WASHINGTON, APR 17 /DNA/ – American support for the crimes of the Israeli occupation continues and increases, so what are we to do? The New York Times prohibits its journalists from mentioning genocide and ethnic cleansing, avoiding the “occupied territories” and “Palestine”
The Intercept website published a report prepared by Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grimm, in which they said that the New York Times issued instructions to journalists covering the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to “avoid” using the term “occupied territories” when using the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing.” Description of the Palestinian territories, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by the site. The memo also asks reporters not to use the word Palestine “except in very rare cases” and to stay away from the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza where displaced Palestinians expelled from other parts of Palestine have sought refuge during previous Israeli-Arab wars. The United Nations recognizes these areas as refugee camps and houses hundreds of thousands of registered refugees. The memo — written by Susan Wesling, standards editor of The Times (as Americans call the paper for short), and international editor Philip Pan, and their deputies — “provides guidance on some of the terminology and other issues we have grappled with since the beginning of the conflict in October.” While the document is presented as a general outline for maintaining objective journalistic principles in covering the Gaza war, several Times staffers told The Intercept that some of its contents show evidence of the newspaper’s acquiescence to Israeli narratives. A source in the newspaper’s newsroom, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, said of the Gaza memo: “I think this kind of thing seems professional and logical if you have no knowledge of the historical context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But if you knew, it would be clear how much justification is given to Israel.” The guidance was first distributed to Times journalists in November, and the guidance — which combined and expanded on previous standard guidance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — was updated regularly over the following months.
