Pro-Israeli Bias of Western Media Is Entrenched Through Selective Reporting

The terrorist attacks launched by Hamas against Israel should be a time for soul-searching. The pre-attack Middle East was defined by a cautious embrace of the Jewish state among its Arab neighbors. Despite opposition from their respective populations, the likes of the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and others were increasingly willing to see Israel as a permanent political presence in the region, and a useful economic partner to help them diversify away from natural resource extraction. Hamas needed a dramatic measure to remind them, and the world, that the embrace should not come at the expense of the Palestinians.

It is a message that has been heard loud and clear among the local Muslim population and a noticeable part of the Western youth population in the months since. Despite the majority of Western states and their people continuing to support Israel's righteousness in defending itself against terror, a fundamental shift in mentality has occurred, where the conversation is no longer a black-and-white Israel-good, Hamas-bad one, but one that increasingly points to Israel as an instigator of economic and political inequality in the Middle East, and indirectly not victim, but a victimizer of Muslim fundamentalist terror.

Yet, even as the Western general public and popularly elected politicians tamper their support for Israel and take a more balanced, nuanced approach to the Middle East, major Western media outlets continue to play the one-sided blame game that portrays Israel as merely reacting to threats through self-defense, while ignoring all signs that the country has only exacerbated the anger that fuels terrorism, through its many preemptive actions that increase the sense of desperation among the Palestinians, its supporters, and other anti-Israeli forces that they need to resort to more extreme measures for any chance of success.

That pro-Israeli apologist attitude of the Western media was on full display in the aftermath of the latest Israeli-Iranian exchange of fire. These media outlets had little to say about the initial Israeli move. They only stated that Israel has been assassinating Iranian personnel with impunity in Syria, glossing over the fact that in the process, it has violated Syrian and Iranian sovereignty through free use of airspace and bombing of embassy facilities. Yet, the Iranian retaliation of missiles and drone launches against Israel has been covered in detail through stories of the defense and extensive analyses of ineffectiveness.

The lack of balance in the coverage is too obvious to ignore. Israel's preemptive actions in Syria against Iranian targets constitute undeclared acts of war. Western media not only played down the incidents themselves but did not draw attention to the fact that no international body condemned Israel for its actions. Yet, the Iranian retaliation was quickly called an escalation in hostility, with media analyses laser-focused on how Israel and its Western allies would respond to the aggression as if the original Israeli aggression is less deserving of a reaction.

Through such selective reporting, Western media outlets almost deliberately exaggerate the agency of pro-Western actors in the Middle East in self-defense, while dismissing the same needs and desires of their non-Western counterparts. The rapid fall of the pro-Western government in Afghanistan against the Taliban onslaught already highlighted just how misleading such unbalanced coverage can be. By exaggerating the moral and military high ground of Western and pro-Western actors, the audience of these Western media outlets becomes less prepared for the mental shocks when Western actors lose.

Indeed, by continuing to stick to an increasingly unrealistic equating of pro-Israel and pro-Western, Western media outlets also ignore the nuance that is making Western societies more complex vis-a-vis their attitude toward the Middle East. The recent pro-Palestinian protests on American university campuses have only been seen through the eyes of policy (on freedom of expression) and security (often of Jewish students) while ignoring how Arab and Muslim voices on these campuses are increasingly more prominent and just as valid.

Many Western media outlets speak to their goal of presenting objective investigative reporting based on empirical evidence. But in the ongoing Middle East conflict, it chooses to heavily leverage the power of its pen to support the Israeli and pro-Israeli position while ignoring the complexity of who may be on the moral right in which circumstances. The intellectual laziness these outlets have displayed in the past weeks will only serve to further alienate non-Western audiences from their Western counterparts as the West further construe the "universal values" it supposedly represent turn out to be pre-Western in core.