A New York Times staffer told the Intercept (4/15/24) that the paper was “basically taking the occupation out of the coverage, which is the actual core of the conflict.”
New York Times editors issued a memo to staffers that warned against the use of “inflammatory language and incendiary accusations on all sides”—but the instructions offered by the memo, which was leaked to the Intercept (4/15/24), seemed designed to dampen criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza and to reinforce the Israeli narrative of the conflict.
Among the terms the memo tells Times reporters to avoid: “Palestine” (“except in very rare cases”), “occupied territories” (say “Gaza, the West Bank, etc.”) and “refugee camps” (“refer to them as neighborhoods, or areas”).
These are all standard terms: “Palestine” is the name of a state recognized by the United Nations and 140 of its 193 members. The “occupied territories” are the way Gaza and the West Bank are referred to by the UN as well as the United States. “Refugee camps” are what they are called by the UN agency that administers the eight camps in Gaza.
The memo discourages the use of the terms “genocide” (“We should…set a high bar for allowing others to use it as an accusation”) and “ethnic cleansing” (“another historically charged term”).
Genocide is defined by the Genocide Convention as certain “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” These acts include “killing members of the group” and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” The International Court of Justice ruled in January that it was “plausible” that Israel was in violation of the Genocide Convention (NPR, 1/26/24). A US federal judge has likewise held that “the current treatment of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli military may plausibly constitute a genocide in violation of international law” (Guardian, 2/1/24).
“Our problem is not allowing the exit, but a lack of countries that are ready to take Palestinians in,” Netanyahu told a Likud ally (Mondoweiss, 12/28/23) “And we are working on it.” At the New York Times, you aren’t supposed to call this “ethnic cleansing.”
“Ethnic cleansing” does not have a legal definition, but surely the Israeli military campaign that has displaced 85% of Gaza’s population, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promises he is “working on” the “voluntary emigration” of that population (Mondoweiss, 12/28/23), qualifies under any reasonable standard.
In contrast to its take on “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing,” the memo contends that “it is accurate to use ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist’ in describing the attacks of October 7″; the words “fighters” or “militants,” however, are discouraged for participants in those attacks. This is the opposite of the approach taken by outlets like AP (X, formerly Twitter, 1/7/21) and the BBC (10/11/23); John Simpson, world affairs editor for the latter, calls “terrorism” a “loaded word, which people use about an outfit they disapprove of morally.”
Also on the Times‘ list of approved language: “the deadliest attack on Israel in decades.” Reporters are apparently not offered any superlatives to use to describe the Israeli assault on Gaza, such as “among the deadliest and most destructive in history” (AP, 12/21/23), or the most “rapid deterioration into widespread starvation” (Oxfam, 3/18/24), or “the biggest cohort of pediatric amputees in history” (New Yorker, 3/21/24).
“Our goal is to provide clear, accurate information, and heated language can often obscure rather than clarify the fact,” says the memo, written by Times standards editor Susan Wessling and international editor Philip Pan, along with their deputies. “Words like ‘slaughter,’ ‘massacre’ and ‘carnage’ often convey more emotion than information. Think hard before using them in our own voice.” The memo asks, “Can we articulate why we are applying those words to one particular situation and not another?”
As FAIR noted in a new study (4/17/24), the Times does apply “heated language” in a decidedly lopsided manner. When Times articles used the word “brutal” to describe a party in the Gaza conflict, 73% of the time it was used to characterize Palestinians. An analysis by the Intercept (1/9/24) of Gaza crisis coverage in the Times (as well as the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal) found that
highly emotive terms for the killing of civilians like “slaughter,” “massacre” and “horrific” were reserved almost exclusively for Israelis who were killed by Palestinians, rather than the other way around.
“Horrific” was used by reporters and editors nine times as often to describe the killing of Israelis rather than Palestinians; “slaughter” described Israelis deaths 60 times more than Palestinian deaths, and “massacre” more than 60 times.
ACTION:
Please ask the New York Times to revise its guidance on coverage of the Gaza crisis so that it is no longer banning standard descriptions and placing the most accurate characterizations of Israeli actions off limits.
CONTACT:
Letters: letters@nytimes.com
Readers Center: Feedback
Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.
Featured image: The New York Times Building (Creative Commons photo: Wally Gobetz)
My email to NYT editor:
Editor,
I think your coverage of the “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” that is occurring in Gaza and the West Bank is a gross dereliction of journalistic ethics. You have instructed your writers to avoid use of those terms and others such as “occupied territories” and “refugee camps.” Even though those terms provide an accurate description of the US sponsored mass murder in Palestine. I am astonished no end, although history should long ago have informed my intuition to be predisposed otherwise, that October 7 is widely reported. Often inaccurately. The three-quarters of a century and beyond of similar daily terror that Palestine endured in the lead up to October 7 is ignored. It’s reminiscent of Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 2005 about Bush’s war of aggression in Iraq: even when the Vietnam war was happening it wasn’t happening. If there were no illegal Israeli occupation and apartheid in Palestine, there would have been no October 7. Yet you advise your reporters to elide description of those facets of this terror, depriving your readers of an accurate appraisal of the nature of the conflict. In the process you do your readers, the country and the world a disservice.
hey potshot, the NYT’s doesn’t give a crap regarding your ‘Letter to the editor’ just cancel you bloody subscription and that they care about.
I wrote the letter as an act of solitary with Jim Naureckas’ suggestion and wisdom. Whether anyone cares about my opinion or not is relatively immaterial. I can’t stand by and do nothing while I watch the vicious US-sponsored genocide play out in Gaza and the West Bank. Writing a letter is the least I can do. I haven’t looked at the New York Times since the fiasco of their coverage in the lead up to Bush’s war of aggression in March of 2003. I didn’t before that either, but that’s a different discussion. Many of the NYT editorialists – the obscene McMansion dwelling Thomas Friedman, David Brooks, Judith Miller and others along with the paper itself – were NEVER right about 2003. Very much more often they were 180 degrees on the wrong side of the issue. Indeed, in a just war crimes tribunal for the Bush regime, the NYT would be in the dock along with Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle, Krauthammer, and the rest of a lengthy list of the mass-murdering liars. You don’t take the NYT seriously, do you?
I was a big fan of Fair.org 10-15 years ago. I’ve returned to see that this organization is now part of the very media environment which they set out to challenge. I was a bit shocked to see the spate of articles with the hard pro-palestinian bent; not because being pro-Palestinian is unpopular. On the contrary, pro-Palestine voices are the loudest among people 40 and under, despite the legacy media’s unwavering defense of Israel. You are on the money side now, which isn’t to say that anyone at your organization is getting filthy rich. But importantly, guys like me can no longer trust you. It feels like you are feeding sharks when I peruse your articles. Get yours, FAIR. I’ll get my news where those reporting bravely digs into the nuance and complexities of issues like Israel/Palestine which deserve to be protected from the reductivity of coverage like yours. Grown ups realize that when it comes to divorce or the middle east: its never as one sided as one half of the partnership would have you believe. If Jim Naureckus is alarmed with the semantics of war reporting, then he’s clearly the kind of friend to Palestine that makes regular house calls to drink chillable red wine from a box and let Her “vent” about Her impossible husband. That’s kind of you. But truth is like divorce court; its ugly, inconvenient, and always reveals the shittiness of both parties. In this scenario, FAIR is the Aunt on Mom’s side that is willing to tell the kids what a problem dad is. They’ll grow up eventually and see the bigger picture.
The New York Times has been an organ of Zionist propaganda rather than a news medium since 1948. Now Israel is on trial before the International Court of Justice and NYT reporters are forbidden to say what it is charged with. The corporate media and ludicrously misnamed “public broadcasting” promote genocide with the enthusiasm of German media during the Third Reich.
Sometimes the “complexities” in divorce court include unconscionable physical violence by one spouse against the other. Israel has murdered more than 14,000 children and murders more every hour. Nobody is murdering Israeli children. Genocide is not a term too morally or legally complicated to understand and only Israel is committing genocide. Like the Nazi program to create a Judenrein Europe, the Zionist project to exterminate and expel the indigenous people of Palestine is a one-sided slaughter of innocents.
You lost me at sentence two. FAIR is nothing like the corporate media and an invaluable resource. I wouldn’t be caught dead if not at least a subscriber to FAIR.
The New York Times has been an organ of Zionist propaganda rather than a news medium since 1948. Now Israel is on trial before the International Court of Justice and NYT reporters are forbidden to say what it is charged with. The corporate media and ludicrously misnamed “public broadcasting” promote genocide with the enthusiasm of German media during the Third Reich.
To be clear, totally agree with this comment, despite the order of the comments above falling is an apparent random, haphazard way
TOO BAD THE NYT IS FOR SALE TO iSRAEL. AND BOUGHT. NO ONE i KNOW READS IT ANYMORE.