Mainstream media is witnessing an epidemic of carefully selected, blatantly misconstrued language in it’s reporting – the bulk of which is working to conceal the facts of the ongoing Gazan Genocide, beginning in 1948 after the Nakba (illegal colonization of Zionists on Palestinian land), not on October 7th.  

The genocide in Gaza has become the most documented conflict in history. Raw, uncut footage is released daily from civilian journalists on the ground to social media platforms for the world to see. But footage is being blocked by cunning algorithms that censor videos based on keywords like “genocide” or “Palestine.” When a creator, like the ground journalists in Gaza, post about what’s going on– it’s only a matter of time until Meta takes the liberty of shadowbanning them. When someone is shadowbanned, their posts or stories won’t show up on many followers’ feeds, and is done in a way that the creators often don’t know of the censorship until much of their content has already expired. This creates a frustrating loop of ground journalists pushing out information not knowing if anybody is seeing it, only furthering the psychological warfare tactics at play by Israel and feeding the hopelessness that comes with 100 days of war. 

 If any coverage is given at all to these historic protests, it’s going to be skewed coverage, talking of the protest numbers being in “the thousands” when the actual estimate of attendees is around 400,000. This is not a question of rounding error, the use of thousands as a descriptor as opposed to hundreds of thousands is done purposefully by the media to push the narrative that nobody should care about the mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. This constant minimizing of public support for the cause reveals how tight of a corner the media has pushed itself into. Their narrative is falling apart, and the general public have uncovered their hidden agenda. The same agenda that had “reputable” news sources push lies about “weapons of mass destruction” to Americans as a rationale for the murder of over a million Iraqis– a selfish war over oil, not national security. 

As much as media censoring is an issue, there’s also the consumer demographics of media to consider: younger people generally consume their information from social media whereas older people get their news from more traditional avenues like the newspaper or live television.  

Gen-z and Millenials in particular, report a distrust in conventional media as their reason for choosing social platforms over broadcast television. If young people continue to branch away from these agencies, it would mean high time for ethical reform within CNN and FOX news agencies (less agenda work and more coverage of the truth). The consequence of not making these changes could mean them not having an audience 20-30 years from now, when all their loyal watchers are dead and the next generations don’t agree with their one-sided representation. 

A text-book example of this one sided-representation is the picky-choosy live tv coverage of the international court of justice (ICOJ) trial in South Africa’s lawsuit against Israel. CNN, FOX news, and the BBC all chose NOT to broadcast South Africa’s evidence driven, expository argument revealing specific details of the massacre in Gaza that make it a genocide. However, they did broadcast Israel’s defensive argument, one where the word “hamas” was repeated over 100 times and the argument centers around Palestinians allegedly being the instigators of genocide against the Israeli citizens– the same Palestinians that have no artillery, no food, no water, no shelter, no clean restrooms, and no peace of mind.