ISRAEL’S destructive military campaign in Gaza, which has so far killed over 35,000 Palestinians, including nearly 14,000 children over the past seven months in revenge for the Hamas assault on Oct 7 last year, has exposed the objectivity and impartiality claims of many leading Western newspapers and media outlets.

The New York Times, whose coverage of the Oct 7 events and its aftermath won the 2024 Pulitzer for international coverage, has been disappointing in so many ways. Analysts have for months strung together its headlines that refrained from naming Israel for the mass killings in Gaza.

A couple of its stories have come in for considerable stick after readers and small independent digital media platforms investigated not just the claims contained in them but also who was responsible for the newsgathering, ie, whose byline appeared on these.

The foremost example of such reporting was a front-page story on Dec 31, 2023, which detailed the alleged rape of many Israeli women by the Oct 7 attackers. There was scepticism within the Times newsroom and its print story, which was also to be made into a podcast, never made it into audio.

Most Western media will have you believe the Palestine issue cropped up on Oct 7, and not with the Nakba.

One of the murdered women’s families, which was cited as a source by the Times reporters, later said they did not believe she was raped, and neither did the reporters mention rape when interviewing them. About a third of the story was centred on this particular victim. (Watch the investigation by ‘Breaking Points’ journalists online.)

After The Intercept reported on the serious differences of opinion in the........

© Dawn