Our understanding of the crisis within the region has been shaped by the words of journalists, allowing for the strategic filtering of the violent nature of the ongoing occupation, ethnic cleansing and genocide committed against the Palestinian people for the past 73 years.
Reading headlines of the coverage of the escalations of the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine has become a part of my everyday routine in recent years. Our understanding of the crisis within the region has been shaped by the words of journalists, allowing for the strategic filtering of the violent nature of the ongoing occupation, ethnic cleansing and genocide committed against the Palestinian people for the past 73 years. Australian media coverage of the most recent Gaza crisis that began in early August – and has thus far killed 49 Palestinians – has again failed to legitimise the dehumanisation of an innocent population.
Headlines in print media are pivotal in defining the scope of an issue, generating interest and informing the reader, however, they also play a secondary, less visible role in framing an issue towards a certain angle. To look beyond the coverage of headlines in the Israeli occupation of Palestine coverage is to understand the nature of Australia’s media landscape and the projection of headlines through our print media outlets. In analysing the August 2022 headlines from Murdoch mastheads The Australian, The Daily Telegraph, News.com.au, along with Nine-Fairfax’s Sydney Morning Herald, and independent outlets like The Guardian and ABC, we can determine the extent to which the Australian media landscape has sanitised the violent nature of Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
Read the article by Rayana Ajam in Honi Soit.