Following escalations in Gaza in the past year, significant media attention has been paid to the ongoing conflict and its expansion throughout the Middle East. Commentators sympathetic to both Palestinian and Israeli experiences have raised charges of bias against mainstream Western publications. I’ll center the anti-Palestinian bias evidenced by independent researchers and mainstream Western media insiders from publications like Reuters, The Washington Post, the BBC and CNN, because it’s more prevalent. Clearly, not every article displays such bias, but many do. Given the pervasiveness of media bias, I think readers have a responsibility to carefully scrutinize the media they consume.
Erasure is a commonly noted form of bias. A 2024 analysis by The Intercept reviewed articles published in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times from Oct. 7 to Nov. 25, 2023 and found that “[f]or every two Palestinian deaths, Palestinians are mentioned once. For every Israeli death, Israelis are mentioned eight times.” Sometimes erasure isn’t as explicit as outright exclusion: sometimes Palestinian voices and experiences are platformed, but in a way that discredits them. This mode of erasure is not as well documented, but this lack of documentation perfectly highlights why careful reading is important to understanding anti-Palestinian media bias on our campus and in general.
In her 2007 book “Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing”, Miranda Fricker defines epistemic injustice as “a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower.” One form of epistemic injustice is testimonial injustice, in which the testimony of an individual or a group of individuals is discredited or dismissed based on prejudice. Fricker gives a number of examples which see people discredited on the basis of race and nationality, among other factors. We can find analogues in our news. Palestinian individuals and groups are often categorized as “terrorist,” and subsequently, either implicitly or explicitly, discredited on this basis.
It may not be clear what the problem is with testimonial injustice. Certainly, it’s humiliating to be disregarded, but the wrong is much greater than that. Knowing is a capacity essential to human value; to challenge someone’s capacity as a knower is to challenge their humanity. Thus, testimonial injustice is a form of dehumanizing rhetoric that justifies the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, by Israel, with U.S. bombs.
Unfortunately, this anti-Palestinian testimonial injustice even appears in The Ithacan. At the beginning of a November 2023 article, two claims are made regarding Hamas: first, that they killed hundreds of civilians, and second, that they took hostages, some of whom are children. The first claim is uncited, the second is cited to the “Israeli government” and both are auxiliary to the sentence they appear in. Their place in the sentence implies something about the information: it’s a given, and it need not be evidenced to be taken seriously. Moreover, the lack of citation in the first case and the lack of information about potential bias for the citation in the second case disallows and discourages readers to investigate the claims’ veracity. When Israeli tragedy is presented this way, it is made significant. The way details about Palestinian tragedy are presented, on the other hand, encourages readers to disregard it — who, after all, would take seriously reports “overseen” by a group “killing hundreds of civilians?” The way it is prefaced serves as a preemptive ‘don’t take these numbers, or the tragedy they represent, too seriously.’ When Palestinian tragedy is presented this way, it is discredited and dismissed. This is a clear case of testimonial injustice in the media.
My intention here is not to bash The Ithacan for the sake of bashing. On the contrary, I know that many of The Ithacan’s staff are caring, hardworking people committed to maintaining high standards of journalistic and moral integrity. But no author or publication is infallible, and I think the real point here is that we, as both readers and writers, should read carefully. How we interpret the world affects others, both in regard to the fact that our individual interpretations influence the viewpoints of those around us and that our collective responses can effect material political change. We owe careful reading not only to ourselves, but to our communities, on both local and international scales.
