Yup, kind of like when we torture people and they call it 'enhanced interrogation'.
Give something a sanitized term and people will run with it.
IDK, NYT has it's issues but I don't see anything wrong with their headline on this. They're pretty explicit (possibly even skeptical given the other coverage of this...) that that's what israel is calling these strikes. What else should they have said?
Oh wait hang on, "Israel assures west that IDF are 'working closely' with amrrican appointed DEI council to ensure no demographic group is unfairly left out of genocidal campaign". They probably could have gone with that. Fucking hell, the only thing that makes my blood boil more than this
limpwristededit: wrist slap-y journalistic coverage is the literal cauldron of blood the IDF keeps scooting out of frame every time biden facetimes them...The irony is that the tweet is the exact type of propaganda it's claiming to call out. They just want to undermine faith in Western media because if you can't trust them - and despite having some obvious failures they have proven to be the most consistently reliable sources - then they are free to feed you emotional manipulation to push their own agenda.
Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various “party lines.
~ George Orwell (Not from a book, this is his actual experience after fighting alongside the Spanish against fasciscm.)
This post clearly highlighting how unreliable Western media is, is actually propaganda. Do not believe your eyes it's <their own agenda>!
The word pre-emptive implies self-defense.
Israel is "preemptively attacking" the entire region.
No. No it doesn’t. Preemption - in the military sense - could be used both offensively and defensively. If you are about to invade a country you could preemptively attack their parliament and barracks’ to make your invasion easier.
Nyt and Guardian seem fine, (in)directly quoting the idf.
The problem isn't them quoting it. The problem is passing along the blatant misinformation as truth. Why are you using their words when it's very clearly wrong?
Israel attacks Lebanon is the correct headline.
Anything else is propaganda.
The tnyt title looks accurate to me: it says Israel is striking Lebanon AND that Israel is casting these strikes as pre-emptive.
The title is not saying that tnyt believes that the strikes are actually pre-emptive, instead it's reporting that Israel claims that the strikes are pre-emptive. Which is accurate, since Israel does in fact claim that.
Same with the Guardian. "in self-defense" is quoted, something Israel is saying
The strikes - whether you agree with them or not and regardless of your political posture - are genuinely seen as militarily preemptive. Israel apparently expected a large Hezbollah attack and tried to get in there first. They “preempted” any such attack. The Guardian employs actual speech marks - so it’s not an opinion but a quote. Newspapers can report what people say, even if the editorial policy is contrary to what gets reported. Linguistically the headli(n)es are correct. (I haven’t taken sides in the Israel-Gaza conflict as I know both sides are currently led by scum who have no qualms about slaughtering innocent people for their own personal gain and have no interest in any meaningful peace.)
The strikes are only pre-emptive if we put on white-nationalism glasses and take away Lebanon's right to defend itself. Israel attacked Beirut first. TheGuardian quotes IDF propaganda but Hezbollah just "fires rockets".
I haven’t taken sides in the Israel-Gaza conflict
...
The strikes are only pre-emptive if we put on white-nationalism glasses and take away Lebanon’s right to defend itself. Israel attacked Beirut first.
I guess as always with language, there are many possible interpretations. Yours is one, that's right.
To me, it came somewhat surprising to see you connected "pre-emptive" to moral judgements, or to the question who attacked "first" (which is a controversial and potentially infinite topic to track the actual honest true 'first' origin).
Another interpretation is just military doctrine. The best defense is a good offense. Who cares who started the fight.
In this interpretation, the IDF felt there might be an attack incoming, and prevented it's adversary from doing so by striking first.
Much like Hezbollah (or any other military force) would gladly pre-emptively strike their foe to protect their own troops. Doesn't say anything about who started the overall conflict or even who's right.
You still have a point; by highlighting the reasons behind the strike, and painting it as a protective measure, it probably makes it easier for the reader to sympathize.
Do you think the situation would have been better if Hezbollah didn't restart the border conflict back in October?
The Guardian is clearly quoting. Judging an article by its title is like judging a book by its cover: clearly misguided.
So is the NYT title
I never saw "pre-emptive" as an absolving term. You just decided to strike first: it's relatively free from any connotations of propriety in my mind.
While I acknowledge that the MBFC does have some right wing bias, I think it serves its purpose. Aka to flag literal propaganda “news” sites.
The titles are literally accurate in the image. Israel is (unethically) launching preemptive strikes.
If you look at the .ml news communities that don’t use MBFC you will see that way too many news stories are from literally Russia Today, Southern China Morning Post, and other extremely biased to a very particular agenda publications.
I think people are trying to tie MBFC to being Zionist just so the bot will be dropped and it will be easier for them to normalize things like Russia Today outside of .ml spaces.
that's quite the theory.... does the bot somehow prevent posts from those places? were there more instances of popular posts from those places before the bot?
I wouldn’t say it’s a theory. Just my thoughts / speculation. I would speculate that people who are pushing out RT / Alex Jones level content would be more hesitant to do so if there would be a big “this is not a reliable news source” sticker next to it.
I would speculate that people who point Alex Jones / RT stuff just hope people read the article without thinking about where it comes from.
Aka to flag literal propaganda “news” sites.
Why do I need MBFC to do this when I can just read someone in the comments who claims "This was posted by a Russian bot farm"?
If you look at the .ml news communities that don’t use MBFC you will see that way too many news stories are from literally Russia Today, Southern China Morning Post, and other extremely biased to a very particular agenda publications.
I don't see any of that on their local front page. In fact, most of lemmy.ml's front page is reposts from lemmy.world. The only other sources I see are the BBC, BoingBoing.Net, and TheConversation.Com.
I think people are trying to tie MBFC to being Zionist
The agent flags virtually every mainstream news source as Left or Center-Left. The AP, the Guardian, Reuters, CNN, you name it. The very concept of Left/Right seems to boil down to "Do American Conservatives hate you?" If they're Zionist on top of that, it's likely only because these corporate media outlets tend to track with the American foreign policy position of any given moment.
But don't actually bother to ask why mainstream news gets consistently flagged as "Left Wing" despite mapping neatly to a right-wing government's enthusiastic endorsement of various fascist middle eastern state leaders. Hell, don't ask why mainstream news habitually runs gushy positive news stories about Saudi monarchs and North African military dictatorships.
To even raise the question... you must be getting your news from all the Russia Today articles on lemmy.ml.
The requirements of quality, fairness, honesty, transparency and bias-minimization of their process for a "trust gatekeeper" such as MBFC claims to be should be far higher that those for mere newspapers, not the other way around - the former wants to control your interpretation of everything you read on the Internet whilst the latter only controls what you read in their site.
One thing is when a guy you've seen a lot in your local pub asks you to "lend me a fiver", a whole different thing is when a some random guy down the pub whom you don't really know well keeps unpromptedly telling you "go talk to this guy, he is a great investment advisor" and then the second guys asks you to "give me all your life savings and I'll make sure you'll be rich".
Not only is the level of proof any half way intelligent would demand to trust somebody with "a fiver" totally different from that to trust somebody with all of one's life savings, but the second setup even stinks of funny business due to the whole hard-push by a 3rd party whom I don't even know well enough to trust.
Just because you're seeing more of the "complete total bollocks" style of propaganda from places like Russia and China in communities without MBFC doesn't mean what you see in those that have MBFC is not propaganda-heavy: I actually lived in Britain for over a decade and also in other countries in Europe (and speak those languages so can follow their news) and certainly the BBC and The Guardian systematically - as exemplified here - spin their reporting, a far more subtle style of propaganda which is based in Marketing, PR and Politics methods to shape people's impressions of specific actors (unlike the outright lying of the newsmedia from authoritarian countries) and which is especially common in Anglo-Saxon countries.
They're just as much out to make up your mind for you rather than merely inform you (and at least the guys at The Guardian have very openly stated they're "opinion formers") as the Russian and Chinese media - they just use different techniques for their manipulation of people's opinions.
MBFC activelly re-inforces the "spin" style of propaganda of very specific news outlets with specific politican biases by claiming they are highly trustworthy and even (laughably) left-of-center, and yet compared to the newsmedia from many European non-English Speaking countries this stuff is clearly and consistently massaged to manipulate the reader into feeling in a certain way towards one side and a different way towards another side.
News reporting using the same kind of techniques to manipulate people as Car Adverts, Investing Scams and Politicians isn't Journalism.
Had I grown up reading and watching on TV all my life this kind of spin portrayed as "news", I would have trouble noticing it, but I was born in Southern Europe and beyond Britain also lived in Northern Europe, so this style of spin used for "opinion forming" in most mainstream newsmedia in the English-speaking World really stands out for me because it's always "loaded" in the same direction.
MBFC is ran by Zionists and rates Zionist propaganda outlets as accurate.
Example: https://unwatch.org/
it has been said many times before, but, remember the USS Liberty
The rocket attacks Hezbollah did launch shortly afterwards lends a lot of credibility to Israel's claim it was preemptive.
If I walked up and started punching you in the face because I said you looked like you were about to punch me...
Would you just let me beat you up to prove you weren't gonna punch me?
Especially knowing there's no one that would stop me from beating you up if you didn't defend yourself?
Hezbollah counter-attacking after being attacked by Israel, does not mean that Hezbollah would have attacked if they had not been attacked first. If your neighbour is a bully, then it's probably best to not be a pushover.
What does lend the "pre-emptive" claim credibility, is that afterwards Hezbollah said that they had retaliated for the murder of one of their commanders in Beirut. So the Hezbollah attack was not a counter-attack, but rather an attack that they had been preparing for weeks already.
If attacked they attack, that's shitty evidence because they would have struck back anyway.
About as much as you punching somebody on the face could, after they punched tyouback, be claimed by you to be a preemptive punching of their face: i.e. it's complete total bullshit.
And here we have the press from nations with heavily pro-Zionist governments and power elites spinning that bullshit into their stories whilst [email protected] moderator's beloved "trust gatekeeper" has their own bot telling readers they're totally trustworthy and even in some cases that those media sources spinning the-ethno-Fascists-are-the-real-victims-here takes on their stories were they're the ones initiating violence, are lefties.
I'm not quite sure what's the bullshit power in this, but it's at least square.
PS: It's funny how me and somebody else seem to have independently come up with the same metaphor, even if I worded it in a reversed way so as not to come out as aggressive.
"Pre-emptive" and "self-defense" are objectively true here. Hezbollah initiated its current conflict with Israel and continues to launch attacks; Israel is fighting defensively and destruction of Hezbollah assets prevents future attacks on Israel.
(You might believe that Hezbollah is justified in attacking Israel, but it's still the attacker and Israel is still the defender.)
This is some George W Bush doublespeak.
You cannot "pre-emptively" defend yourself, an attack to head off a suspected attack is still an attack.
Other than that semantic nitpick, personally I'm there with you.. However, you cannot seriously be pointing this out without also recognizing that Israel is very much the initial offender in any conflict that arises as direct result of their actions in gaza.
If I let a bully sucker punch me so I have an excuse to beat up all the people around them, and then someone else close by hits me, I can't honestly say I am the one who is defending myself.
I think the purpose of the word "pre-emptive" is to describe a situation where one side appears to attack first but that side is actually acting to prevent an attack against itself. Consider a less controversial situation: Ukraine launched drones into Russia in order to blow up glide bombs in storage at Russian airbases. I suppose that could be described as a "pre-emptive attack" but I still see it as an act of self-defense.
With regard to your second point: Hezbollah has agency. They weren't just helplessly carried along by events in Gaza; they chose to get involved. Their choice was predictable, but it was still theirs. One could argue that it was justified (and Hezbollah would certainly argue that it was justified) but justification is a matter of opinion and even if an attack is considered justified, the defender is still, well, defending.
Is a 'massive strike' bigger or smaller than a 'large-scale attack'?
fuck hamas
It's understandable, in an environment where they don't control all the information that readers have access to, propagandists have to use framing techniques from PR, Marketing and Politics to push out a certain impression of trustworthiness and maximizing empathy towards one side, since they can't just use outright lies without getting caught like propagandists in places like Russia can (mind you, the NYT has definitelly been caught repeating IDF lies).
At least this time around they didn't use the trick of the Passive Voice (for example: "Massive strikes land in Lebanon").
That propaganda trick is a pretty common one in the "reporting" of these news sources when they talk about Israeli bombings of civilians in Gaza (which are generally reported as "deaths in Gaza" as if they were just due to natural causes rather than being murders).
Mind you the "verbatum" and undisputed quoting of IDF claims on the title as exemplified here is also a pretty commonly used propaganda techniques by these newsmedia outlets.
Since a lot of users don't seem to have caught on yet:
The Intercept collected more than 1,000 articles from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times about Israel’s war on Gaza and tallied up the usages of certain key terms and the context in which they were used. The tallies reveal a gross imbalance in the way Israelis and pro-Israel figures are covered versus Palestinians and pro-Palestinian voices — with usages that favor Israeli narratives over Palestinian ones.
The term “slaughter” was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, and “massacre” was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to 2. “Horrific” was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4.
Only two headlines out of over 1,100 news articles in the study mention the word “children” related to Gazan children. In a notable exception, the New York Times ran a late-November front-page story on the historic pace of killings of Palestinian women and children, though the headline featured neither group.
Overall, Israel’s killings in Gaza are not given proportionate coverage in either scope or emotional weight as the deaths of Israelis on October 7. These killings are mostly presented as arbitrarily high, abstract figures. Nor are the killings described using emotive language like “massacre,” “slaughter,” or “horrific.” Hamas’s killings of Israeli civilians are consistently portrayed as part of the group’s strategy, whereas Palestinian civilian killings are covered almost as if they were a series of one-off mistakes, made thousands of times, despite numerous points of evidence indicating Israel’s intent to harm civilians and civilian infrastructure.
Lots of us know this. Lots of us can also see that the 4 titles that you posted are not an example of this.
Some of those article titles that you are trying to paint as inaccurate, are in fact highly accurate. I can't find anything wrong with the titles of the guardian and the new York Times that you posted. They are reporting a thing that happened and a thing that was said. They make it very clear that the "pre-emptive" thing is a claim of Israel and not a fact.
Unlike your claim in the OP, The Guardian also doesn't have a credibility of high on that shitty mbfc site, but only "mixed".
As I've explained above, reliably giving prominence to the quotes of one source promotes that one source and those quotes as it subconsciously it makes it seem more important to the reader.
This is a technique used for Propaganda when the propagandist doesn't control the information space of the reader: since outright lies would easily be caught when readers have easy access to other newsmedia, the promotion of one side over the other by the propagandist is instead done by portraying it as more important by quoting it more often, giving more prominence to those quotes and never challenging them.
It's interesting the number of concerned posters popping out if the woodwork here repeating the pretty old falacy commonly harped by such news media that "they are stating those are quotes hence they're giving fair coverage" which is an obvious oversimplification of how impressions are made on others and hence of how opinions are made by even the most junior professional in PR, Marketing or Politics.
Lots of us know this. Lots of us can also see that the 4 titles that you posted are not an example of this.
Why is Hezbollah not defending themselves against a large scale israeli attack?
Why is Hezbollah not launching a "pre-emptive" attack?
Why is Hezbollah not "launching rockets 'in self defense'?
Because loaded language is used in favor of israel, not against it.
