Striving for a deceptive “balance,” US media miscast the devastating violence of Israel’s attacks on Gaza and obscured the lopsided nature of the death toll.

This started with the timeline preferred in much of the press. By most media accounts, the conflict started when three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped on June 12; their bodies were discovered on June 30. The Israeli government immediately declared Hamas responsible. Days after the discovery of the victims’ bodies, a Palestinian teenager was abducted and murdered by Israeli extremists, in what was called a “revenge” attack. Hamas rockets started falling in Israel, and “Operation Protective Edge” was Israel’s response.

This narrative of Israeli response to Palestinian aggression was set from the beginning: “Striking back. Israel hitting hard overnight with 34 precision airstrikes on a Hamas compound,” declared ABC World News’ Alex Marquardt (7/1/14). A USA Today editorial (7/15/14) explained that the war started when “Hamas began its latest round of mostly ineffectual rocket attacks on Israel.”

But this chain of events is dubious. “Operation Brother’s Keeper”—the Israeli response to the abduction—resulted in mass arrests in the West Bank, including Hamas officials, and killed five Palestinians. The declaration that Hamas was responsible for the abduction and killings—often treated as a fact in news coverage—was never firmly established, as the suspects were militants well-known for operating in defiance of Hamas leadership (FAIR Blog, 7/28/14).

The Hamas rockets that Israel, in the conventional timeline, was “striking back” against were fired in response to an Israeli airstrike that killed a Hamas leader, Israeli officials told the Times of Israel (6/30/14); these were the first rockets fired by Hamas since 2012, the officials said.

Nor is it clear why the chronology should begin with the three Israeli teens killed in June, and not with two Palestinian teens shot to death by Israeli soldiers in May while protesting the expulsion of Palestinians from Israel (B’Tselem, 4/20/14). The two were among 84 Palestinian minors killed by Israeli security forces in the last five years, according to B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights monitor.

Israel’s previous assaults on Gaza—most notably “Operation Cast Lead,” which killed 1,391 Palestinians, mostly noncombatants, including 318 children, in 2008–09 (B’Tselem, 1/1/11)—were mostly down the media memory hole. The land, air and sea blockade that Israel has maintained against Gaza since 2007 was likewise seldom mentioned, even though blockades are generally regarded as acts of war.

But the desire to start the clock with Palestinian aggression and Israeli retaliation is a familiar media framing of the conflict (FAIR Action Alert, 4/4/02))—“Palestinian militants continue firing rockets into Israel, whose air force answers with precision airstrikes,” as ABC World News (7/4/14) put it. “The response by Israel was quick and powerful,” NBC anchor Brian Williams (7/1/14) declared.

Also familiar was what came next—an obvious effort to “balance” coverage to show suffering on both sides, despite the obvious fact that the suffering was overwhelmingly occurring on one side. (At the end of July, 275 times as many civilians had been killed in Gaza as in Israel—Intercept, 7/29/14.)

Nightly newscasts were often split between correspondents in Gaza and Tel Aviv, reporting on the mood in both places—and conveying Israeli fear was often foregrounded. On the NBC Nightly News (7/8/14), Williams narrated:

As the skies over Israel have lit up tonight, sirens have sounded and Israelis have been told they have between 15 seconds and one minute to run to shelter and avoid rockets launched by Hamas.

NPR host Robert Siegel (7/8/14) posed this question to correspondent Ari Shapiro: “How is this affecting living in southern Israel, and, for that matter, in Gaza?”

Shapiro spent 120 words on the stress experienced by Israelis—how long it takes to get to a bomb shelter, and what one family felt when sirens go off when they’re sitting down for lunch. Gaza got 41 words, a reference to an NPR producer living amid airstrikes that were actually killing entire families.

USA Today had a similar piece (7/9/14) headlined “In Shadow of Fear in Israel, Gaza.” The paper leads with the story of a clerk in an Israeli toy store who was remaining behind the counter as the warning sirens blared. The headline placed this situation on the same level with what was happening in Gaza, where “more than two dozen Palestinians were killed and scores injured from Israeli airstrikes.”

The desire for “balance” may have been what led ABC World News anchor Diane Sawyer (7/8/14) to make one of the most widely criticized errors of the conflict, narrating over a scene of devastation: “Here, an Israeli family trying to salvage what they can, one woman standing speechless among the ruins.” The photos were of Palestinians, as Sawyer acknowledged in an on-air correction (7/11/14). The level of destruction shown in the pictures was not evident anywhere in Israel.

But in corporate media that were continually treating the threat to Israelis as comparable to what was being experienced in Gaza, such mistakes are hardly an accident. Consider the opening of the newscast in question, where Sawyer declared: “On the brink: Rockets raining down on Israel. The Israelis trying to blast them out of the sky before they hit.” If one’s understanding of the conflict centered on rockets “raining down on Israel,” one is bound to assume that this “rain” causes significant damage.

There was often an implied military symmetry in coverage as well. “Israel and Hamas Trade Attacks as Tension Rises” was the New York Times headline (7/8/14) over a story that began: “Israel and Hamas escalated their military confrontation on Tuesday, with Israel carrying out extensive air attacks in response to heavy rocket fire.”

The same day’s Wall Street Journal front page (7/8/14) announced “Israel, Hamas Escalate Violence,” and led with the Palestinian escalation: “Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip unleashed their most far-reaching rocket attack ever on major Israeli population centers.”

On NPR’s All Things Considered (7/8/14), host Siegel told listeners, “Both Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas intensified their attacks today.” Correspondent Ari Shapiro noted that “Israel’s military had said it had fired on 150 targets in Gaza, in response to 160 rockets being fired from Gaza towards Israel.”

But if citing the total number of attacks was intended to send the message that both sides were equally culpable in committing violence, the wide disparity in the death toll would be a sign that such “balance” is not a proper journalistic goal—if it leads to the sacrifice of truth.

One might conclude from such coverage that corporate media value some human lives more than others. And some media figures, in fact, made it clear that they feel this way.

On CBS’s Face the Nation (7/13/14; FAIR Blog, 7/15/14), host Bob Schieffer repeatedly expressed concern for Israeli civilians who felt threatened, saying that the war “really came home to a lot of Americans” when they heard rocket warning sirens during his interview with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The hundreds of Palestinians who had been killed at that point did not provoke Schieffer to express any sympathy—or to imagine that “a lot of Americans” might be pained by those deaths as well.

Two weeks later (7/27/14), he explained his worldview more fully:

The Palestinian people find themselves in the grip of a terrorist group that has embarked on a strategy to get its own children killed in order to build sympathy for its cause, a strategy that might actually be working, at least in some quarters.

Schieffer found comfort in a quote he attributed to former Israeli leader Golda Meir: “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children… but we can never forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.”

Schieffer’s attribution of the 226 children killed by Israel as of July 27 (UNOCHA .org, 7/27/14) to a Hamas “strategy to get its own children killed” that was “forcing [Israel] to kill their children” might seem like a bizarre, not to say racist, form of projection. But it is just an extreme expression of the media’s diminishment of Palestinian life. Schieffer made his priorities clear elsewhere in the show, telling Netanyahu that while

many people agree with and sympathize with your determination to stop these attacks on your people…they are also worried that every time the world sees these pictures of these children being hurt and killed, that you may be losing the battle for world opinion.

To Schieffer, Palestinian suffering is bad because it harms Israel’s image. It follows, then, that the less the media show of it, the better.

SIDEBAR

When Headlines (Don’t) Tell the Story

Headlines are supposed to convey the essence of a news story, but often they served to obscuring the reality of the crisis in Gaza. A Reuters dispatch (7/8/14) reported the news that 23 Palestinians were killed—17 of them civilians—under the headline “Hamas Rockets Land Deep in Israel as It Bombards Gaza Strip.”

When an Israeli missile struck a beachside cafe where a crowd had gathered to watch a World Cup match, the New York Times (7/10/14) went with the Web headline “Missile at Beachside Gaza Cafe Finds Patrons Poised for World Cup.” Many readers were alarmed at the idea that a missile might “find” a group of civilians; the headline was eventually changed to “In Rubble of Gaza Seaside Cafe, Hunt for Victims Who Had Come for Soccer.”

But if there was a lesson learned, the Times had a funny way of showing it. Just a few days later, the paper ran a dramatic account of the killing of 4 young boys on a Gaza beach. The initial headline—“Four Young Boys Killed Playing on Gaza Beach”—was apparently too precise, since it was later altered to “Boys Drawn to Gaza Beach, and Into Center of Mideast Strife.” Times public editor Margaret Sullivan (7/22/14) brought the complaints to editor Dean Baquet, who explained that while online headlines tend to be direct, the print versions are “a little poetic and written in the context of the whole.”

Poetry can come at a price, though. “Loss of Shelter and Electricity Worsens a Crisis for Fleeing Gazans,” read a July 30 headline. Homes and power plants were not “lost,” of course—they were destroyed by Israeli bombing. -P.H.