Cross posted by Leah Benoz
On Thursday 28th May Sky News aired a special report on Gaza. Titled “Gaza: Fight for Survival” it claimed to bring together all the crucial insights and latest reports on the war in Gaza. Unfortunately, what actually aired was an hour of manipulation, omission and propaganda, designed specifically to frame Israel as a uniquely evil, genocidal aggressor, and Palestinians as helpless victims with no agency.
The very first line; “Gaza is in a fight for survival” set the tone. Within seconds Israel was quietly accused of lying about its intentions; “Israel says its mission is to eliminate Hamas and bring back its hostages… some allies are saying enough is enough and asking whether this is still a war on Hamas or an existential threat to the Palestinians”
By 1:32 “Gazans are crying out for help”,
At 2:15 “Unequivocal, of course its a genocide”
2:29 “Is this the time Benjamin Netanyahu stops the fighting?”
2:37 “There will not be a Palestinian State between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea never ever”
3:12 “The Irish Government back that accusation (of genocide)”
In less than four minutes a casual viewer is left with a single conclusion; Israel is committing a genocide, and no counterpoint has been offered.
Journalists should never shy away from difficult truths, and the human suffering in Gaza should never be minimised. But journalistic integrity requires interrogating political narratives. It means asking difficult questions not only of the Israeli government but of Hamas, of the UN, and of anyone else advancing one sided viewpoints. What’s most concerning about the programme on Thursday is that it’s difficult to argue that it represents mistakes, which leaves us with the distasteful possibility that it represents deliberate editorial choices to omit and distort facts in order to push a chosen conclusion. So when we look at this programme through the lens of core journalistic standards such as framing, accuracy, sourcing and balance, is it Gaza that’s fighting for survival, or is it Sky News journalism?
“The Gazan health ministry says over 54,000 Palestinians have been killed since the October 7th attacks”
The greatest power the media has to control narratives lies in the things they leave out. Simple choices like the refusal to point out that the Gazan Health Ministry is run by Hamas, and therefore all of these facts that are presented without question come directly from Hamas, are made deliberately, and in this report, they were made continuously.
Why did Alistair Bunkall call a report on the Gazan ambulance crews “my report” while failing to mention he hasn’t stepped foot in Gaza and obfuscating the issue of who was actually filming those scenes? Why are we not told that Shifa Hospital where the paramedics are based is a known Hamas stronghold, with a long and well documented history of tunnels, command centres and even hostage movements? Is it because Sky doesn’t know? Or is it because they don’t want you to know? And why in the segment on injured children is the hospital not named at all, but only referred to as “the last hospital in southern Gaza”? Could it be because that suggests that the hospital was Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, where just months ago a senior Hamas leader was killed by the IDF? If the interviews are being provided from hospitals with even suggestions of Hamas control wouldn’t integrity demand that Sky news at least make their viewers aware that those interviews may be compromised or under duress?
If it stopped at the hospitals we could perhaps give benefit of the doubt, but it didn’t. Throughout the piece key details were omitted, obscured, or manipulated to blame israel.
A “rush” at a world food programme aid warehouse killed four; but we aren’t told that two of them died of gunshot wounds allegedly fired by Hamas as they tried to prevent civilians accessing aid.
An image of an armed Palestinian man with UN vehicles is shown, but we’re told it’s 6km inside an Israeli combat zone, subtly implying Israeli orchestration of aid looting.
The claim that “Israel seized Palestinian territory in the West Bank in 1967”, one that is simply untrue because the West Bank was under Jordanian control in 1967, is followed up by “700,000 Israeli settlers currently live in the West Bank in communities considered illegal under international law” ignoring decades of legal debate, thousands of years of Jewish history, and the Oslo accords in one fell swoop.
Over and over again for an hour Sky News omitted crucial details of which they cannot claim to be unaware, leaving the average viewer with a dangerously skewed understanding of the situation and the well informed viewer with only one conclusion to draw; deliberate narrative manipulation.
After the introduction, it takes the programme 17 minutes to say the word hostage. A conversation with a family member perhaps, or a released hostage as a first hand witness to what is unfolding? No. In the context of a ceasefire deal that would secure the release of “ten living hostages and 18 of the dead hostages”. That’s it. Numbers. Mentioned with far less emotion than numbers of aid trucks or bags of flour, and quickly glossed over. In fact the existence of the hostages was mentioned in passing only 4 times in the whole programme. No names, no testimony.
Israeli voices were either extremist or absent. The voices that were chosen were a few minutes with Daniela Weiss, a hardline ultra nationalist considered fringe even on the Israeli right, and a car crash interview with Professor Jacob Nagel, former acting national security advisor to Netanyahu, in which Yalda Hakim utterly refused to let him speak, talked over him, demanded time to repeat negative quotes even when they were utterly irrelevant to what he was trying to say, and became visibly upset when he pointed out that Hamas could end this war in a minute by releasing the hostages, and that Israel had already accepted the latest ceasefire agreement, a fact that was never put to either former UN aid chief Martin Griffiths, or Irish Minister for Diaspora and International Development Neale Richmond, while they were given free reign to accuse Israel of genocide with no pushback at all.
There were no questions for Martin Griffiths about Tom Fletchers egregious 14,000 dead babies libel, even when Griffiths singled him out for praise by name, and there were no questions for the Irish government about why it was trying to expand the definition of genocide in order to find Israel guilty of it. In fact, there were very few questions for them at all, just vaguely leading statements like the frankly stunning “So you do believe what we are seeing now as a result of inaction and not allowing aid to get into the territory and for this bombardment and killing to continue you do believe it’s a genocide” designed to elicit specific sound bite responses, in this case; “it’s unequivocal, of course it’s a genocide”.
The constantly recurring theme of accusations of genocide were backed up not by vigorous interrogation of that word’s very specific legal definition, or by comparisons with already established genocides, but by a repeated return to a single core idea. The Israelis are killing children. Three children were chosen to be shown, two badly injured and one with a graphic and painful birth defect in need of treatment. Their suffering is unbearable and the idea that it could be used cynically by anyone to make a political argument is simply grotesque. No one should ever have to question the motives of someone reporting such horrors, but the fact remains that the accusation of deliberately killing children is the oldest form of antisemitism there is, almost a thousand years old, and when these children are presented with facts from “Gazan health officials” (Hamas) and no hospitals are mentioned by name, or airstrikes are shown with no information as to the targets of those airstrikes or why children were present in evacuation zones, and when not one Israeli child was mentioned in the entire programme, one is forced to ask the question. What purpose is being served here, and does it benefit these children, or Hamas’ propaganda?
This Special Programme was yet another opportunity for a western broadcaster to fully interrogate Hamas’ narrative, to push back against abounding blood libel and unfounded accusations, to offer balance and to demand answers to the difficult questions, but once again it failed and what it produced in its place was an hour of narrative manipulation, distortion and propaganda.
Less than two weeks ago two Israeli diplomats were shot at a Jewish event by a man screaming “Free Palestine”.
Yesterday, a group of Jews at a hostage event, including children and a holocaust survivor, were burned alive by a man with Molotov cocktails screaming “Free Palestine”.
Propaganda that fuels rage against the Jewish State is causing violence against Jews.
Yalda Hakim pushed Jacob Nagel to take responsibility for Israel’s actions. Maybe Sky News should take responsibility for theirs.
I wonder why Hamas built so many military tunnels and yet forgot to build a single air-raid shelter for the Gazan people? One might almost conclude that it wants to use Gazan civilians as shields and dead Gazan babies for propaganda …