Worst Headlines in a Year of Livestreamed Genocide

Suchitra, Bhakti and Madhuri analyze shocking, biased and racist headlines from mainstream newspapers from the past year with a focus on Palestine, Lebanon and Iran. They discuss the importance and impact of headlines historically but also in a world defined by ever-diminishing attention spans, and where news is mainly read on smartphones. The media appears to have an active investment in war, the ongoing genocide in Palestine, and in American imperialism, broadly. The hosts tackle three broad trends how headlines were written in the last year: the use of passive voice, the fabrication of a both-sides perspective, and an unabashed racism towards Muslims. This invented grammar of the headlines obfuscates the identity of the perpetrators, generates vagueness around mass killings, applauds technological prowess of attacks and invasions, and sanitizes and diminishes war crimes. Such headlines and unethical journalism enables the dehumanization of non-white lives and the consequent normalization of violence against them by the state. The episode highlights the urgent necessity for critical awareness and unlearning racist, dehumanizing narratives designed to legitimize and elicit popular consent for brutal state atrocities against non-white, colonized and marginalized people around the world.

Key Takeaways

• The media plays a significant role in shaping public perception of genocide.
• Headlines are crucial in framing narratives, they contain entire histories of language.
• Passive voice in reporting obscures accountability and responsibility.
• “Both-sidesism” in the media creates false equivalences in conflict reporting.
• The normalisation of racist language in the media and passivity as a tool in reporting contributes to dehumanisation of Arab, Muslim, Queer, and non-White lives.
• Journalism can act as a tool for genocide, actively participating and propagating, rather than maintaining a check on power.
• There is a concerted effort by the media to erase and invisibilise the realities of violence against marginalised and colonised communities, ignoring all historical contexts and accountability. Doing so, they continue to keep the harrowing reality of colonialism and imperialism alive.
• Unlearning harmful narratives is essential for fostering understanding and empathy in the light of a harmful gaslighting and propagandist force.
• The complicity of the media in state violence must be critically examined.

Keywords: Journalism, media ethics, reporting, headlines, propaganda, narratives, war, genocide, racism, Islamophobia, public perception, both-sidesism, passive voice, Palestine, Lebanon, Iran.

A podcast by The Polis Project https://www.thepolisproject.com/

References:

U.S. Media's Complicity in Israel's Genocide with Sana Saeed (Jadaliyya) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50nEqjFTI-4

Assal Rad Twitter/X account: https://x.com/AssalRad

Journalism as Genocide/Suchitra Vijayan (The Wire, India) https://thewire.in/communalism/journalism-as-genocide