A newspaper does not need to lie in order to reposition reality. Sometimes it can do so through something far quieter: the placement of uncertainty.

On May 12, covering a two-year investigation into the sexual crimes Hamas and its collaborators committed against Israeli civilians on October 7 and against the hostages taken into Gaza, the New York Times gradually transformed its headline. What first appeared as “Israeli Report Finds That Sexual Violence by Hamas Was…” became, by publication: Israeli Report Examines Sexual Violence During and After a Hamas-led Attack. The earlier wording still survives in Google’s cached listing:

The difference between those formulations is not stylistic. It is epistemic. One describes documented findings. The other describes an inquiry orbiting an event. The subheadline beneath it was blunter. But it is rarely the subheadline that readers carry away.

Another major newspaper approached the same material differently. Le Monde’s headline read: October 7: New report documents extent of sexual violence committed by Hamas. Both newspapers worked from essentially the same body of evidence. Yet where Le Monde framed the report as documenting findings about sexual crimes committed by Hamas, the New York Times embedded the violence within the diffuse chronology of “during and after a Hamas-led attack”.

The wording replaces the grammar of action with the grammar of temporal association: violence no longer appears as something perpetrators did to victims, but as something that somehow existed around a larger event. Even the event itself is flattened into the generic language of an “attack,”........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)