Looking at the two big news publishers in my country. One isn’t reporting about the current bombings at all, while the other one is phrasing their words mostly anti-Palestinian.
Is there some neutral coverage I can keep up to? Where do you guys get your info from?
You can’t, it isn’t a neutral situation
The funny thing is how people on both sides could read your comment and agree with it, but for opposite reasons.
How is it funny? This is true of every war that has ever happened. There is no such thing as unbiased reporting of real time events. Its just the truth.
There is no such thing as unbiased reporting of ANY events. Real time or historical. All reporting is biased.
Honestly don’t think you can find any neutral news about it. I recommend use multiple news places to get the overall view (that’s what I do).
I feel like every news-publisher is leaning to one or the other.
https://ground.news/interest/israeli-palestinian-conflict
This site collects news from multiple sources, tells you their political affiliation, shows the difference in summary based on left / center / right news sources, and optionally shows a lot more like ownership network etc if you pay for it.
Nothing will be neutral, but I like it to get an overview.
Stick with reputable news sites. Reuters is my gold standard. Along with AP News. They tend to be some of the least bias sources out there and do their due diligence when it comes to reporting.
It’s worth noting that a lot of the news coverage may come across as pro-isreal and anti-palestinian but that’s because a lot of the news is “Isreal claims this” and “An IDF statement that” the sources themselves are biased.
Also keep in mind that this is an active war. There will be a lot of wrong information as media reports the best information available, it’s not the media having a bias, it’s just the fog of war as things rapidly develop.
but that’s because a lot of the news is “Isreal claims this” and “An IDF statement that” the sources themselves are biased
It’s also important to keep in mind that when you read “Gaza health ministry claims”, in reality it’s the same as “Hamas’ health ministry claims” since Hamas has been ruling that area since 2006 and tortured the Palestinian opposition ever since (https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/05/gaza-palestinians-tortured-summarily-killed-by-hamas-forces-during-2014-conflict/ ). Same thing with claims by Al Jazeera since Qatar hosts Hamas’ leadership and funds their lavish lifestyles there so it wouldn’t be right for them to suggest in their own newspaper that they’re hosting terrorists, thus their news will rarely be critical of Hamas.
What’s the solution? There are a few choices you could make. You could cherrypick pro-Palestinian sources like Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye or Electronic Intifada and automatically dismiss whatever Israel says as disinformation and it could make you feel good about yourself as it’s very easy to oversimplify the conflict as just one big high-tech state abusing poor people fighting back with stones. You could also do the same cherrypicking for a pro-Israel position. Or you could dismiss any pro-Palestinian or pro-Israel source and only listen to news sources that provide a “balanced” account of the events (Associated Press is indeed very good). Or, much better but will require more thinking on your part: you read all of them and you dismiss none of them.
Ugh. That link is horrible. I mean the descriptions behind it.
It looks like non-Hamas Palestinians have two enemies working against them.
Makes me wonder what exactly a Pro-Palestinian position is.
A pro-Palestinian position is (for now) anti-Hamas and pro-Abbas, supports the removal from Hamas from power, supports Israeli action against Hamas, but decries the limitations of aid or the blockades from Egypt/Jordan/etc against even short-term refugees.
Palestine would currently be a country, for the first time in human history, if Hamas did not exist.
After Amnesty’s report on Ukraine when russia invaded it, many people no longer consider it a credible source.
Amnesty is not a neutral source. They are always biased toward minimizing casualties regardless of political outcome.
Once you know that, and that they aren’t news so much as they cite news, it’s readable.
I’m aware of that, and some of the current claims are probably subject to change in the future. I just browsed through reuters, and they seem unbiased. While my local news refers to hamas as “radical islamic terror organisation Hamas”, reuters just uses “hamas”.
Good journalists will never make their own opinion on the matter known outside the comment/opinion/analysis pages.
Not: Man eats a delicious red apple
Not: Man eats a red apple and says it’s delicious.
But: Man says he ate a red apple and claims it is delicious.
Or in some cases: Footage appears to show many saying he ate a red apple and claiming it was delicious.
If the journalist didn’t see it with their own eyes, they won’t state that it’s a fact.
It’s annoying how intertwined opinion and journalism have become, but it isn’t a journalist’s job to do anything more than report on what they saw, read or heard.
Unfortunately journalism has been in decline for so long now, that many people don’t know the difference between good and poor journalism. So when a good journalist simply reports on what someone said, they wrongly think the journalist is agreeing with them, instead of simply reporting on what they heard the person say.
Good journalism isn’t someone shouting about how angry something makes them, even if you agree with them. Good journalism is the equivalent of a court stenographer or someone who subtitles movies for the deaf.
Why is man “claiming” the apple is delicious? Is he in the pocket of Big Apple, and it really isn’t delicious? Or is the report from Fox Apple and they’re trying to cast aspersions on the man and his “claims”?
Right. It’s all about media literacy. Once you start picking up on loaded language like “Radical Islamic terror organisation Hamas” it starts becoming pretty evident what the biases are. That’s not to say the news they are reporting is false, just that it is going to take some extra work on your part to filter out all of the bullshit. Like you mentioned, the Common name of the government of Gaza is “Hamas” calling it anything else is an attempt to appeal to emotion to prime you to think about it a certain way. Like calling the Israeli government “zionists” it’s ment to sway to to something, not give you news.
radical islamic terror organisation Hamas
This is an accurate, unbiased description of Hamas. They are exactly that, the same way ISIL/ISIS is.
While this might be true, it’s all about the context. They make it seem like the Israelis are targeting the “bad guys” and should be allowed to do so. But they don’t mention the unrightful suffering and death of Palestinian civilians at all.
You now what I mean? If they call the Hamas a radical islamic terror organization (which I’m fine with), why don’t they also call the Israelis a radical zionist terror organization?
What I want to read is, if the Hamas fucked up, then let me know about it, also, if the Israelis fucked up, I want to know about that too.
Part of critical reading is collecting more sources, not less. You’ll have to read differing opinions and make up your own mind
That’s the neat part - you don’t.
The idea that there could be a truly neutral source is not really realistic, human minds do not work that way and there are many other reasons why it’s even harder than that.
As long as you stay away from the blatant extremes, partisans, people with some other stake in the game, etc., all you can do is evaluate relative bias, and try to adjust for it. It is inevitable that your take isn’t going to be unbiased, either, but this way you’ll have had a decent shot at minimizing wrongness.
