference to Palestinians being killed by Israel.

By that date, thousands of Palestinians had perished, the vast majority of whom were women and children, and most of them were killed inside their own homes, in hospitals, schools or United Nations shelters.

This carefully managed use of words is deliberate and insidious and, as Jack Tame’s interview with Israel’s ambassador on last Sunday’s Q&A programme showed, even our most experienced media people are not immune to its effects.

Here is our interview with Israel Ambassador, Ran Yaakoby. From this morning’s @NZQandA https://t.co/pSHdxpccre

— Jack Tame (@jacktame) April 20, 2024

From his introduction, “establishing” that the genocide taking place in Gaza had its genesis in the October 7 attack by Hamas, and not in the Nakba of 1948, Jack Tame and TVNZ facilitated an almost hour-long presentation of pro-Israel propaganda, justifying its atrocities.

For its appalling lack of balance, including Tame’s obsequious allowance and nodding agreement with the Israeli ambassador’s thoroughly discredited claims of Hamas atrocities; “beheadings” “necrophilia” and for describing Israelis’ as being “butchered” (five times he used the word) while Palestinians were merely “killed”, this was a new low in our media’s record of bias when it comes to the presentation of the facts about the Palestine/Israel conflict.

In the very week that we prepare to remember the horrific sacrifices made in previous wars and even as Israel‘s genocidal slaughter of Palestinians brings us closer to World War Three than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis, that TVNZ should have, pre-recorded and so had time to edit, such a disgraceful presentation is simply appalling — and heads should roll.

Republished from The Daily Blog with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

But while the media have aired angst about editorial independence, trust and costs, the opportunities have barely been addressed — or the consequences of sticking with the status quo.

“Do you think you’ve got too much on?” Newshub political editor Jenna Lynch asked the prime minister last Wednesday in one of several set-piece sit-downs with the media.

“Yeah, I do. So over the summer, we will be thinking about areas that we can pare back,” Prime Minister Ardern replied.

Lynch reckoned the creation of the new public media entity — Aotearoa New Zealand Public Media (ANZPM) — could be one of them.

“Are you ready for the RNZ/TVNZ merger to be dropped?” she subsequently asked Broadcasting Minister Jackson.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. We’re committed to it and things are going well,” he replied bullishly.

But when asked if he was 100 percent sure, he answered with a question: “Do you know something else?”

Merger ‘not number one’
Ardern told Newsroom this week that “the merger is not number one on the government agenda”.

She also told its political editor Jo Moir a lot of people say they do not have a view on the merger because “there isn’t a lot of information out there about it”.

Yet it is almost three years since her government decided to do this — after which almost all the planning was behind closed doors until this year.

One opportunity to explain it last weekend went begging when Jackson appeared on TVNZ’s Q+A show. It was also the first time any TVNZ programme had addressed the merger outside of brief mentions in daily news bulletins.

It was condemned as a “trainwreck” by pundits and political rivals and added to perceptions the ANZPM plan had gone off the rails.

On The AM Show the next day, Ardern cited the potential collapse of RNZ as a reason for the merger, though as Gordon Campbell pointed out on Scoop.co.nz — RNZ will not collapse unless a government actually decides to collapse it.

But it was public support for the ANZPM project that was collapsing, according to a widely-reported Taxpayers Union-commissioned poll. Stuff reported 54 percent of poll respondents “did not want the state broadcasters to merge”.

(The Taxpayers Union does not want that either and campaigns against it on the grounds that it is wasteful spending).

‘Unsure’ about plan
Stuff also reported a quarter of people polled were “unsure” about the plan – and no wonder, when there has been so little in the media about what it might offer or how it could be improved, but plenty about the opposition to it among media (some with their own vested interests) and opposition political parties’ calls for it to be scrapped.

Stuff political editor Luke Malpass called the plan “a dog of a concept” and Today FM’s Duncan Garner urged the prime minister to suspend the plan immediately.

Newstalk ZB’s HDPA told her listeners “if Labour were smart they’d kill the merger”, while comparing the plan for two media outlets to the one for Three Waters.

She was not the only one.

In the NBR, Brigitte Morton said the RNZ-TVNZ merger was political repeat of Three Waters missteps. (Morten is a director for law firm Franks Ogilvie and has previously disclosed on RNZ the firm has clients taking legal action over Three Waters).

NBR political editor Brent Edwards — formerly political editor at RNZ —  told Morten in an online interview that other countries — including Australia — have joined-up multimedia public media networks paid for by the public. So why not us?

“Australia and Britain are much bigger media markets so whilst you might have giants like the BBC, you’ve still got enough space for other big players to be quite influential,” Morten replied.

More complaints about ABC
“And having worked in Australian politics, there are much more complaints about the ABC than I’ve ever seen about TVNZ and RNZ,” Morten said.

The ABC is targeted by some politicians, the hostile Murdoch press and other media rivals — but it has shown it has the power to resist attacks and push back against political interference. And the public that actually pays for it seems to value it.

The ABC tracks public perceptions of its performance and value three times a year across the country and this year’s approval improved on last year’s.

Seventy eight percent of surveyed Australians believed the ABC performed a valuable role; the same proportion said ABC provided good quality TV and two thirds said it provided shows they personally liked to watch and hear.

Nine in 10 said the ABC’s online stuff was good. They were less keen on ABC radio, but it still had the approval of a clear majority.

The ABC 2022 annual report says “it continues to outperform commercial media in the provision of news and information about country and regional Australia” among both city and country and regional populations.

The study also found 77 percent of Australian adults aged 18-75 years trusted the information the ABC provided — significantly higher than the levels of trust recorded for internet search engines, commercial radio, commercial TV, newspaper publishers and Facebook.

But no-one has asked New Zealanders if they would like something like ABC or BBC in place of RNZ and TVNZ.

The government has yet to make a strong case for ANZPM to the public. This week the minster’s office said he was “not available this week” to discuss it on Mediawatch. (Next week he is in Europe).

‘Problem in search of a solution’
Meanwhile, vocal critics like Newstalk ZB’s Heather du Plessis-Allan say the plan “smacks of hidden agendas”.

“There is no plausible explanation for why we need this merger. What is the problem we’re trying to fix?” she asked on ZB.

One problem is we are spending almost as much as public money per capita on public media as Australia now – but getting nothing like as comprehensive a service from it.

The two networks the government plans to replace both attract core audiences that skew older than the national population – not a good sign for the future.

Stuff’s Glenn McConnell noted the Taxpayers Union survey from last month revealed higher levels of support for the media merger among people aged 18 to 39.  A third of them supported it, a third opposed it, and the other third were unsure.

But while there has been a lot of media heat about that Willie Jackson TVNZ interview last weekend, one with the National Party leader on Morning Report last Wednesday may prove even more significant. For the first time, Christopher Luxon definitively said he would undo the media merger if his party wins the 2023 election.

“It’s important that TVNZ continues its commercial model. We’ve seen incredibly good media operations – like NZME, a commercial organisation that has done incredibly and TVNZ could continue to do the same,” Luxon told RNZ’s Jane Patterson later that day.

The opposition seems committed not just to preserving the status quo – but even restoring it — even if it is costly to do so.

Next month, it will be three years since an advisory group, including TVNZ and RNZ executives, first declared the status quo was not an option and persuaded Cabinet a new entity was the way to go.

Since then, the government and the existing entities have not found a way — or the willingness – to persuade the public of that — or their political opponents, wedded to a system within which a highly-commercial state-owned TVNZ is already effectively operating on a not-for-profit basis.

TVNZ already overlaps online with the much smaller RNZ — which has sold land, buildings and even grand pianos in recent years to maintain its services, even as government funding across the media swelled to more than $300 million a year currently.

The current government says it is committed to public media but has not committed much to its only real national public broadcaster since 2017 (until Budget 2022 when it allocated ANZPM $109m a year from 2023 to 2026).

Independent of each other, RNZ and TVNZ will also be even more vulnerable in the future to other media picking off their audiences, while hundreds of millions public dollars will still be sunk into various media with — potentially — less and less impact.

Even if merging RNZ and TVNZ is not best solution, the longer-term consequences and cost of that could end up being greater than opponents believe — financially as well as in terms of political risk and public opinion which sway pundits and politicians alike.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. 

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz