“There's no room for complexity in the American media when it comes to Israel and Palestine,” said Robin Andersen, the award-winning author and professor emerita of communication and media studies at Fordham University, to host Robert Scheer on this episode of the Scheer Intelligence podcast.
In the almost three weeks since the October 7th attacks in Israel, the coverage around the war in the Middle East is as alert as ever, except only for one side, Andersen and Scheer discuss. The real and fabricated stories of Israeli devastation plastered mainstream outlets during the onset of the war, but since then, the bombing campaign on Gaza has yet to receive equal attention.
For Palestinians, “the only explanation is that these people are terrorists and they're evil and they're animals. When you set that up and you mix it in with Israeli officials saying ‘we're going to turn them into rubble,’ and then you've got President Biden saying [Israel] can do whatever they want to defend themselves, that is a setup for the worst kind of violence as far as the world is watching,” Andersen said.
Scheer backs up this sentiment, explaining that in all their history, the Palestinians have faced adversity in every sense and this is what the media also ignores. Scheer explains how Palestinians have suffered thoroughly with respect to their lack of state power and their shabby treatment even in the Arab world, where they have been forced to wander around and experience killings in their camps.
“Atrocity propaganda,” is what Andersen says feeds the war machine and the manufacturing of consent for killing innocent Palestinians. Lies and misinformation are put out to justify the bombing of civilians and “time passes, the bombing continues, and then…we’re going to find [that] all of this stuff will be revealed and by that time it'll be too late,” Andersen said.
