Historian Assal Rad is doing a superb job in X by juxtaposing headlines from the New York Times that highlight the media's double standard. For example, she contrasted these two news items: “Iran claims dozens of people have died in an attack on a school” and “Nine people killed in an Israeli city near Jerusalem after an Iranian missile attack.” Notice that the first is attributed to an interested party, while the second is presented as a fact. And that the authorship of the attack is omitted in the first, which is not the case in the second. If this were an isolated case, it could be a coincidence or, simply, an attitude of caution with events that have just happened and have not yet been confirmed. But Rad has been offering these pairings for months where, invariably, only Arab sources, whether Palestinian or Iranian, are questioned, while American or Israeli sources are usually served to the reader without any warning or reminder that one-sided information is being transmitted.A few years ago, many news stories about gender-based violence were written with the formula “A woman dies...” and it was the most aseptic way to put it, because there was no court ruling yet to confirm the murder that was evident. In clinical rigor, in the end, the collateral effect of conveying the idea that women, oh look, died for no reason, escaped. And the murderers remained absent from the macabre equation. This has been corrected today, even if it has had to be rectified: except in exceptional cases, the murders have been confirmed. With war, in case of doubt, it is good to apply the relevant layers of caution. But if you only apply them to one of the two sides, you will probably have to review your biases.
