On December 14, I came across a report on the CNN website titled “Watch Clarissa Ward Report from Gaza for the First Time Since the War Started,” which caught my attention, as good people usually do. securities. The subtitle further heightened my interest: “CNN’s Clarissa Ward witnessed the horror and humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza during a visit to a UAE-run field hospital in Rafah “.
American journalists had not covered Gaza – except for a few embedded with Israeli troops – because Israel, as the occupying power controlling the borders of the Gaza Strip, denied access to foreign journalists and pressured Egypt to do the same. So I was intrigued by how Ward had managed to gain access and saw his report as an opportunity to find out whether such on-the-ground coverage would make up for the overall terrible Western mainstream media coverage of the nine weeks previous ones.
Over the previous two months, I had observed very pro-Israeli, distorted and incomplete media coverage, particularly on American television.
I have seen most news anchors and talk show hosts express a strong pro-Israel bias in their words, tone of voice and editorial choices. The predominance of military analyzes by retired senior U.S. officers was equally biased toward Israel and against Hamas.
The flow of deeply human, personalized, warm and emotional reporting on Israeli hostages and victims contrasted with much shallower and fewer reporting on Palestinian victims and prisoners.
So I asked myself if the report from a field hospital in Gaza would be better, more balanced, more humane? So I clicked on the link to the CNN article to find out how it was reported from inside Gaza, amid the massacres and human suffering. What follows are some observations on the strengths and weaknesses of the report. It is important to cite them as an example of practices that undermine coverage of the war in Gaza by most American media outlets.
The strength of the report lies in the fact that CNN, Ward and his team made the effort to enter Gaza, see for themselves its human and material conditions and share with the world the images, words and emotions of a handful of Palestinians in Gaza. I salute and thank them, and hope that they will encourage other journalists to enter Gaza by any safe means possible.
The report also exposes viewers to the range of human suffering, fear and helplessness that now define Gaza. It offers extracts from the stories of a number of victims, including young children and an orphaned toddler.
The video also shows the moment Israel bombs a location near the hospital; this demonstrates the frightening sensation of hearing and feeling the impact of a shell or bomb that Palestinians in Gaza feel every hour.
Ward maximizes the powerful combination of images, quotes from people she interviews, and her own descriptions, something television, at its best, can do so well. She beautifully allows the viewer to feel what any hospital visitor would feel when she says she feels “in every bed another punch”, as I did when I watched her report. She rightly calls Gaza’s massive suffering and continuing deaths “one of the great horrors of modern warfare” and “a window into hell.”
But elsewhere, the report falls short of journalism’s responsibility to give the public a reasonably complete picture of the situation on the ground in Gaza. Here are some examples of how an additional sentence or sentence, or just a few more words, would have allowed viewers to grasp the full context of the lives of these young Palestinians in hospital, amid the causes, victims and participants of the conflict wider.
- Ward mentions only once, at the beginning, the more than 22,000 Israeli military strikes and their “intensity and ferocity.” But she neglects to say that Israeli bombing has been so indiscriminate and deadly that legal experts consider what is happening in Gaza to be genocide and that there are several major lawsuits in the United States and Europe to stop it.
- The report states that most patients are women and children, who also account for two out of three deaths. But it does not refer to the fact that Israeli bombings have left more than 80,000 Palestinians dead, injured and missing, most of whom are civilians killed in their homes, in hospitals or in UN-run schools transformed into shelters. .
- The report mentions that the UAE hospital receives patients from other medical facilities, which are overcrowded, but does not specify why – because Israel has systematically bombed and attacked most hospitals in Gaza to the point that they are out of service. Nor does it mention the hundreds of medical professionals Israel has killed, leading to severe shortages of medical personnel.
- The report highlights the improvised tourniquet on an injured man rushed to hospital, but it does not reveal that this was because Israel blocked the delivery of vital and even basic medical supplies.
- All of the suffering humans Ward interviews – with their limbs amputated, their family members killed, their bones broken and their faces disfigured – are mostly presented in passive, almost abstract contexts, which do not capture their full humanity or the full nature of the conflict. Consequently, most of the Palestinians we meet in the story appear as one-dimensional, caricatured characters, expressing only fear, misery and worry. We, the public, mostly feel sorry for the Palestinians, but we don’t really know them, because no emotion other than pity connects us to them.
- We’re told one of the patients – Lama, 20, who lost his leg – was studying to become an engineer. But we do not know that Israel not only broke his body but also his dreams, by devastating Gaza’s universities, making it impossible for Gaza’s youth to pursue higher education in the years to come.
- The report clearly states that Lama and his family fled their home on Israeli orders, but were then bombed in the house where they were seeking refuge. But we are not told that 80 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been displaced and are living in appalling conditions, made worse by the total blockade imposed by Israel which has cut off food, electricity, water and medicines.
- The report discusses Gaza in the context of other conflicts in Europe and the Middle East, but does not mention this as the latest episode in Israel’s 75 years of ethnic cleansing, colonization and occupation of Palestinians. It does not refer to the fact that the majority of Gaza residents are refugees or descendants of refugees who were forced to flee their homes by Jewish militias in 1948 to avoid being killed.
- Although the report mentions that Israel and Egypt have made access to Gaza “virtually impossible”, it appears to indicate that this is due to the danger of Israeli bombing. This justification is rather bizarre given that Western journalists have been on all the front lines of the war in Ukraine, where they faced Russian bombing. The report avoids saying that foreign journalists are barred from Gaza because Israel wants to control the war narrative.
I don’t know Clarissa Ward personally, but I have known many of CNN’s correspondents since the network’s beginnings, and I know that they are sincere professionals who aim to do quality journalism. My comments are therefore not directed at the correspondent or at CNN as a whole, but rather seek to point out the weaknesses of these reports which reflect much of the flawed US coverage of the Israeli attack on Gaza.
I raise the issue of poor media coverage of our region because in the US, UK and other Western countries I have seen the damage caused by promoting the views of Israeli and Western governments in above all others.
Since the media is the public’s primary source of information about the Middle East, biased reporting over several decades has created a misinformed population. This perpetuated the government’s support for Israel’s apartheid colonial system, which now wants to expel more Palestinians from Gaza to the Sinai Peninsula. This allows Israel to resist any serious peacemaking efforts and refuse to comply with international legal standards. The result is the chronic and ever more horrific war we are witnessing these days.
Our common struggle to create a world of justice and peace continues. We in the world of journalism must act quickly and forcefully to play a constructive role in using the tools we know so well to communicate truths across borders.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.