Saturday, February 9, 2008

Media Language and War: Manufacturing Convenient Realities

To convey a version of a story that is as close the true story as possible, a media person has to comprehend the context himself, analyse the motives and follow the line of logic: cause and affect.

By Ramzy Baroud

".....The corporate media’s depiction of the Gaza story which has been unfolding for months might be summed up in one overriding headline: Hordes of Palestinian Breach Gaza Border with Egypt, Israel Concerned over Its Security.

The imprisonment of 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza – where poverty stands at 79 percent and unemployment hovers around a similar number, and where the majority of the population is ‘food insecure’ according to United Nations agencies – should have been depicted first and foremost as a humanitarian disaster compelled by an Israeli siege. The dates related to the successive stages of the siege follow a line of Israel’s political, not ‘security’ logic. Any reasonable timeline of recent events could easily verify that (the formation of the Hamas government in March 2006, the ousting of the pro-Israeli Palestinian security apparatus in June 2007 and so on being followed by dramatic Israeli moves to tighten the siege on Gaza, Hamas’ stronghold).

But little of that seemed relevant to the way the Gaza story was amply reported. Like the Iraq story, where the two main trusted sources are the occupation and its puppet Iraqi government, any story of relevance to Israel and Palestine has to be validated by the official Israeli source and to a lesser but growing extent by their allies among Palestinians. The rest are ‘extremist’, radical and hell-bent on the destruction of the ‘Jewish state.’ Note how the Jewishness of Israel is often emphasised whenever the word ‘destruction’ or similar words are infused......."

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