Watch Your Language: How Journalists' Word Choices Distort Truth

In the British science-fiction anthology series Black Mirror, there's an episode where soldiers are deployed to hunt terrifying, humanoid mutants known as "roaches." After a neural implant embedded in one soldier malfunctions, he soon makes the terrifying realization that the "roaches" he has been hunting were ordinary humans the entire time—their appearances were merely distorted by said neural implant. Under the pretense of eliminating terrifying monsters, he had been murdering innocent civilians—all because his perception of reality was distorted.

I don't like this episode of Black Mirror. It's cliché. However, I think the best science fiction encourages us to speculate about the future, our society, and the potential ramifications of emerging technology—something this episode fails to do, largely because it presupposes that its premise is a fantasy that doesn't actually occur. Of course, we don't embed neural implants that distort reality into soldiers, but our windows to reality–newspapers, news channels and news TikToks—do something far more sinister: distort language.

Over the past few months, the Israel-Hamas conflict has raged on. Hate crimes against both the Jewish and Muslim communities have risen dramatically in the U.S. ever since Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, which resulted in 1,200 Israeli casualties. These violent altercations include the October 14 murder of a young Palestinian-American boy in Illinois by his landlord, who reportedly was angry about Hamas’s attack on Israel. Furthermore, there have been more than 2,000 incidents of anti-Semitism reported in the U.S. by the ADL (Anti-Defamation League), a 337-percent increase from the previous year. The Council on American-Islamic Relations received 774 reports of bias incidents and requests for help from Muslims across the U.S. from Oct. 7 to Oct. 24, a 182% jump from the average 16-day period in 2022.This spike in anti-Muslim hate incidents echoes post 9/11 Islamophobia in frequency and intensity. 

Despite the suffering of Jewish and Muslim peoples, media coverage of both groups has been disparate. While the suffering of the Jewish community has been highlighted, as it should, by countless authority figures across the globe, the suffering of the Palestinian people is muffled with both silence and obfuscation. For instance, the BBC News tweeted the following on October 9, 2023: "More than 500 people have died in Gaza after Israel launched massive retaliatory air strikes, according to Gaza's health ministry. More than 700 people have been killed in Israel since Hamas launched its attacks on Saturday." Note the difference between "died" and "killed," and how the BBC's language works to devalue the lives of Palestinian people. Rather than confront Israel's unjust air-strike-based killings of Palestinian civilians in their reporting, the BBC suggested to its readers that Palestinian people simply die—as if they are magically vanishing into thin air.

This abuse of language is nothing new. When the U.S. wanted to clear the Vietnamese Communists (Vietcong) from rural areas during the Vietnam war, it did so with extensive bombing and artillery attacks titled "pacification." George W. Bush referred to the CIA's use of torture as "enhanced interrogation techniques." And leading up to April, 1994, state-funded radio broadcasts in Rwanda told Hutu listeners that the Tutsi were “inyenzi,” or cockroaches—a call disturbingly similar to the premise of the aforementioned Black Mirror episode. Language has always played a role in disguising the terrors of conflict, packaged carefully for consumers—to influence instead of inform.

This uneven coverage of the Israel-Hamas war is not unique. In fact, the dehumanization of the Palestinian people dates all the way back to the Balfour declaration of 1917, the original statement calling for the establishment of a national home for Jewish peoples. The Balfour declaration speaks of Palestinians as "non-Jewish peoples," effectively establishing them as  "other,” as opposed to the rightful inhabitants of the land.

The othering of the Palestinian people continues today. In late October, Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu referenced the Old Testament in characterizing Hamas as “Amalek”—a nomadic nation that was the nemesis of ancient Israel. “Put to death men and women, children and infants,” he said. Though Netanyahu’s staff later claimed he was speaking only of Hamas and not Palestine, his call to indiscriminately slaughter the enemy is unsettling. 

The government of Israel has and continues to debase the humanity of people to justify its campaign on Palestine. Israel's CoGAT (Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories) Head Major General Ghassan Alian stated, “Human animals must be treated as such… There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza]; there will only be destruction.” Similarly, Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, said, “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” Beyond Israel's rhetoric, however, what scares me most is how the West, through media which propagates public sentiment, actively encourages this dehumanization of the Palestinian people. On August 6, 2022, more than a year before Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, The New York Times buried the lede on the deaths of six Palestinian children in its report on a “flare” in “Israel-Gaza fighting." The report failed to mention that the six children were among those killed by Israeli strikes in Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp until its second paragraph. A Sky News report on the killing of a Palestinian child by Israeli forces in early January detailed a bullet “accidentally stray[ing]” in the back of a van and killing a “3 to 4-year-old young lady”. A subsequent report changed the phrasing to “young girl,” but kept the “stray” bullet. It's the passive voice in “killed” versus “died,” the usage of the term "Amalek," the burying of Palestinian tragedies, and these stray, wandering bullets with supposedly no clear shooter which comprise the cruel language of the Israeli government and Western media. 

This is unacceptable. As I am writing this, 13,000 children and counting and 33,00 people in total have been killed in Gaza by the Israel Defense Force. If you are a human being with the basic capacity to respect the lives of others, to hold our one common gift sacred, you must recognize that this massacre is an injustice, and the language surrounding it is dishonest. Journalism should uphold and tell the stories of the weak as opposed to obfuscating and concealing their struggles. Until this is the case, we, as consumers of journalism, must take great care to recognize the inherent biases in language—only then can we be truly compassionate.