Good article from Responsible State Craft, emphasizing how the media manages your perception by reporting or not reporting on what is really happening. Or what the facts of a matter, any matter, really are. Lies of omission are still lies.
The particular focus is on “topical silences,” those cases where failure to include information relevant to a certain topic can skew the recipient’s understanding of that topic in a propagandistic way. Such selectivity constitutes a type of “framing” driven by ideology including sociopolitical myths.
Responsible State Craft- Israel’s evidence-free furor against Palestinian aid agency is working
The mainstream media’s incomplete reporting about UNRWA employees’ alleged ties to Hamas is fueling calls to de-fund it
Momentum in Washington to cut or eliminate U.S. funding for a United Nations agency that aids Palestinians is moving forward almost entirely unchecked. But it’s based on unproven allegations — largely uncritically amplified by U.S. media — that the agency’s staff had links to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
The allegations are contained in an Israeli government dossier claiming that 13 employees (one of which was not identified), out of a total of 13,000, at the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) either took part or assisted in the Hamas-led atrocities. Israel notified UNRWA of the allegations early last month and authorities at the U.N. agency immediately fired the 12 employees without conducting an investigation.
News of the allegations broke soon thereafter which opened the floodgates of knee-jerk reactions, including donor countries pausing their funding for UNRWA — which could result in millions of Palestinians in Gaza stranded without aid amid a humanitarian crisis —and efforts in Washington to cut UNRWA’s funding entirely and forever.
Meanwhile, these debates have been buttressed by inaccurate media coverage of Israel’s allegations. More specifically, many major U.S. news outlets have been leaving out one key detail when reporting on the Israeli dossier: while the Israelis make a number of claims and accusations that they say are based on intelligence and other source data, the document itself contains no direct evidence that these 12 identified UNRWA employees participated in or assisted the Oct. 7 attack.
This is and has long been a political issue- The US, and Israel, have wanted to destroy UNRWA because it was supportive of a Palestinian state and the right of return. For Palestinians
“There has been a long standing aim for Republicans and some Democrats in Congress to defund UNRWA long before Oct. 7, as they see the agency as responsible for enabling the right of return to be an ever growing final status issue,” Joel Braunold, managing director of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace, told RS.