COMMENTARY: By Steven Cowan
Stuff declined earlier this month to publish a full-page advertisement accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza.
In his 1994 memoir, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, US historian Howard Zinn explains that when events are moving in a certain direction, to be neutral means to meekly accept that. The world is a moving train, writes Zinn, and none of us can be neutral passengers. To pretend that we can is to perpetuate a myth.
But it is a myth that the New Zealand mainstream media continues to perpetuate. Its devotion to the cult of objectivity has been thoroughly exposed by its woefully inadequate coverage of events in the Middle East.
- READ MORE: Decolonise how? Biased Gaza coverage is the tip of a much larger media iceberg
- Silencing the messenger: Israel kills journalists, while the West merely censors them – David Robie
For the past 12 months the media has insisted that Israel is at war in Gaza and not engaged in the indiscriminate killing of helpless, exhausted children, women, and men. It is not genocide, says the New Zealand media, even though the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has already ruled that Israel has a case to answer.
It should come as no surprise that Stuff, a publisher that prides itself on its liberal views, declined to publish a full-page advertisement from the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA). The advertisement was scheduled to be published in all Stuff newspapers on October 1 but was pulled.
According to Stuff it did not want to publish the advertisement “while the ongoing conflict is developing”. Whatever this means. The real reason why Stuff has pulled the advertisement is that it charges Israel with committing genocide in Gaza.
The New Zealand mainstream media, both commercial and state-owned, refuse to engage with some of the most important questions about Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza: Is Israel committing genocide in Gaza? Is the United States and its Western allies, including New Zealand, complicit in genocide?
The silence from the New Zealand media is deafening.
The New Zealand mainstream media has been more than happy to embrace Israel’s claim that it is legitimately “defending itself”. But through journalistic tricks — including bothsidesism, and the myth of objectivity — it continues to pretend it is a neutral passenger on the moving train.
Note: It will be interesting to see whether the Free Speech Union takes up this case. Given it has remained silent while Israel has killed more than 170 journalists in Gaza, the chances are it will say nothing.
Republished from Steven Cowan’s blog Against The Current. He is a former editor of New Zealand Monthly Review.
