What the Mainstream Media is Not Reporting About the Israeli Side of the War

If you rely on the mainstream media for news about the Gaza War, 90% of what you read or listen to will consist of tallies of the Gazan dead, pictures of mournful mothers holding their dead babies wrapped in shrouds, while a voiceover assures us they were killed in an Israeli airstrike. Or you may see videos of families making their way, with their heaped-up belongings on donkey carts, out of one city to another, and endless shots of destroyed buildings. One Palestinian man has been shown in three videos taken in three different parts of Gaza, holding in his arms three different dead children (or at least their eyes are closed and they are not moving) who are all said to be his only child. Devastation, human and material, inflicted on the poor Palestinians, is everywhere. The Israelis are seldom seen; they are the sinister force off-camera that we are told has wantonly inflicted all that pain.

But there is much more about the war against Israel to which the mainstream media pays scant attention. That journalistic failure is discussed here: “What mainstream media isn’t reporting during the Israel-Hamas war – opinion,” by Andrea Samuels, Jerusalem Post, May 24, 2024:

If you’re reading this outside of Israel on jpost.com, chances are, I’m preaching to the converted as it means you get your news about what’s going on here from a reliable Israeli news source – The Jerusalem Post.

However, those who have just stumbled across this article, whose main information concerning the situation here is the mainstream media (MSM), will probably be surprised by what they’re about to read. In short, MSM will only tell you half a story, and a biased one at that.

Diaspora dwellers could be forgiven for thinking that the war in Israel is centered around Gaza alone: “Nothing about the North of Israel on any news in [the] UK. The only news at the moment is about getting food into Rafah,” said Chana Werner of Bolton, UK.

When was the last time you heard or read about the near-daily barrages of rockets launched by Hezbollah into the Galilee? They are mentioned, if at all, only briefly, as part of a story on the IDF retaliatory airstrikes in northern Lebanon.

Those who live stateside share the same problem, as Sandy Wasserman confirmed, “I have to seek [Israeli news] out online. Then I read it from various sources. But it’s not reported in the standard US TV news. All we hear about is Trump’s trial.”

In American news broadcasts, it is domestic, not foreign, news that dominates. In the 30-minute evening news broadcasts fully eight minutes is spent on advertisements. Of the twenty-two minutes remaining, at least 17 minutes is spent on reports of extreme weather (flooding in Houston, tornadoes in Missouri), mass shootings at schools and workplaces, the assorted trials and latest tribulations of Donald Trump, a report on how the Stock Market has been feeling poorly, and then the heartwarming stories, toward the end of the broadcast, about a serviceman who surprises his daughter at her elementary school graduation when she thought he was at a base overseas, or about a homeless boy who has just been given a full scholarship to Harvard, or about a 93-year-old who finally receives the army medal that had been lost in the mail some 70 years ago.

And wherever possible, a touching story to end the news — a sure crowd pleaser — usually about a primiparous panda named Ling-Ling giving birth at an American zoo That leaves a total of five minutes for foreign news — the grinding war in Ukraine, the violent chaos of gang rule in Haiti, the trade war with China and the Chinese ships now showing the flag in Taiwanese waters, and finally, the Gaza war, which is given, at best, two minutes of airtime, for those videos of dead Palestinian children being grieved over by their parents, and of whole city blocks in Khan Younis or Gaza City or Rafah now shown lying in ruins.

As we all know, or at least ought to know, on October 7, Hamas and their supporters flooded into Israel from Gaza, hellbent on death and destruction….

Since then, the world has watched as the war has been prosecuted in the Strip, poring over every military decision, largely trying to paint Israel and the IDF as the aggressor, and regarding as victims Hamas, its supporters, and the people of Gaza – often unable to distinguish between them.

The IDF is being scrutinized in Gaza as no other army in history has been scrutinized. What is the IDF doing in Al-Shifa Hospital? Why did it close the Rafah crossing? (Answer: it didn’t. Egypt did. But that is never spelled out.) Has the IDF used phosphorus bombs? Why does the IDF not treat Palestinians wounded in the war? (Answer: it does, in the eight field hospitals the IDF has set up inside Gaza).