The online world isn't buying biased Gaza narratives

The death toll after Israel’s attack on the Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza has been appalling. Nearly 300 were killed in what EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell called “another massacre of civilians”. And yet some seemed to see it very differently.

“In Israeli hostage rescue, minutes made the difference” was one headline. “How Israel Saved a Hostage Rescue Mission That Nearly Failed” was another. “The Israeli mission to rescue four hostages from Gaza echoed Entebbe. It will be hard to repeat” was a third, which referred to the 1976 mission led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s elder brother Yonatan to rescue Israeli hostages from an airport in Uganda.

Many were more even-handed, but it beggars belief that anyone could believe that the main focus of this story should be on the four hostages saved – as welcome as that will be for them and their families – and not the deaths of hundreds of Palestinians, with further hundreds wounded. Those that evidently did included the US State Department, whose press statement on “The Rescue of Four Hostages from Gaza” failed to mention the Palestinian casualties entirely.

When wondering how anyone could think like that, I happened to see the news about Noam Chomsky’s ill health – and it reminded me of the theory he and Edward S Herman wrote about in a famous book of the same name: manufacturing consent.

I’d never taken the “propaganda model of communication” – which suggests that what we think of as “news” has already been filtered to serve the interests of elites – too seriously. This was partly because about 20 years ago, a group of activists repeatedly argued that journalists in Britain (as I then was) were all corporate stooges who had either been bought off or had been tricked into believing the mainstream narratives of the day. Being certain that I’d made up my own mind, I rejected their whole approach.

When one sees the headlines above, however, or the performances by US President Joe Biden and his administration's spokespeople who for months have seemed unable to accept that the devastation Israel has wrought upon the Palestinian people truly matters, one has to conclude that you have to be conditioned to see the world in that way.

Consent – witting or unwitting – to that narrative has to have been earned by a particular marshalling, even distortion, of fact, opinions and values, probably over quite a long time.

Attitudes can harden pretty quickly, too, though, as a report on British media coverage of China published by King’s College London in January shows. Particularly in recent years, it states, UK outlets have made “use of repeated memes about China that reinforce a monochrome, reductionist and negative picture of the country and its politics”. This “is influential in policymaking and contributes to shaping the acceptable bounds of policy discussion”.

Fortunately, there is a world where conformity is far harder, if not impossible, to manufacture: social media and online. This isn’t new. Long ago, I made the case that Malaysia’s 2008 polls were the country’s first “internet election”. The then government thought online campaigning didn’t matter; the then opposition knew differently, and it made significant inroads in winning state assemblies.

But online spaces have expanded exponentially since then. Anyone who looks at X – to take one example – knows that there are a huge number of impassioned threads and conversations constantly going into great detail about what has been happening in Gaza.

Only a few weeks after October 7, many were already arguing that Israel had lost the war for global opinion among the billions who are clicking and swiping, plenty of whom may not care overly whether their information is coming from storied legacy media outlets or from ordinary people on the street.

Just today I could read US Senator Bernie Sanders calling Mr Netanyahu a “war criminal”, the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem’s report on state-backed settler violence in the West Bank, and heart-rending posts from the Palestinian politician Mustafa Barghouti. (Later, for some light relief, I might spend 30 minutes on a watch forum, interacting with fellow enthusiasts. The point is all of life is there online.)

Here, too, you can find figures who have either mostly vanished or been banished from the mainstream media.

Take Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs. Once one of the most prominent economists on the planet – he remains a UN Sustainable Development Goals Advocate – his words are still reported in online outlets, often from the Middle East and China. But he is generally absent from the platforms that used to give him plenty of space. The reason? Prof Sachs challenges the narratives that dominate the western political classes on Israel, Russia and China.

Has he become a conspiracy theorist, as some allege? You can decide for yourself by watching his interview on Piers Morgan Uncensored from this March. That’s another example. Mr Morgan was recently taunted on a BBC programme for no longer having a television show. Since Mr Morgan has 2.9 million subscribers on YouTube and his channel has reportedly had more than 700 million views, I daresay he’s not too bothered. Online and on social media, everything is content. And content is king.

So there is another, huge alternative media universe out there, in which each time Israel conducts another massacre the perpetrators are named and the victims are not erased.

But it still troubles me that dissenting voices have been so completely excised from the big beasts of traditional media, particularly in the West. There is no obligation to agree with them, but I do think we should hear them.

Also, surely we can agree on this: something has gone badly wrong when any organisation can believe that the headlines I quoted at the start were an appropriate way to describe what happened in Gaza on June 8.

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