Pirate's Cove

Now, if it was Republicans turning to seriously hardcore news outlets, the NY Times would be apoplectic

Frustrated by Gaza Coverage, Student Protesters Turn to Al Jazeera

Nick Wilson has closely followed news on the war in the Gaza Strip since October. But Wilson, a Cornell University student, is picky when it comes to his media diet: As a pro-Palestinian activist, he doesn’t trust major U.S. outlets’ reporting on Israel’s campaign in Gaza.

Instead, he turns to publications less familiar to some U.S. audiences, such as the Arab news network Al Jazeera.

“Al Jazeera is the site that I go to to get an account of events that I think will be reliable,” he said.

Many student protesters said in recent interviews that they were seeking on-the-ground coverage of the war in Gaza, and often, a staunchly pro-Palestinian perspective — and they are turning to alternative media for it. There’s a range of options: Jewish Currents, The Intercept, Mondoweiss and even independent Palestinian journalists on social media, as they seek information about what is happening in Gaza.

Al Jazeera has always been a pro-Islamist and anti-Israel outlet. Jewish Currents is a very hard left Jewish outlet. The rest are simply Jew haters and supporters of Palestinians, who all fail to note that no Arab nation wants them because of their penchant for violence.

Their preferences embody a broader shift for members of Generation Z, who are increasingly seeking out news from a wider array of sources and questioning legacy outlets in a fragmented media ecosystem.

Israel’s recent ban on the local operations of Al Jazeera has only elevated the network’s status among many student protesters. They prize coverage from reporters on the ground, and Al Jazeera has a more extensive operation in Gaza than any other publication. Students also noted the sacrifices it has made to tell the story there. Two Al Jazeera journalists have died since the start of the war.

That’s because Al Jazeera has no harsh words for Hamas, designated a terrorist organization by the US, EU, and UN.

While many Western media outlets, with few if any journalists in Gaza before the war, have struggled to gain access to the territory, Al Jazeera has been recognized for its raw, searing portrayals of the death and destruction there. A typical report may show video of Israeli tanks rolling into cities, alongside drone shots of leveled buildings in Gaza City and Palestinians fleeing their homes.

In normal times the NY Times would note that Al Jazeera is providing propaganda for Hamas. And the kiddies are downloading the Al Jazeera app in huge numbers

Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, described the network’s Arabic-language channel as more outwardly pro-Palestinian than the English one, which he said has a more subtle slant.

Critics say its coverage veers into support of the armed resistance to Israel. The Israeli government, which has accused Al Jazeera of acting as a “mouthpiece” for Hamas, last Sunday seized its broadcast equipment and shut down its operations in the country for at least 45 days.

The majority of people named in the article have names which would suggest that they support Islamic terrorist groups and hate Jews. If they were Republicans the Times would be calling them racists and terrorist supporters

The protesters rattle off a list of mainstream U.S. publications as having coverage they find objectionable, including CNN, The Atlantic, the BBC and The New York Times, among many others. Although major news outlets have reported extensively on Israel’s campaign in Gaza, the death toll and the damage, the coverage in the view of student protesters doesn’t assign enough blame to Israel for Palestinian deaths, or thoroughly fact-check Israeli officials. And they said protest coverage has focused too much on antisemitism on college campuses instead of Islamophobia.

The protesters are upset that Credentialed Media outlets are actually covering the Jew hatred and support of Hamas. Pretty wild to think with these outlets, eh?

Part of what doomed the network back then was “a distinctly anti-American bent” to its coverage, Ibish wrote in a 2016 guest essay for the Times. But now, broadcast from a different country, the network’s tone is finding its audience on university campuses, he said.

“There’s a third-worldist, anti-imperial point of view, and that’s also the view that many college kids have adopted,” he said.

They’re play-acting at being revolutionaries while going back to their dorm rooms and meal plans, having access to reliable water, clean clothes, electricity, then home to their parents homes when school is out. They wear their Intifada keffiyehs as fashion for the camera, having no understanding of their meaning. These students need to go to Gaza, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Yemen, etc. to see how well they are received with open arms by the people they advocate for so much, especially the women and LGBT folks. See how that goes.