How the media tears up its own rulebook to hide Israel's atrocities

The news cycle has rules every rookie journalist understands. When the media choose to break them, you can be sure it is for entirely non-journalistic reasons

You can tell much from how the media choose to cover a news story – and from the facts they decide to emphasise in a headline. And you can tell even more from the fact that, on certain subjects, the media uniformly choose to break the most basic rules of news gathering taught to every young journalist.

Typically, reporters try to extract as much news “value” from a story as they can. That means there is often a formula hiding behind the coverage.

When the news first hits, it is handled as what we call a “breaking story”. It is the first draft of the event, containing essential information as it can best be understood at the time of the report.

Here’s an example of a possible headline on a breaking news story: “Two dead, over 40 injured as London-to-Brighton train derails.”

Later the same news event is repackaged in what is called a “follow-up” – once more information is available and errors can be corrected, or because, with more time to talk to those directly involved, there is the chance to present a different, or more interesting, angle on the same story.

Here’s the headline on a possible follow-up: “Train driver reportedly had heart attack before fatal train derailment.”

But there are cases where the natural order of the news cycle gets disrupted – and when it does, there are invariably likely to be non-journalistic reasons in play.

In the case of Israel, the news-gathering rulebook often gets torn up.

The first lesson taught to every rookie journalist is this: wherever possible, supply the reader with the “who, what, when, where, why and how” of the story.

I would not be the first to note how often news media forget in headlines – the only part of a story most readers see – to mention the first of those points, “Who?”, if the responsible party is Israel and it is committing indisputable war crimes.

We have had two years filled with this kind of rogue reporting, designed to obscure Israel’s role in systematically perpetrating atrocities that amount to genocide:

But I want to highlight a less noticed element to the media’s perverse coverage of Israel. And that is the regular skewing of the traditional news cycle. Too often the media simply skip the breaking stage of a news story and head straight to the follow-up.

By now, you might be able to guess why. Because a breaking story presents only the essential facts, and those facts cannot disguise the nature of Israel’s crimes.

By moving straight to the follow-up, the media get to muddy the water with Israel’s rationale, however preposterous, for its war crimes at the very moment those crimes first come to public attention.

Let us take as an example Israel’s strike last month on Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, the only major hospital still functioning, partially, in Gaza after Israel put out of action dozens of others. The strike killed scores of journalists and rescue workers.

The media uniformly framed Israel’s attack on a protected building – a hospital – and its murder of civilians there as potentially warranted by amplifying an Israeli claim that was patently ridiculous on at least three counts.

First, Israel claimed that it was targeting a camera on an outside balcony – and that the camera was such a threat, and an immediate one, that it needed to hit Nasser hospital with missiles to destroy it.

Second, Israel claimed that the camera was being used by Hamas, even though it belonged to a Reuters journalist and was actually being used by Reuters for a live feed at the time it and the hospital were hit.

And third, Israel claimed that the only way the camera could be disabled was by hitting the hospital with a series of missile strikes that killed journalists and emergency workers who rushed to assist those killed and injured in the initial strike that had destroyed the camera.

The problem with the coverage ran much deeper than the astounding levels of gullibility demonstrated by the entire press corps in reporting Israel’s “Hamas camera” claim.

The media also had to pervert the normal news cycle by failing to report the attack on the hospital as a breaking story. Instead the media moved straight to the follow-up, in which Israel was allowed to foreground its atrocity “denial” with the camera claim.

In large part, the media could do this only because Israel – which understands how to manipulate the news cycle, especially when the media are so ready to spread its disinformation – had its excuses ready from the outset of the attack. That alone should have rung alarm bells with any real journalists.

But further, major media outlets all chose as their follow-up Israel’s ludicrous rationale for an illegal attack on the hospital: the red herring of the “Hamas camera”. Were they doing their jobs properly, these outlets could have chosen an entirely different follow-up. They could have taken testimony from experts and witnesses on the ground to tear apart Israel’s tissue of lies.

The goal here, of course, was to distort the audience’s understanding of a simple news event – Israel’s attack on a hospital in violation of international law to kill journalists and emergency workers, also in violation of international law – to ensure any loss of sympathy with Israel was kept to a minimum.

The media’s role in artificially sustaining support for Israel, in the face of all the evidence of its crimes, has been absolutely essential to smoothing the path, over the past two years, to genocide.

Once you understand how the media pervert the normal news cycle when it serves larger political purposes, the strange presentation of other events starts to make more sense. Such as the minimal coverage of police detaining George Galloway, a former MP and leader of a UK political party, at Gatwick airport at the weekend under draconian terrorism laws. Galloway also had his electronic devices seized.

His detention alone should have been a big news story. But there was also plenty of extra news “value” that could have been extracted from it.

The story was more than ripe for follow-ups, given Galloway’s outspokenness about Israel and its genocide in Gaza; the Starmer government’s efforts to silence dissent on Gaza from journalists, lawyers and now politicians using terrorism laws; and the government’s recent abuses of the terrorism laws to proscribe for the first time in British history the direct-action group Palestine Action, which has been targeting weapons factories in the UK, like the Israeli firm Elbit’s, supplying Israel with the tools to carry out the Gaza genocide.

Were the Russian government to detain and seize the electronic devices of a politician critical of Putin’s policies in Ukraine, we all know how the British media would cover that story. There would be endless follow-ups of Putin’s growing and ruthless authoritarianism, of the struggle of critics to speak openly about events in Ukraine, of the need for more sanctions on Russia, and so on.

Contrast that to the coverage of Galloway’s persecution – which comes in the wake, also largely unreported, of a growing number of arrests and investigations of journalists and lawyers under the same terrorism laws after they have criticised the Starmer government’s complicity in the Gaza genocide.

Notice two days later the lack of follow-ups in the British media on Galloway’s detention. Outlets have reported the breaking story – one in which headlines connect Galloway to “terrorism” – but not issued follow-ups whose headlines might push back against the authoritarian over-reach of the British security state overseen by Starmer.

In this case, the breaking story serves the British establishment’s interests in implicitly vilifying Galloway far better than any follow-up.

A follow-up would either have to “put up” – that is, provide a rationale for detaining Galloway under terrorism laws that, we can infer, doesn't exist – or interrogate the narrative the government has been manufacturing to justify its persecution of regime dissidents.

Paradoxically, the only outlet that has offered a follow-up – as shown in the screenshot above of a Google search late this afternoon – was from the rightwing Israeli outlet The Jerusalem Post. Uniquely, its headline “‘Politically motivated intimidation’: George Galloway reportedly detained at Gatwick airport” captures the story the British media is carefully avoiding.

The media aren’t reporting the news. They are shaping the news to shape our minds, our perceptions, our sympathies. Until we grasp that simple fact, we will continue cheering those whose only goal is to keep oppressing us and enriching themselves.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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