An internal style memo from New York Times editors tells reporters not to use words like “genocide” or “Palestine” when covering Israel’s war on Gaza.

The New York Times instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to “avoid” using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept.

The memo also instructs reporters not to use the word Palestine “except in very rare cases” and to steer clear of the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by internally displaced Palestinians, who fled from other parts of Palestine during previous Israeli–Arab wars. The areas are recognized by the United Nations as refugee camps and house hundreds of thousands of registered refugees.

While the document is presented as an outline for maintaining objective journalistic principles in reporting on the Gaza war, several Times staffers told The Intercept that some of its contents show evidence of the paper’s deference to Israeli narratives.

Almost immediately after the October 7 attacks and the launch of Israel’s scorched-earth war against Gaza, tensions began to boil within the newsroom over the Times coverage. Some staffers said they believed the paper was going out of its way to defer to Israel’s narrative on the events and was not applying even standards in its coverage. Arguments began fomenting on internal Slack and other chat groups.

  • @AceticonEnglish
    8•7 months ago

    I’ve lived in the UK for over a decade as an immigrant.

    Any exposure to foreign news media alongside the BBC shows that the BBC is certainly not “a reputable news source” when it comes to international news as it’s always pushing a very specific slant aligned with the thinking of the UK and US governments.

    As for local coverage, a studdy that the BBC itself had the Nottingham University do some years ago showed that the BBC always leans in favour of whichever party is in Government at the time. The UK’s Government has for some years now been Tories, of late the Brexiter Tories, which are almost as far right as Orban in Hungary, just with a posh education.

    If you want a great example, just look up their coverage of Corbyn back when was elected the leader of the Labour Party: one one occasion that news source you call “reputable” literally photoshoped a soviet cap into a picture of him and used it as background in a news segment during the slander campaign to kick Corbyn out as leader of the Labour party because he was an actual leftie rather than a neolib.

    Things like Brexit weren’t born in a total vacuum: there is a huge English nationalist pro-neoliberal slant in the coverage from what is still the TV sender with the largest audience in Britain.