Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)
An excellent example of how the U.S. regime works was provided in a news-report by Ryan Grim and Jeremy Scahill at The Intercept on April 15th, titled “LEAKED NYT GAZA MEMO TELLS JOURNALISTS TO AVOID WORDS ‘GENOCIDE,’ ‘ETHNIC CLEANSING,’ AND ‘OCCUPIED TERRITORY’”. It displayed the fact that the management of the most highly regarded newspaper in the U.S., if not throughout the entire U.S. empire (including England), the New York Times, provides detailed instructions to its reporters concerning how they are to slant their foreign ‘news’-reporting so as to comply with the U.S. Government’s slants — not with the Republican Party’s or the Democratic Party’s, but with the U.S. Government’s, slant, the U.S. Deep State’s, or permanent Military-Industrial Complex’s, slant (which is actually the slant of the U.S. armaments manufacturers, whose market is the U.S. Government and its colonies or ‘allies’, selling to the taxpayers permanent war, for permanent ‘peace’), in international news-reporting. It’s the slant that’s against entities and Governments which the U.S. regime is trying ultimately to conquer (for exploitation by America’s billionaires) by means of sanctions, subversions, coups, and/or ultimately invasions, in order to advance ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, and ‘human rights’, throughout the world. Basically, this slant is directed against the U.S. aristocracy’s enemies-list of their targeted peoples or nations. In the present case, the permanent enemy that the NYT targeted was Palestinians (whom, of course, the NYT’s editorials pretend to support, in order to fool their liberal, Democratic Party, readers, to think that the newspaper couldn’t even possibly be slanting its reporting in this quite opposite way).
Here are highlights of The Intercept’s news-report about the NYT management’s subtle hate-maintaining instructions to their employees, against Palestinians, which instructions read like a propaganda organization’s instructions to its employees on how they are to produce their propaganda articles so as to be able to keep their jobs and work their way up through the ranks of (in this case) the “news” business side of PR:
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 displaced Palestinians expelled 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.
The memo — written by Times standards editor Susan Wessling, international editor Philip Pan, and their deputies — “offers guidance about some terms and other issues we have grappled with since the start of the conflict in October.” …
“I think it’s the kind of thing that looks professional and logical if you have no knowledge of the historical context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,” said a Times newsroom source, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal. …
Said another Times newsroom source, who also asked for anonymity. “But there are unique standards applied to violence perpetrated by Israel.” …
heated language can often obscure rather than clarify the fact,” the memo says.
“Words like ‘slaughter,’ ‘massacre’ and ‘carnage’ often convey more emotion than information. …
Despite the memo’s framing as an effort to not employ incendiary language to describe killings “on all sides,” in the Times reporting on the Gaza war, such language has been used repeatedly to describe attacks against Israelis by Palestinians. …
The Intercept analysis [of many newspapers] showed that the major newspapers reserved terms like “slaughter,” “massacre,” and “horrific” almost exclusively for Israeli civilians killed by Palestinians, rather than for Palestinian civilians killed in Israeli attacks. …
As of November 24, the New York Times had described Israeli deaths as a “massacre” on 53 occasions and those of Palestinians just once. The ratio for the use of “slaughter” was 22 to 1. …
The guidance spells out usage of the word “terrorist.” … “It is accurate to use ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist’ in describing the attacks of Oct. 7. … The Times does not characterize Israel’s repeated attacks on Palestinian civilians as “terrorism,” even when civilians have been targeted. … the guidance says, “‘Genocide’ has a specific definition in international law. In our own voice, we should generally use it only in the context of those legal parameters.” [In other words: avoid using it unless and until the International Criminal Court will say that Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza — long after the fact.] …
Regarding “ethnic cleansing,” the document calls it “another historically charged term,” instructing reporters: “If someone is making such an accusation, we should press for specifics or supply proper context.”
Bucking International Norms
In the cases of describing “occupied territory” and the status of refugees in Gaza, the Times style guidelines run counter to norms established by the United Nations and international humanitarian law.
On the term “Palestine” — a widely used name for both the territory and the U.N.-recognized state — the Times memo contains blunt instructions: “Do not use in datelines, routine text or headlines, except in very rare cases such as when the United Nations General Assembly elevated Palestine to a nonmember observer state, or references to historic Palestine.” The Times guidance resembles that of the Associated Press Stylebook. [There is nothing unusual about what the NYT’s management are doing here: all U.S.-and-allied ’news’-media parrot the U.S. Governent Deep State line.]
The memo directs journalists not to use the phrase “refugee camps” to describe long-standing refugee settlements in Gaza. “While termed refugee camps, the refugee centers in Gaza are developed and densely populated neighborhoods dating to the 1948 war. Refer to them as neighborhoods. …
The United Nations recognizes eight refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, … 600,000 registered refugees. Many are descendants of those who fled to Gaza after being forcibly expelled from their homes in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, which marked the founding of the Jewish state and mass dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. …
Since October 7, Israel has repeatedly bombed refugee camps in Gaza. …
The memo’s instructions on the use of “occupied territories” says, “When possible, avoid the term. …
The admonition against the use of the term “occupied territories,” said a Times staffer, obscures the reality of the conflict, feeding into the U.S. and Israeli insistence that the conflict began on October 7.
“You are basically taking the occupation out of the coverage, which is the actual core of the conflict,” said the newsroom source. “It’s like, ‘Oh let’s not say occupation because it might make it look like we’re justifying a terrorist attack.’”
That news-report about the New York Times concerned international news. The newspaper is funded by advertisements from the organizations of Democratic Party billionaires (the same people who fund the Party); and, so, its coverage domestically is slanted for a Democratic Party audience against Republican Party politicians, just as, for example, the Wall Street Journal is slanted for a Republican Party audience against Democratic Party politicians. But on international news-reporting, all of the U.S. regime’s news-media have the same, bipartisan, slant, and it’s like the NYT’s management were instructing there — targeting against the regime’s billionaires-sponsored ‘enemies’-list.
Thus, the billionaires who really run the Government are being protected by all of the regime’s media, so that any domestic-policy issues will get blamed on the opposite political Party instead of blamed on the aristocracy, the billionaires who are actually in control over the Government (and over the voters); but, on international news-reporting, the slant is bipartisanly the same propaganda line, because both Democratic and Republican billionaires want the U.S. Government to come to control the entire world, all countries. So, the “MIC, or “Military-Industrial Complex, is run, actually, by America’s billionaires; and this is how they do it: by shaping the public’s political perceptions.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.