SAMNET wishes to highlight the reduced coverage of — and in places the silence of — much of our mainstream media on the situation in Palestine. We have noted a drop-off in critical reporting by the state broadcaster, and an over-reliance on media aggregators.

It may be easy and cheap to run agency feeds. But those sources are based in countries with a pro-Israeli bias and largely reflect their states’ positions.

What our monitoring suggests

Our monitoring of the news media suggests either a bending to pressure or a fatigue, broken only when a critical incident occurs. It is the media’s responsibility to inform and educate on the real experience of a situation that could readily escalate into a regional war.

Without informing the public about the context and the lived experience of Palestinians — drawing on globally recognised expert bodies such as the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights — the narrative advanced by Israel through its highly sophisticated propaganda apparatus is left unchallenged, and comes to be received as truth.

As South Africans, our own history shows how the apartheid government manipulated international media to control the narrative.

Even the wording carries the frame. Reports have described settlements as illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this — a formulation that quietly converts a settled legal position into a dispute between two sides.

Complain, and ask for better

We call on the public and civil society to complain to our mainstream media and to demand more and better reporting, including coverage of UN findings that are critical of Israel.

Sources

• UN report: Palestinian detainees held arbitrarily and secretly, subjected to torture and mistreatment — OHCHR, 31 July 2024.
• An example of the framing in question — CAMERA-UK, a media-monitoring site, 2013.

Shared by the South African Muslim Network (SAMNET) in the interest of greater media accountability and better coverage of the crisis in Gaza and Palestine.