However, if we dig deep into what was actually said, the hostage claimed that she, along with 25 other hostages, slept on mattresses and ate the same food that Hamas fighters had ate. Moreover, she said that they took care of sanitary side for them not to get sick and even took care of the feminine hygiene of the women. She added that they were very kind and generous.

Here, we come to point out how this headline was bias and anti-palestinian. If you read the headline, you let the picture of terrorism and violence stick to Hamas or the palestinians in general and neglect the right scenario of settler-colonialism.

Furthermore, the article signals there have been “years of quiet” once again minimising the question of genocide and erasing 80 years of occupation, as if what is currently happening is not related to years of oppression, apartheid and genocide. In other words, this headline frames the current situation as something that was unexpected and unrelated to the right of resistance of Palestinians. 

The article goes on to describe what they denominate a “little-noticed police action in Jerusalem”. With this, the author is further minimising the conflict and at the same time acknowledging the media bias that exists when reporting on Palestinians. Using “little-noticed” to describe the “action” implies that the coverage done on the acts of oppression suffered by Palestinians is minimum; talking about the actions undertaken against Palestinians is not directly covered by big media outlets. They have only started to go back to these events and report on them now, to try to find reasons for Hamas operation. 

Furthermore, the author uses “police action” to describe an act of oppression and violation of human rights against Palestinians.

In harrowing detail, an 85-year-old Israeli grandmother described her 17-day ordeal as a hostage, offering for the first time a captive’s account of the armed Palestinian group Hamas’s subterranean garrison beneath Gaza, the conditions in which the group’s hostages are being held and the operatives deployed to tend to them.

The woman, Yocheved Lifshitz, a peace activist from Nir Oz, a kibbutz near the Gaza border, was released on Tuesday along with another woman, Nurit Cooper, 79, after negotiations between Israel and Hamas were facilitated by Egypt and Qatar. Only two other hostages out of at least 222 have been released since the Hamas rampage on Oct. 7 left over 1,400 people dead in Israel.

The headline says that US assessment is not responsible for Gaza blast. This firstly absolves Israel from any responsibility for the mass killing committed. The first bias we see is the media not holding Israel responsible for the mass killings they committed. Instead the article claims that it was a misfire by Islamic Jihad. Firstly this implies an orientalist discourse because it uses the terms Jihad and Islamic Arabs as well as implying that they are unorganized and terrorists because they bombed their own people by mistake. The first picture is of a man holding carpets and kids behind him in dirty clothes in a destroyed area by Israelis, this image further pushes orientalism by showcasing them “dirty”. The article should have posted a picture of the hospital bombing instead. The headline and article also has a Zionist approach as it doesn’t hold Israel responsible for its mass killings and uses the US as further justification on their title.

another example, is the difference between the headlines depending on the victim and the criminal especially in the war going right now in gaza, when israeli civilians dies the headline would be " hamas killed [] israeli civilians" while when palestinian civilians die the headline is changed into something like" [] palestinians were killed".

and to that i say :using the present perfect tenses and vaguley written headlines will not make genocide, ethnic cleansing and killing of children justified.

I think it is essential for media consumers to engage critically with news sources, seek information from diverse outlets, and be aware of potential biases.

In the lede, the phrase "At least 18,608 Palestinians have been killed in the ongoing Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip since Oct. 7, the Health Ministry said Wednesday" quantifies the human toll but doesn't provide detailed information about civilian casualties. This omission creates room for ambiguity and could contribute to a biased narrative by not emphasizing the impact on Palestinian civilians. The absence of specific details about civilian casualties may perpetuate a narrative that downplays the suffering of Palestinian civilians, potentially reinforcing an anti-Palestinian bias.

Moreover, the lede mentions the Israeli death toll in the Hamas attack as 1,200, according to official figures. While providing a comparative aspect, this can introduce bias if not accompanied by a detailed breakdown of civilian casualties and the overall impact of Israeli attacks. Without this context, the comparative framing may perpetuate a biased portrayal, reinforcing a narrative that positions Israelis as a self-defense entity and Palestinians as oppressors. This aligns with King and Jegić's analysis of media style guides discrediting Palestinians by providing selective context.

In essence, the aforementioned aspects, when analyzed in the context of scholarly insights such as Siddiqui and Zaheer's study on media coverage of the Israeli occupation, underscore the importance of critically examining language choices in media reporting. These biases may unintentionally contribute to narratives that diminish the violence perpetrated against Palestinians, reinforcing a portrayal of Israelis as a self-defense entity. Such unintentional biases may align with an Orientalist view, reflecting the need for media consumers to be vigilant and demand more balanced representations of the ongoing conflict.

The truth is: We are preconditioned not to see Palestinian humanity because colonialism, white supremacy, and Islamophobia are still the dominant lens through which states, institutions, people, and media in the West view the world (although geopolitical interests are, of course, also at play).

This is why, in this screenshot, Palestinians “die” while Israelis are “killed”.

Yes, Hamas, the Palestinian militant and political group that governs the Gaza Strip, is responsible for the killing of hundreds of Israeli civilians and the taking of hundreds of hostages on 7 October. But the Israeli government has also been responsible for killing thousands of Palestinian civilians since. And before 7 October, 3,803 Palestinian civilians had been killed – compared to 177 Israeli civilians – since 2008, according to the UN.

The passive voice (have died) is often decried in media style guides. One of the classic Elements of Style by Strunk and White guidelines is USE THE ACTIVE VOICE!!! White apparently repeated it with increasing passion several times. But when it comes to Palestine, the media are militant about using passive voice. The difference in active and passive voice is symptomatic of anti-Palestinian racism.

Focusing of CNN on Hamas "brutal attack on Israel" without putting the incident in the context of Israel’s brutal occupation and oppression of Palestinians for more than half a century, creates dangerous false narratives. The word "attack" emphasizes how Hamas actively attacked Israelis, but Gazans "have died", as if there are some sort of natural occurrence, rather than missiles being actively fired by Israel.

Add to this when saying: "unexpected and brutal attack on Israel" removes Palestinians from the picture, as if Israeli suffering is the only kind of suffering worth mentioning first. Ironically, this approach can in itself lead to a biased portrayal of the events.

The expression "the military campaign launched in response by Israel" is giving the Israel the right to defend itself, but the practices on the battlefield (1000 dead Palestinian in comparison to 1400 killed Israelis) brings us to the point of genocide in Gaza Strip. In the event of self- defense, you may not violate the rules of international law, nor may you target civilians, and any crime is not permitted under the justification of self-defense.

As Frantz Fanon taught, it is always the case that the burden of liberation is on the natives themselves. So the least we can do is refuse to participate in the discourse that accords unequal rights, that uses unequal language, and that demands impossible standards of the resistance while giving a green light to massive violence by the oppressor.

The biased language used to describe Palestinians can be painfully obvious.

Firstly,

The New York Times ran the headline “Shireen Abu Akleh, Trailblazing Palestinian Journalist, Dies at 51". In comparison with the other post for the same newspaper we observed that they used the word "Killed" when it came to American journalist in Ukraine.

A double standard is at play here: why is media coverage of Ukraine and Palestinians so asymmetrical?

The truth is: Palestinians are depicted as less deserving of our sympathy because they are seen as less than human.

As a result of major outrage against the New York Times, the headline was later changed to “Trailblazing Palestinian Journalist Killed in West Bank.” While the change in the headline reflects the importance of persistently raising our voices against mainstream media’s complicity in obscuring the truth, the revised headline still keeps the identity of Shireen’s killer and the cause of her death vague, while the article gives weight to the Israeli military’s framing of the shooting, which contradicted eyewitness reports by fellow journalists who were on the scene with Shireen. Also, even after changing the headline, the NYT inserted the word ‘killed’ in the title. While it was known that the journalist was shot dead, either deliberately or mistakenly, either by Palestinians or by Israelis, it is strange that NYT chose to omit it from the headline that she was killed by a bullet. It took a month-long New York Times investigation to reach the same conclusion that eyewitnesses had immediately reported: that the gunfire that killed Shireen came from the position of an Israeli military vehicle. It is far from the first time the Israeli military has contradicted journalists’ reports from the scene.
The utilization of the passive voice, particularly through the term "died," without explicitly illustrating the event itself, stands as one of the defensive and manipulative tactics employed by Western media outlets to obscure or distort public perceptions.

On the day of the shooting, Israeli military spokesperson Ran Kochav told Army Radio that Abu Akleh had been "filming and working for a media outlet amidst armed Palestinians. They're armed with cameras, if you'll permit me to say so," according to The Times of Israel.

It seems that the camera of Shireen was more powerful than Israeli weapons.

From this screenshot alone, orientalist discourse is prevalent such that Hamas is referred to as terrorists / a terrorist organization four times, as opposed to what Hamas actually is - a resistance group that has the right to armed resistance under international law (here we can see that the legal context is missing). We can also see orientalist discourse in the usage of language such as ‘extreme acts of sexual violence’ to describe what happened, which is especially noteworthy considering the UN report itself does not use such phrasings.

An Israeli-centric framework is also at play, as we can see from the subtitle “Israeli fm complained", where the “Israeli” occupation’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs is quoted, but not a single Palestinian is quoted. This subheading additionally represents anti-Palestinian bias because its message is not central to the aim of the article, it is just added to push forward an Israeli-centric frame – that Hamas is a terrorist group and its supporters should be sanctioned. This “Israeli” narrative continues throughout the rest of the article which is not in this screenshot, such that most of the article is direct quotations from the occupation’s spokespeople.

This article also has a lot of missing contexts. For one, Hamas's legal right to armed resistance is not mentioned. The UN article also does not confirm that Hamas carried out acts of sexual violence, it only says there are “reasonable grounds to believe,” which is not at all what the article reports when using words such as “UN finally recognizes.” The article also clearly omits essential parts of the report such as who was interviewed, failing to mention that all evidence comes from secondhand accounts. Additionally, the article mentions October 7 in a void, failing to mention the occupation and the history that led to the act of resistance on October 7.

Finally, we can see the constant asymmetry in the article and general reporting of Fox News. This can be seen in the word choice such as ‘killing’ of the women, whereas in other articles of Fox News, Palestinians either die or are ‘allegedly killed.’   Fox News also does not report on the continuous sexual violence that the IOF commits against Palestinians, women, men, and children, and that the IOF has been committing long before October 7.  

First, I noticed that the headline implicitly foreshadows that if a ceasefire doesn't occur, it would be because of this attack. Second, the lede reflects two concepts that we learned about "language-word choice" and "orientalist discourses". for example, the word war appears repeatedly instead of the word "genocide". In addition, describing the Hamas as terror thus representing Palestinians as terrorists which was always the case in the western media. Moreover, the author refers back to Oct 7 and thus "missing context" of the Nakba dating back to 1948 and the massacres that happened even before.