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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   26782 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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The media is solidly pro Israel as is the entire foreign policy establishment. If anything blind support for Israel is their prime directive and they ignore things Israel does in a way they wouldn't do for anyone else. The October 7th attack was lied about to an absurd extent, with stories of mass baby burnings and rapes that turned out to be as true as Saddam's nukes. Those stories were pushed hard by pro zionist media which is essentially all media. This report has more credible sources than those stories.

The media is also still regularly uncritically reporting numbers from de-facto Hamas controlled bodies such as the Health Ministry. The UN is likewise blindly trusted, despite the fact that they have been caught red-handed over and over at this point. There is a very strong zionist lobby with a lot of influence, but the media landscape as a whole is a mix of very different biases.

The media is solidly pro Israel as is the entire foreign policy establishment.

Do you count the Guardian as part of the media? That was the second most prominently placed story at the time I read it, if I recall correctly.

What about the German Sueddeutsche Zeitung, which reports roughly the same (even if I get a bit more of a balanced vibe from them as opposed to the Guardian)? I did not cherry-pick here, this was really the first source I checked (after stumbling over it on the Guardian, which I read for the math puzzles or something).

If I go to the NYT, paywall aside, or CNN, or BBC or god-help-me Fox-News, is your prediction that I will only will not have reported it because of their 'blind support for Israel'?

I mean, I did forget about the ADL, and that's my bad, but as you say they aren't in play either and so I think the overall issue of "remarkably little of the USA is actually movable by any potential Israeli warcrimes, because most of the populace either is already dead-set against Israel, is shielded from the information, or is so pro-Israel it'd still support it" still exists.

I am not so sure information doesn't matter:

Knowledge – or lack of knowledge – about casualties is related to attitudes about the conflict in a few ways. For a start, respondents who do not correctly answer that more Palestinians than Israelis have died are much more likely to decline to answer many opinion questions in the survey. Chart shows In the U.S., awareness that more Palestinians than Israelis have died is related to opinions about the current conflict

For example, among those unaware that more Palestinians have died, 59% offered no opinion when asked whether Biden has been favoring one side or the other too much. Among those who knew the balance of casualties, far fewer – 22% – had no opinion on Biden’s approach to the war.

In addition, those who are aware that more Palestinians than Israelis have died in the current war tend to express more pro-Palestinian views on certain questions. One example is that they express more favorable attitudes about the Palestinian people than do respondents who are not aware of the relative number of deaths on each side. Among those who correctly answer this knowledge question, favorable opinions of the Palestinian people outnumber unfavorable opinions by 61% to 36%; among those unaware of the balance of casualties, more have an unfavorable than favorable opinion of the Palestinian people (47% unfavorable, 39% favorable).

Similarly, those aware that more Palestinians have died are about twice as likely to say Biden is favoring the Israelis too much (35%) as to say he’s favoring the Palestinians too much (17%). Among those who do not know that more Palestinians have died, 15% say Biden is favoring the Palestinians too much and 9% say he’s favoring the Israelis too much.

https://www.pewresearch.org/2024/03/21/emotions-news-and-knowledge-about-the-israel-hamas-war/

Americans with the most knowledge about casualties are much more pro Palestinian. There is a major divide between young and old americans and that is probably due to getting info from pro zionist mainstream media vs those who get information online.

Americans with the most knowledge about casualties are much more pro Palestinian.

In large part the only Americans who care about Palestinian casualties at all are already pro-Palestine.

My point is: suppose Israel commits an atrocity. People who consume pro-Palestinian media will hear about it and be outraged, but they mostly already hate Israel so nothing's changed. People who consume pro-Israel media will just hear Israel's side of the story, as implausible as it may be, and therefore won't be outraged because they don't know it happened, so nothing's changed.

Sure, there are people who care about the truth, have a variety of sources, but are not either already pro-Palestinian or rabidly pro-Israel and thus can be flipped - those people are in play. But there aren't actually all that many of them.

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