By Halil Ibrahim Medet
ISTANBUL (AA) – Mainstream Western media outlets’ biased reporting on Israel-Palestine trivialized Palestinian deaths and distorted which side is the victim and which side is the perpetrator, according to a Turkish academic.
Eyup Al, a member of Marmara University’s Faculty of Communication, told Anadolu that Israel’s attacks on Palestine are covered in a biased way by mainstream media.
"We see bias in both the content and the language of the news … News is reported about the death of Palestinians, but their death is portrayed as if it was natural. When it comes to Israelis, they are reported as killed,” he said, adding that mainstream media bias led to a situation where Hamas and all Palestinians are blamed for the Israeli loss.
Although the Israeli death toll was much lower than the number of Palestinians killed, he said the Western media made front-page coverage of it. The same priority was not given to the bombing of hospitals or schools in Gaza, he added.
Al laid emphasis on the economic and political factors behind the biased reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, noting that these include the need for mainstream media organizations to turn a profit and their “specific political views.”
“Therefore, when we base journalism and news on the criteria of objectivity, this can, of course, manifest at the theoretical level. But on a practical level, things don't work that way,” he said.
Despite Israel’s “decades-long systematic occupation and violations against Palestinians,” the mainstream media is trying to create the perception that the events were started by the Hamas resistance group on Oct. 7, he said, underlining the importance of media literacy and having knowledge on the background of the Israeli-Palestinian issue.
Noting that Israel has been working to dehumanize Palestinians as one of its strategies to legitimize its actions, he said the Oct. 7 attack is a major pillar in this strategy. “In fact, the entire Palestinian people are being dehumanized through Hamas,” he said.
“Israel bombs schools, mosques, and hospitals and claims that these are shelters used for military purposes,” he said, adding that they want to create a perception that all the children, women, and elderly people are “not actually innocent and they are all part of an evil plan.”
“Although the perception was created in the traditional media that Palestinians do not have human characteristics and therefore can be killed, the real-time posts by Palestinians on social media affected the whole world public opinion,” he said.
On the killing of journalists by Israeli attacks, he said this was also related to Tel Aviv’s desire “to cut off the flow of information from the region and impose a blackout.”
“The protection of journalists is actually linked to people’s right to information. Israel killed many journalists and wanted to cut off the flow of information. The number of journalists killed by Israel in Gaza since Oct. 7 is 118. This is a very clear war crime,” he noted.
Israel has launched relentless air and ground attacks on Gaza since a cross-border attack by Hamas, which Tel Aviv said killed 1,200 people.
At least 24,285 Palestinians have since been killed, mostly women and children, and 61,154 injured, according to Palestinian health authorities.
According to the UN, 85% of the population of Gaza is already internally displaced amid acute shortages of food, clean water, and medicine, while 60% of the enclave’s infrastructure is damaged or destroyed.
*Writing by Gozde Bayar