The New York Times instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to “avoid” using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept.
The memo also instructs reporters not to use the word Palestine “except in very rare cases” and to steer clear of the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by internally displaced Palestinians, who fled from other parts of Palestine during previous Israeli–Arab wars. The areas are recognized by the United Nations as refugee camps and house hundreds of thousands of registered refugees.
While the document is presented as an outline for maintaining objective journalistic principles in reporting on the Gaza war, several Times staffers told The Intercept that some of its contents show evidence of the paper’s deference to Israeli narratives.
Almost immediately after the October 7 attacks and the launch of Israel’s scorched-earth war against Gaza, tensions began to boil within the newsroom over the Times coverage. Some staffers said they believed the paper was going out of its way to defer to Israel’s narrative on the events and was not applying even standards in its coverage. Arguments began fomenting on internal Slack and other chat groups.
No one is immune from propaganda and just because a media outlet is historically part of “your team,” it doesn’t mean they don’t engage in propaganda. The military and intelligence agencies manipulating the media has been a thing since the beginning of the Cold War.
You seem to be limited in your idea of what is possible by the constraints you live under in the US enviroment, including things like its falacious two-sides politics and the anti-Democratic relationship between most of the Press and the two parties of the Political Duopoly.
It’s perfectly possible for a media outlet to be critical of that which deserves criticism independently of the “side” - it’s what is known as “Journalistic Integrity”. The US. however, has very very little of that.
Also that “it has always been so (in the US)” falacy neither turns it from a bad thing into a good thing nor proves that it’s impossible for it to be otherwise - somehow some news publications in the US (and even more outside) manage to only be biased on occasion instead of being salesmen for a political side in every single news piece they publish.
Ultimatelly it’s up to people to be more demanding with the news, especially those they pay for, and a bit more skeptical. Something as simple as punishing media outlets when they are so shamelessly biased as the NYT by not buying their publications or giving your time to their websites would be a much better push for a decent Press environment than coming up with falacious excuses for their actions.