This is the best summary I could come up with:
Some staff are concerned about Thompson’s willingness to withstand external attempts to influence coverage given that in a former role as the BBC’s director general he was accused of bowing to Israeli government pressure on a number of occasions, including a demand to remove one of the corporation’s most prominent correspondents from her post in Jerusalem in 2005.
In late October, as the Palestinian death toll rose sharply from Israeli bombing with more than 2,700 children killed according to the Gaza health ministry, and as Israel prepared for its ground invasion, a set of guidelines landed in CNN staff inboxes.
The paragraph said that, while CNN would report the human consequences of the Israeli assault and the historical context of the story, “we must continue always to remind our audiences of the immediate cause of this current conflict, namely the Hamas attack and mass murder and kidnap of civilians”.
The Jerusalem bureau chief, Richard Greene, told staff in a memo announcing SecondEyes – first reported by the Intercept – that, because coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is subject to close scrutiny by partisans on both sides, the measure was created as a “safety net so we don’t use imprecise language or words that may sound impartial but can have coded meanings here”.
“The system results in chosen individuals editing any and all reporting with an institutionalised pro-Israel bias, often using passive language to absolve the [Israel Defense Forces] of responsibility, and playing down Palestinian deaths and Israeli attacks,” said one of the network’s journalists.
CNN faced similar accusations of partiality in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in 2001 when the network’s chair, Walter Isaacson, ordered that reports on the killing of Afghan civilians by US forces be balanced with condemnation of the Taliban for its links to al-Qaida.
The original article contains 4,101 words, the summary contains 299 words. Saved 93%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
It would be if they were a journalistic outlet rather than a nonsentient mouthpiece for the US state department and its allies.
I’m guessing it all comes down to money.
No it isn’t, being generally pro israel is just the unpopular opinion rn, it will flip back within the decade.
The article is not talking about pro Israel opinions.
It points out specific ways that current practices are leading to credulous and untrustworthy reporting. And highlights the history that the current editor in chief (who began 2 days after oct 7) has of bowing to Israeli government pressure in his previous role at the BBC, including firing specific staff at their request.
It is obviously not credible journalism to just take the word of a government at war. Governments lie, moreso when they are at war.
Something happened to CNN after fox news had to pay 878 million dollars from the dominion lawsuit.
They went from pure left wing commentary, to giving trump a platform to spread more lies.
Then they just started running with it.
Now they are stuck with left wing staff, required to argue for right wing talking points for their right wing audience.
That something was that they were bought out by a right wing billionaire.
Corporate News Network
Pretty rare to see an honest reveal on how much of a propaganda mouthpiece one of these big Western news agencies is.
Now if only people will remember this and not come down with Gell-Mann Amnesia the next time the free press is pushing people to hate a group or take sides in a conflict.
Reminder that major news outlets like CNN, MSNBC, and Fox just buy their stories from news agencies like Associated Press and Reuters specifically so they can adjust the stories to their agenda. This is why they are news outlets, not news agencies.
If you legitimately want news just being presented as-is, just go to the source and read it directly from the agency. I personally haven’t seen a slant when reading from either Reuters or AP.
Really, you’ve never detected slant from Reuters or AP?
I agree that cnn, fox, etc are outlets and not agencies but calling the agencies unbiased is also wrong.
I only recently learned that knowledge, so I’ve only started doing this - hence the “personally, I haven’t seen” comment. But I probably just haven’t read enough of their articles to get a feel for their slants if they have any.
So far though, I will say, both AP and Reuters are a hell of a lot more neutral and matter-of-fact in presenting news than any news outlet in recent years.
What would be considered slant?
a guide would be good here for defining slant so everyone can go through a checklist and say, yeah that article or news agency’s articles are slantedLiterally everyone has a bias. That is all I’m saying. People like to pretend that some groups keep things “objective” but that’s not really possible or desirable, what is possible is being biased but staying factual.
If you haven’t seen a slant, then those two news agencies are slanted towards things that you already believe. In reality, all news agencies are slanted somehow.
There’s no possible way they could cover every single issue from all perspectives, right? So even if you think that they’re trying to be as neutral as possible, the stories that they pick and choose to cover tell you what their values are.
And sometimes being neutral actually means you’re being slanted, because sometimes the truth isn’t in the middle. Sometimes some of actors really are so bad that you need to call them out on their bad actions, at least if you have any morals.
I personally know people who lived under Israel’s illegal occupation of Lebanon. If America knew even HALF of the shit they get up to, we would demand all funding be cut off immediately.
Don’t be naïve, the US knows it, but simply they don’t care, as it doesn’t fit their narrative
The US government knows it, the US citizens are almost wholly ignorant of it.
*Some of the US government. Deb who does accounting for NIST doesn’t know it (of course); many top officials refuse to know it. Experts who deal with the Middle East know it, and at least some of them are tearing out their hair over it.
Overall I guess you could say they know it, but let’s not pretend this is a well-thought-out approach they’re executing. It’s a lobby-fueled clusterfuck, and it’s probably going to blow up in their face.
I don’t think it’s simply a question of knowledge. A lot of people make money by supporting the status quo, especially the military industrial complex, and other people hold racist views towards all Palestinians.
America knows, America supports it. Quit thinking America is moral. It is THE LEAST moral country that exists.
American citizens don’t know because the information is being kept from them.
