It Could Happen Here - CZM Rewind: Media Bias In Covering Palestine and Israel

Episode Date: September 26, 2023

Unfortunately, media bias when it comes to Palestine and Israel is truly an evergreen topic. For today's re-run episode from June 2022, we're reminded of how irresponsible journalism unfairly frames the public perception of Palestine.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You should probably keep your lights on for

Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of riot. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. search. Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Hello, welcome to It Could Happen Here. We are taking a week off and I've chosen a rerun episode from June of 2022. It was my episode

about the media bias in covering Palestine and Israel. Unfortunately, this is an evergreen topic, so I think it's worth re-listening to. Just a reminder of how unfair and irresponsible journalism can be when it comes to Palestine in particular. So, enjoy. Hi, everybody. Wow. Usurped. Jesus, Shireen.

Oh, I thought that's what Sophie said I should do. I know. You did the right thing. I'm the one being an asshole here. Okay. Well, this is Shireen. This is also It Can Happen Here. It's a podcast that happens every day that I am now on.

You did it. What is it about again? It's about everything happening here. Yes. It's about everything happening here. And this week's episode is about my neighbor dave who appears to be gardening no that's not what this show is about i'm sorry no no the society's crumbling and how maybe we could put it back together there it is that's what yeah that's what that's what it is about shireen shireen lani enos is going to take lead today but we also have christopher wong robert

evans and it is me sophie yes that's good see this is what i'm gonna keep in mind next time if i ever have to do this again like what uh introing this show means i mean it is a daily show so i have a lot of opportunities to get this right um yeah i wanted to do something a little different today so hopefully the listeners are okay with it uh be easy on me well and if they're not we will simply club them into submission um yeah well i appreciate that um i live for violence uh that is why we've spent half of our year's podcasting budget on shillelaghs um but i wanted to take a couple episodes to talk about something very important that i don't think it's enough news coverage.

And I want to talk about Palestine. And this first episode, I wanted to focus on how biased news coverage is as far as depicting what's happening in Palestine and Israel. So that's what we're going to talk about today. So are you ready? Are you all strapped in? I'm going to start talking at you guys for a long time. Hell yeah, motherfucker. Okay. At the height of the 2014 war between the Israeli military and Palestinian factions in the Gaza Strip, New York Times ran an article headlined, Israel says that Hamas uses children's

shields, reviving debate. It was a reference to the hundreds of Palestinian civilians who had been killed in the Israeli attacks by that point in the war. And there was no question about who had killed them, yet the language shifted the subject to a debate about who was really responsible. A few weeks earlier, after an Israeli airstrike had killed several Palestinian soccer fans, the times ran another absurd title titled missile at beachside gaza cafe finds patrons poised for the world cup and they later just found them huh yeah wow yep they found them poised just sitting there it's amazing people talk about the exonerative case in like journalism and it appears to apply to the israeli military

and american cops yes exactly um and they did later amend this title because they had like a widespread like backlash and disgust that was expressed on social media uh it only changed after that but the whole point is that headlines matter and it's the first and sometimes only exposure the general public has to world events. And especially like now, I believe that in our current time, the words at the top of that page, or like sometimes the only words that show up in a hyperlink are more important than the articles themselves, because sometimes it's all people see before they keep on scrolling. And in the case of Israel and Palestine, inappropriate, misleading and biased headlines

like those that appeared in the New York Times that I just mentioned have been all too common, accepted, and treated as accurate reporting and quote-unquote journalism. In 2019, there was a study titled 50 Years of Occupation that was published by 416 Labs, which is a research and data analytics firm based in Canada. Labs, which is a research and data analytics firm based in Canada. This firm analyzed nearly 100,000 news headlines about the conflict in the American press over the past five decades and found that the Israeli point of view, surprise, surprise, was featured much more prominently than the Palestinian one. And that references to Palestinians' experiences of being refugees or living under occupation, that word especially, that has steadily declined over time. So one of the study's authors, Awai Sahir, he told The Intercept that the findings demonstrate a persistent bias in coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian issue, one where Israeli narratives

are privileged and where, despite the continued entrenchment of the occupation, the very topics germane to the Palestinians' day-to-day reality have disappeared. It calls to attention the need to more critically evaluate the scope of coverage of the Israeli occupation and recognize that readers are getting, at best, a heavily filtered rendering of the issue. So this study analyzed 50 years of news headlines on the Israeli-Palestine conflict. I put that in quotes. I feel like conflict is suggest an equal uh also like understating it yes exactly come on yeah it's very uh it's understating what's actually happening and it just depicts a a somehow neutral playing field but it's not for sure but the study analyzed 50 years of headlines from five major american publications the chicago tribune the la times the major American publications, the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.

It employed this thing called natural language processing, or NLP, and these techniques are used to analyze massive databases of headlines published over this period. NLP is a big data analysis approach used to identify statistical trends and patterns in large caches of text. In this case, researchers analyzed nearly 100,000 headlines and identified dozens of frequently recurring terms and word sequences in stories about Israel and Palestine. While studies of media coverage on Israel and Palestine have been conducted before, this one by the 416 Labs analysis is the largest and most comprehensive look at headline coverage since the occupation began in 1948. And their findings show a clear slant towards the Israeli perspective. Headlines like the one that I

mentioned earlier from the New York Times about civilian deaths in Gaza that use the term Israel says were two and a half times more likely to appear than headlines citing Palestinian equivalents. Headlines centering Israel were published four times more than those centering Palestinians, and words connoting violence, such as terror, appeared three times more than the word occupation. And since 1967, that's the year that the Israeli military took control of the West Bank, there has been an 85% overall decrease in the mention of the term occupation in headlines about Israel, despite the fact that the Israeli military's occupation of the Palestine territory has in fact intensified

over this time. And the mention of the term Palestinian refugees, meanwhile, has declined a massive 93%. And while this is maybe subtle from the outside it's just a consistent disproportion of article headlines which by default gives a greater air time to one side and avoid certain key issues and this obviously can impact public perception yeah i mean it's very noticeable once you realize what the bias is looking especially on like social media and stuff. When you see just, just the headline of an article, uh, it's, it's, it's the bias is obvious. Yeah. It's, it's just, I don't know. Like what you have is a,

a conflict where one side is treated like a military force and the other side is treated like, um, almost like weather. Like that's, that's almost how they write about when the Israeli military does something. It's like, like a, like a thunderstorm came in. Right. Like it's nobody's fault.

This is just what happened. You know, like the Palestine, you know, the Hamas or whatever, that's like a military force. And so we talk about them the way that we talk about, you know,

a military force carrying out a strike or something. But, but the Israeli military is like, it's like with the weather, right? Like there's nothing to be, there's no blame to go around it just rained you know yeah and also like legitimizes israel like delegitimizes any kind of uh force that palestine exerts because it's like shown in this like yeah like a militant terrorist lens um when it's just acting in self-defense it's interesting because the.S. media actually does a better job of discussing the U.S. military

as if it actually can be guilty of crimes. The New York Times in particular has done some, not that there's not still problems with it, but there's something unique about the way they write about Israel that I guess is not quite unique because they do often write about police in a similar way. But it's very peculiar that it's like, I don't know. Yeah, there's definitely a lot of crossover with U.S. police and Israel in more ways than one. Oh, yes. They train them, first of all.

But also just like the way, and I'll talk more about this later, but the fact that there are so many videos blatantly showing brutal acts against humanity or just brutalism in general and they still get away with it just shows that they know there's no punishment. They know that there's a certain amount of immunity because they have big brother America to always fucking get their back. But yeah. Despite this ongoing American involvement, the total volume of U.S. media coverage about the conflict has been in an overall decline since the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords. This was a negotiated agreement between the then-Palestine leader Yasser Arafat and then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and it was intended to establish conditions for peace in the region. The decline in news coverage says little about the conditions on the ground, because they didn't get better. But the hopes that were briefly raised by this Oslo Peace Accord effectively died in 1995 after an Israeli extremist assassinated Rabin and a new hardline Israeli leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, he took power in 1996. And since then, the Israeli military, their occupation

of the West Bank has only expanded, with new settlements eating away at the remaining areas of Palestinian control, even while global media attention has declined. And it's not just American media that shows a clear bias that favors Israel. British media coverage on the violence in Palestine is also very biased against Palestinians, which in turn skews public perception internationally. In 2021, the Muslim Council of Britain's Center for Media Marketing, the CFMM, published a 44-page report that was titled Media Reporting on Palestine 2021. And this report came after two weeks of violence, in which Israeli police cracked down on protests against the imminent evictions of Palestinians in the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.

This report came after two weeks of violence in which Israeli police cracked down on protests against the eminent eviction of Palestinians in the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, and this subsequently attacked Palestinian worshippers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and that wounded hundreds. I don't know if you guys remember, but in 2021, last year, there was a lot of violence occurring in Palestine. There was more coverage than usual, especially covering Sheikh Jarrah. And obviously, news headlines didn't always come at it in an even-handed way. But the brutal escalation of violence that followed as rockets were fired from Gaza and Israeli airstrikes on the besieged enclave, it killed at least 248 Palestinians, including 66 children.

In the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, 29 Palestinians were killed and the rockets fired from Gaza killed 12 people in Israel. Gaza killed 12 people in Israel. The CFMM stated that between May 7th and May 20th of 2021, that's May 20th is when a ceasefire was announced, there were 62,400 online print articles and nearly 8,000 television broadcasts reporting on the events. And this report found that the narrative was extremely unbalanced due to, quote, skewed language, misleading headlines, and problematic framing. Rizwana Hamid, the director of CFMM and the co-author of this report, told the Middle East Eye that the overwhelming amount of complaints that was received by the monitoring organization about the biased media coverage in Britain covering the events in Palestine, it aligned with the analysis and evidence that this is all skewed, and it makes sense to get defensive when being rightfully called out. Just to kind of talk a little bit

about Sheikh Jarrah and Al-Aqsa really quick, this report cited several examples of media referring to the situation in Sheikh Jarrah, which the situation was Palestinians being forcibly removed from their homes. They called this an eviction or a real estate dispute, which implies a legal basis for these forced displacements when in reality it was a violation of international law. So that's minimizing it to an extreme. It also found that 50% of broadcast media clips between May 7th and May 10th refer to quote-unquote evictions or similar terms to describe illegal settlement plans in Sheikh Jarrah. And that also kind of

just conflates that there's nothing you can do. This is like a legal dispute, not your problem. Let the mess be over there and we're just sitting here all pretty in America. Yeah, they make it seem like it's like, oh, this is like a landlord thing.

This is like a, thing this is like a yeah go ahead yeah yeah there's also this this way in which the actual thing that is happening is a bunch of people are showing up with guns and stealing people's houses and this is getting treated as like oh this is like this is you know this this is some kind of sort of like it's like a rental dispute it's like yeah yeah it turns into this this like completely bloodless legal thing and then you know you look at what's actually happening and it's like yeah they're stealing people's houses at gunpoint they are like blowing up children with high explosives it's just like yeah it's definitely not presented in an accurate way and especially

if you don't know what's actually happening like you do and you just see these like random headlines and whatever you don't think it's anything but what it is what they're telling you like why would you deep dive any further if you're not affected by it you know um and one of the one of the things i noticed like when i was reading some of the coverage of this is like the the reporters would like go try to find some kind of legal basis for this and they'd start like they do these like like five paragraph long things about like weird legal stuff from like 1953 and it's like this has nothing to do with what's happening like this is you you've taken you've

taken the yeah yeah it's like they've they've taken the exonerative case from from the title and then gone and just done exonerative journalism yeah i do have to say that is i we are we keep using the term exonerative case somebody came up with that and i i keep forgetting who it was but it's a uh one of the better one of the better developments in discussing the way the media talks about palestine yeah no for. Yeah, it's, yeah, I just hate the word, I hate that even the word journalism has like a, it's not,

I don't even like calling this journalism, you know what I mean? I don't like that the New York Times doesn't use anything, but it is what it is. That's what we got. Well, and it's, you know,

as is always the frustration with the New York Times, they have also done some really good journalism on fucked up shit done by, like on the, I think it was the New York Times. They have also done some really good journalism on fucked up shit done by, like on the, I think it was the New York Times who did one of the articles

on Shireen's murder. But no, that was CNN, I think, this time. CNN did a really good article. Yeah, CNN did a really good, and it's like all of these, like these problems are systemic. All of these news agencies

have people who do care and who have like been over there and know how fucked up things are. So it's not like there aren't people within the system trying to wrench it. It's just like a sign of kind of how powerful the fucking how much inertia there is built up in Israel's favor here, I guess. But maybe that's maybe that's too exonerative for what's actually happening. I think it's also like I'll get into this a little bit later, but New York Times, for example, it like there are some writers that are clearly they clearly have a bias in favor of Israel, whether it's like they've described themselves as being like right wing or whatever. Obviously. It's like it's there's no there's not even an option for balanced journalism if you're giving someone that kind of voice. And I mean, even if you are, if you have an opinion, you would think as a journalist, you would understand what journalism means when it comes to like reporting accurate and fair information. But I think bias always wins. Yeah. Well, because not like if you're even if you're like, because I think honestly, if you know what's going on there, if you've actually spent time in the area and not just like hung out with the Israeli military, the honest take is a tremendous amount of sympathy for the Palestinian cause and Palestinian people.

But even so, if you're an honest journalist, you're going to try to be careful. Like you do have to report on stuff like, you know, Hamas missile strikes and whatnot. Yeah, of course. Yeah. But because you've got that side and then you've got the people who are overwhelmingly in Israel's corner and refused to report on the other side of things, the coverage de facto is always going to tilt towards Israel because the side that would be kind of reflexively and purely on kind of the Palestinian side just has no visibility here. You know, I don't know, like, what you do with that, because this is, again, a broader, as with all these things, these are broader problems in media. But yeah. You know what else is a broader problem in media? It is the fact that news and journalism is heavily advertising supported, which leads to deep amounts of bias in journalism and also problematic traffic-seeking behaviors and a wide variety of things that are careening us all towards an unsurvivable outcome. all towards an unsurvivable outcome. those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys,

and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real inspiring stories from the people, you know, follow and admire join me every week for post run high. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to post run high on the I heart app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

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in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts.

Check out betteroff offline.com and we're back hopefully that was um and if not well this is what you get but i want to bring up something i'm sorry about like so go ahead no i just was apologizing for calling the audience motherfuckers oh Never apologize for that. Never apologize for that. Yeah. Go to hell, you sons of bitches. Thank you for listening. Yeah.

Thank you so much. Also, be nice to me. But I want to bring up something that I hear all the time as far as people that have been to Israel on birthright. I want to say that birthright does not count unless you have like critical thinking and you understand how biased that trip even is and the fact that like you don't even have to be from that land to go back there meanwhile palestinians are not allowed to even step foot in that land so that's another episode entirely i won't get into it but it does really make me mad get into it, but it does really make me mad. And I'll stop there before I rage talk any further.

But let's go back to Israeli violence and police. So with regards to the violence at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, it resulted in hundreds of Palestinians being wounded. And the report, the British report that we're talking about documented widespread instances of media outlets using terms like clashes, conflict, scuffles, and skirmishes, which kind of implies equal blame, which is obviously not true because one side is armed in SWAT gear. And it also cited several news reports speaking of an intifada, which it said played into fear-mongering and framing Palestinians as violent aggressors. I want to point out that the word intifada is just an Arabic word that means rebellion or uprising and or a resistance, a resistance movement. It's a key concept in contemporary Arabic usage. It refers to a legitimate uprising against oppression. contemporary Arabic usage, it refers to a legitimate uprising against oppression.

And I feel like, like so many Arabic words, it's been skewed into something to fear. Like, even the words Allahu Akbar, which literally just means, like, thank you, God. Or, like, dear God. You know what I mean? Like, I think the fact that those words are invoking fear, like, it's really breaks my heart to hear, like, my native language being used to incite fear like trust me i've been on airports with my parents where we've gotten really strange uh looks just for speaking in arabic so again another episode i keep getting distracted there are so many things that make me mad but um i just wanted to bring up that if you're afraid afraid of the word don't be because that's also public media skewing your brain don't believe it and um hamid the director of this organization and the

co-author of this report she said that as far as language is concerned terms like evictions max they mask the illegal force removals and expulsion of Palestinians from their homes. References to conflict and clashes, they try to equalize what is in effect a battle between David and Goliath. And also, as I said earlier, masking ethnic cleansing as rental disagreements is absurd, but it also implies that there's a legal basis for everything um but it's not surprising at this point like i feel like clashes also isn't it's just anytime you see a writer using the word clashes it like clashes is just like is it's it's just the coward tense it's clashes yeah clashes is what you say when you are incredibly desperate not to at any point talk about who started the violence that's happening and why. Because clashes lets you just write it off. It's a combat. It's like, well, okay, there's two people fighting each other.

A clash is – like if you're discussing like Ukrainian and Russian troops like fighting in a village. Like, yeah, you can call that a clash. Both sides showed up with tanks and weaponry to like fight a war and if you're talking about the band the clash you can talk about the clash but otherwise maybe don't use the term clash yeah if you're talking unless you're talking about someone who's not dressed well or who's dressed really well one of the two i forget what um no but you're right i think especially if you're talking about literal an army coming to an unarmed family's home and kicking them out that's not a fucking clash yeah that is yeah yeah or it's like

you're tear gassing someone in a mosque and it's like this is not a clash no this is a chemical weapons attack like what yeah it's a chemical weapons attack on a house of worship which is what what we in the biz call not cool what's really ironic too is that that mosque and that region like that point in particular is sacred to muslims jewish people and christians alike so the fact that they're desecrating it at all in any way is really ironic to me because they don't care about anything. But another area of concern surrounding this reporting on Jerusalem was an overemphasis on religion. That's a good segue. Look at that. An accidental segue.

I'll take it. It's pronounced segue. Okay. The report found that nearly two-thirds of 90 clips in this time frame uh referred to palestinians religion uh in some cases explicitly just saying that they're muslim one itv report from may 10th referenced sirens which prompted quote jewish worshipers at the western wall to flee and run for cover and palestinians using the quote third holiest site in islam as a base to throw stones at Israeli

police. And while religious significance may be important to note at times, journalists, I believe, should avoid implying this religious motivation unless it's necessary, because it portrays the history of Israel versus Palestine as anything other than settler colonialism. If it's a religious dispute, then it's just like a far away, decades, centuries long fight that there's nothing we can do about it. Our hands are in the air. But really, it's really simple. It's just settler colonialism. And skewing as anything, any kind of religious conflict is very purposeful to get people not to care and get people not to think that there's a solution. And as I said, not only does this false religious narrative, it ignores the existence of persecution also of Palestinian Christians, because not all Palestinians are Muslim. There are Palestinian

Christians and Palestinian Jews, but it ignores their existence and their persecution by Israel. And it furthers the narrative that there is a centuries-long religious war that is too complex. That word is always used in this conflict. Conflict, again, I hate that word. But it's always used to describe what's happening. It's too complex to talk about or understand when instead it's opposite. It's the opposite. It's simple. It's an oppressor and there's an oppressed. Israel is an apartheid state that has been ethnic cleansing Palestinians and stealing their land ever since it was established. And I'd even say that war and conflict, it's not a fair fight. It's not an even word. And we've been witnessing a

genocide that has been occurring in Israel since it was established. And it's like there's a clear oppressor and a clear oppressed. Any kind of wording that implies otherwise is a lie. Let's go on to Gaza for a moment and the headlines that describe what's happening in Gaza. There are multiple examples of problematic language and framing regarding violence in Gaza. on May 12th of 2021, was titled, 15 Kids Massacred in Israel-Hamas Conflict as Netanyahu Warns We Will Inflict Blows You Couldn't Dream Of. This headline failed to mention that 14 of the 15 children that were killed were Palestinian. Because reading it, it implies that those children were all Israeli and Palestinians are monsters. That's not the case. And then on the 17th of May of 2021, iNews reported that 42 Palestinians died over the weekend.

They died over the weekend. Oh, that's sad. From like heart failure? Yeah. Like what? Like, fuck you. It failed to mention that all of those deaths were Palestinians in Gaza that were killed because died does not give the same impression as murder.

If you swap out the truthful word at any of these headlines, it makes a huge difference for people that only see these headlines. Like 42 Palestinians died is not the same as 42 Palestinians were murdered. There's a huge connotation difference for the people that just read something and move on. And popular headlines tell us time and time again, just like this, that Palestinians have died while stating that Israelis, on the other hand, were killed. Israelis don't die. They're always killed. Palestinians, they always die, though. They're never killed. There's a huge misproportion of those two words being used for those sides. Christopher brought up earlier about like passive voice in journalism and saying Palestinians died is another example of that.

And biased media outlets use this passive voice and they avoid specifying in its headlines who was killed and who was responsible if it portrays Israel as the aggressor. if it portrays Israel as the aggressor. The use of passive voice de-emphasizes or hides those perpetrating such negative action on Palestinians, and this has the rhetorical effect of minimizing the responsibility of Israeli aggressors and causing Palestinians suffering. A lot of headlines also refer to the Israeli military while referring to Palestinian groups as militants or Islamists, which implies differences in legitimacy, like we mentioned earlier. There are also headlines

describing Israeli airstrikes of having come, quote, after Hamas rocket attacks, but this ignores that the violence from Israeli settlers and police in Jerusalem preceded those rocket attacks. It's like starting in the middle of a fight where you punch in self defense and that's where the article starts. Like you punch someone, not the person that punched you first. Maybe that's a bad example, but it's just thinking of it that way. You're starting in the middle of a timeline versus the beginning. And Hamid told the Middle East Eye that the media narrative erases history, context, and legitimacy of the Palestinian cause by presenting Palestinians as the aggressors and Israel as acting in self-defense when it is quite the opposite. And I can't talk about Palestine or Israel without mentioning the anti-Semitism claims that a lot of people bring up every time you mention Palestine.

Other instances of skewed media coverage, they included articles that conflated pro-Palestinian activism with anti-Semitism. There was an article in the Telegraph that said that demonstrators in London that were in support of Hamas were therefore anti-Semitic because the group was committed to the elimination of Jews, which is not correct. I don't agree, obviously, with everything that Hamas does, but you have to keep in mind that no one else is fighting for Palestinians and desperate times, desperate measures. And there's no there is never a reason to excuse any kind of murder of any anyone that's unarmed or innocent. But against David and Goliath, what what choice does Palestine have if no one in the international community is coming to the rescue? And and every everyone who anyone who supports any military action anywhere supports the kind of collateral damage that Hamas does.

They just support it under different circumstances and with different weapons systems. Doesn't make it OK to fire rockets blindly into a city. But the United States Air Force fires way more rockets just as blindly into way more cities. It's like, yeah, war is horrible. It's fucked up and bad. It doesn't say anything about the broader cause. Like, sure, certainly you can have whatever the moral there's moral condemnation to be had for military leaders with Hamas, as there is for the military leaders with any militant force and for some of the soldiers doing some of those things. But at the end of the day,

it says nothing about the overall righteousness of the cause because there's not a discrepancy in the willingness to accept civilian casualties between Hamas and Israel. They're both very willing to accept civilian casualties in pursuit of their goals. So you have to set that aside when you're trying to determine what is what is happening here and where is righteousness. And I think righteousness overall lies on the side being ethnically cleansed. Yeah, very well said. I think it's a good place to take an ad break. And that's you know, who also condones heavy civilian casualties in pursuit of their goals.

The good people. But that works, too. That does also work. Honestly, has gotten a lot more people killed than Hamas. Right. To be fair, they may have gotten more people killed than the Israeli military has caused a lot of bloodshed over the years. Yikes. Anyway, here's our sponsors at F***.

Hey, guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run

and get into the heart of it all it's light-hearted pretty crazy and very fun listen to post run high on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground playground for billionaires from the chaotic world of generative ai to the destruction of google search better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of

tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose this season i'm going to be joined by everyone from nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and i'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge

and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Okay, we're back. Before the break, we were talking about pro-palestinian activism being conflated with anti-semitism and i want to bring up this um quote from a daily mail column commentator

richard little john stated that anti-semitism like covid comes in waves this is the palestinian variant excuse me wow Sometimes I just have to read that and really just remember what planet I'm on. But this research also mentions examples of insufficient challenge to views in broadcast interviews. This included a Sky News interview

with Tzipi Hoteveli, the Israeli ambassador to the UK, failing to sufficiently answer or be challenged on questions about ethnic cleansing in Sheikh Jarrah. She has previously described herself as a religious right winger and has referred to the 1948 displacement of 750,000 Palestinians as a quote. Displacement. No, listen, she describes it as a, quote, strong and popular Arab lie. This is the Israeli ambassador to the UK.

And it's like there's a lot that's frustrating here. One is that, like, you do have to take some care when you particularly when you talk about the media complicity and like pushing the Israeli narrative and all of the different uh things like apac that like fund u.s politicians and whatnot because like it is you do have to be careful to not like veer into conspiracy territory and you have to be careful with the sources that you pick because since a lot of mainstream news doesn't cover it you find some of this written about by people who are definitely not the folks you want to have on your side. But that doesn't make talking about this anti-Semitic. It just means that the entire discourse is poisoned because of the way the internet functions.

Yeah. And yeah, no. Good point. I'm not going to expand because I will restate it in a worse way. But that quote just really baffles my mind, especially because this person has a lot of power as an ambassador but she's also been accused of holding racist and islamophobic views and has expressed support for the annexation of the entire illegally occupied west bank yeah really great stuff there something no it seems like nobody's calling that racist though no exactly you know

like like you think about the reaction to like to like hey yeah we're we like we want to literally take over all of this land like you compare that to the reaction to like someone saying from the river to the sea which like everyone immediately loses their minds it's just like yeah this is the ambassador saying this stuff and nothing happens yeah yeah it's really unsettling and having someone like that in power as i'll mention later within yahoo uh someone that is so uh right wing or like uh extremist it just like um it it encourages people like that that in in the in the population encourages that kind of belief system to like expand just like Donald Trump did, just like Donald Trump did

with his fan base or fan base, his base. The drizzle, as we call it around here. Yeah. The British report that I'm mentioning also reported that Palestinians were regularly asked to answer for the actions of Hamas and recommended that spokespeople for the

group should instead be given a platform to respond to allegations. Meanwhile, you don't see random Israelis being asked to answer for murders committed by the IDF. It's always very one-sided. In 2021, there was also another study that was conducted by MIT titled The New York Times Distorts the Palestinian Struggle. It was written by Holly M. Jackson, and it was tracking changes in news coverage bias, showing how anti-Palestinian bias has persisted in the Times coverage by analyzing its articles during the first and second Palestinian intifadas, both periods in which Israeli violence far exceeded that committed by Palestinians. Deploying machine learning methods to analyze over 33,000 articles, Jackson focused on bias in the language of the times, reporting through two linguistic features. First was to identify whether actions by Israeli and Palestinian groups were being described in the active and passiveada, which was from 1987 to September 1993, it revealed some revealing results. Nearly 93% of these articles reference Israelis, while only 40% reference Palestinians, and about 12% of all references to Palestinians use violent language, as opposed to only 5.9% for Israelis.

used violent language as opposed to only 5.9% for Israelis. Palestinians, meanwhile, were referred to in the passive voice nearly 16% of the time, while the passive voice was used only about 6% of the time to describe Israelis. And like, I know this is just like all numbers and percentages because we obviously know how biased it is, but I think it's helpful to like scientifically, mathematically see that this is actually accurate. And there's not just us talking about it. This is actually true. So I do believe these studies are very important in showing people that might be, I don't know, skeptical that this is actually the reality. And then Jackson also highlighted that during this period, the Times stable of reporters were filled with those with known prejudices like Thomas L. Friedman and Joel Brinkley, who framed their articles by elevating Israeli perspectives alongside blatant anti-Palestinian sentiment. So, like we said, they're giving platforms to people with really clear biases.

Yeah. Oh, also, Thomas Friedman, famously super fucking bullish on the Iraq War and also very famously said when he was trying to rally support for the Iraq War that the Iraq War was about telling Muslims

to, quote, suck on this. Good guy, Tom Friedman. Real cool dude. Unbiased. They gave this man a Pulitzer. I think they gave him multiple of them. I would give him a Pulitzer very quickly and thrown overhand. Yeah.

That makes me sick. Thank you for sharing that. I'm glad i know that now it's cool shit he doesn't talk about that anymore keeps his goddamn mouth shut doesn't he shuts the absolute fuck up i mean realizing that was the iraq war and now he's he's still obviously given a platform to talk about palestine there's no there's no repercussion or even like red flags about this kind of language because it's accepted and it's really normalized. It sucks. Yes.

Headlines surveyed for bias dredged up editorials like quote, Israel and Arab neighbors must bend a little, no more Palestine, end quote, and Israel has controlled little of Palestine. So they're really clearly trying jesus to frame this in an incorrect way like as if is as if israel's arab neighbors haven't

basically just abandoned palestine by this point right like it has been pretty much like even this like fucking idiot tankies talk about how like hasad supports them but he put them into fucking camps he's like arrested and tortured and killed Palestinian activists. And like, you know, the thing none of these people ever want you to do is Google what Hafez al-Assad was fucking doing and why

he didn't bring in the Air Force at a certain very critical moment that... Hafez al-Assad, famed buddy of Henry Kay k my friend yeah everyone's friends everybody's friends that's what makes politics fun yeah additionally there was a systematic attempt to highlight petty disputes between palestinian groups or contradictions in their leader's strategy to frame Palestinians as irrational

or disorganized. And I will say that there has been significant changes in U.S. media coverage of the conflict, especially in the last couple of years, and this is driven in part by popular pressure coming from social media. There are also signs that Israel is becoming a partisan issue that divides liberals and conservatives in the U.S., with polls showing that growing numbers of Americans would like their government to take a more even-handed stance on the conflict. However, hardline supporters of the Israeli government have seemingly shifted their approach from winning, quote, hearts and minds to punishing opponents. They've published blacklists of Palestinian activists, they've censored public figures that are vocal about the conflict. They've speared them as anti-Semitics. And they've advocated for laws to restrict boycotts of Israeli goods. But BDS stands for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, and it works to end international support for Israel's oppression of Palestinians and pressure Israel to comply with international law just by boycotting products and companies that are either based in Israel or have products from Israel.

And it works because Israel doesn't like it. And I think that's fair. Like, that's telling enough that if Israel has a problem with boycotting shit, you should keep doing it. And it's now a vibrant global movement. It's made up of unions, academic associations, churches, and grassroots movements across the world. BDS launched in 2005. And it has a major impact in effectively challenging international support for Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism. So that's my sidebar about BDS. But nonetheless, people that have followed the U.S. debate on the quote-unquote conflict for decades say that there are serious tectonic changes occurring at the level of the American public, both in media and in popular sentiment.

Phyllis Bennis, the director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, a DC-based progressive think tank, said, although news coverage is not even handed and is still generally skewed toward the Israeli perspective, there has been a massive shift over the past five years in how this issue is both reported and discussed in the United States. We are seeing a shift in the types of stories that are being covered by major outlets, as well as the stances that public figures are willing to take. There are still huge problems, but things are changing. The discourse on Israel-Palestine is nothing like it was in decades past, which is very true. And for me personally, seeing the public

discourse change firsthand has been like very surreal and amazing, but really surreal because I think a lot of Palestinians and Palestinian supporters never thought it would happen. Seeing public figures talk so actively about being pro-Palestine. And even though this occupation, this problem seems insurmountable, outing these quote unquote journalists and news outlets is extremely important because of public opinion and pressure is strong enough. Things have to change. And the proof of this is seen in the headline that I mentioned at the very top, where the Times changed their headline because of widespread disgust expressed on social media. because of widespread disgust expressed on social media. And speaking up and sharing the truth on social media is extremely important, especially if you aren't Palestinian, and especially if you live somewhere that is skewing all these news headlines against Palestinians. There's nothing else but your voice left. And Palestinian voices have been and are continuing to be silenced. And this is not simply a Palestinian issue. It's a human issue that calls for humans to stand up when they are witnessing extreme injustice take place

and boycotting works or else Israel wouldn't be so afraid of it. Choosing to remain silent is choosing the side of the oppressor. You've heard it before. It's true. And I am hopeful with the change that we've seen in the last few years with public figures using their platforms to speak out and defend Palestine. I think it's honestly the best use of their platform, and I respect them for that. And I know that the concept of celebrity is ridiculous and stupid, but I think if you have the platform and you have millions of people watching you, using your voice in a way to support people that are in danger and, like, stand up for the oppressed is one of the only things you should do. And people that I respect,

this includes Bella Hadid, Susan Sarandit, Natalie Portman, Selena Gomez, Dua Lipa, The Weeknd, just to name a few. These people are huge names. They have millions of people watching them, and they're not afraid to speak up. Especially Bella Hadid recently. Like, every other story she posts on Instagram is about the Israeli occupation, which I really respect. I really respect that she has taken such a clear stance. And utilizing their platform, it does make a difference of public perception because fans that follow her might not follow news or anything else. There's just a lot of crossover that I think is really valuable. And ultimately, I think using your voice is the only right thing to do.

And any alternative or silence is simply cowardice. And that's my time. That's what I got today. All right. Well, thank you, Shireen. This was pretty bleak, but important. And I tried to uplift you at the very end. All of you go, go.

Okay. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of right an anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of latin america listen to nocturnal on the iheart radio Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech

brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from.