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Americans who get their news primarily from cable are the only people who believe that Israel is not committing a genocide in Gaza, according to a new survey that examined the relationship between attitudes toward the war and news consumption habits.
The survey puts numbers on trends that have become increasingly apparent: Cable news viewers are more supportive of Israel’s war effort, less likely to think Israel is committing war crimes, and less interested in the war in general. People who get their news primarily from social media, YouTube, or podcasts, by contrast, generally side with the Palestinians, believe Israel is committing war crimes and genocide, and consider the issue of significant importance.
And yet there are still lots of people on here who tell us that western media is not biased, and trot out nonsense like mediabiasfactcheck to argue why we should only consume information from mainstream western sources.
I talked to a boomer fox news watcher recently, and apparently the current party line is that since the US firebombed dresden, what Israel is doing to Gaza is justified. The US even bombed white europeans, so how can you criticize them for killing middle-easterners?
IE, nothing wrong with murdering civilians as long as the US did it first, and to criticize Israel for doing what the US already did is unpatriotic, and the protesters have no right to protest this genocide.
At least the US right is honest about their values, and make no justifications or apologies for civilian murder.
Indeed, this is the key difference I see between liberals and conservatives in US. Conservatives are just more honest about their support for US hegemony by any means necessary. Meanwhile, liberals will do hand wringing and talk about lesser evils to justify atrocities.
Meh, Reuters, which is pretty much the mainstream western source, has been relatively good on calling out Israel, and even funded an independent investigation that found that the IDF probably purposefully shelled one of their journalists.
Doesn’t mean that having a wider variety of sources isn’t still good, of course.
It’s becoming very difficult to hide what’s happening in Israel, so it is starting to leak into western mainstream media now. However, it’s pretty clear that there has been a strong bias from the start. And the question you should ask yourself is what other biases western media promotes in a similar fashion.