The New York Times instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to “avoid” using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept.
The memo also instructs reporters not to use the word Palestine “except in very rare cases” and to steer clear of the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by internally displaced Palestinians, who fled from other parts of Palestine during previous Israeli–Arab wars. The areas are recognized by the United Nations as refugee camps and house hundreds of thousands of registered refugees.
While the document is presented as an outline for maintaining objective journalistic principles in reporting on the Gaza war, several Times staffers told The Intercept that some of its contents show evidence of the paper’s deference to Israeli narratives.
Almost immediately after the October 7 attacks and the launch of Israel’s scorched-earth war against Gaza, tensions began to boil within the newsroom over the Times coverage. Some staffers said they believed the paper was going out of its way to defer to Israel’s narrative on the events and was not applying even standards in its coverage. Arguments began fomenting on internal Slack and other chat groups.
Are you going to tell me that Stalin wasn’t far left?
Nope. Stalin was a right-winger. “Left” and “right” are not aesthetic classifications - they describe your stance towards the status quo, ie, to your relationship with institutionalized power.
If you wish to call Stalin a leftist, you have to prove that Stalin (somehow) had no instututionalized power in the USSR. Are you willing to try?
Oh only anarchy is leftist? That’s uhhh… An interesting position.
That’s not what I said.
However, it is true that there’s a lot of (alleged) “leftism” out there that aren’t leftist at all.
How do you have institutions without institutional power?
Do institutions need to have power over you? If they do, will that power serve you or the institution?
If they don’t then you have anarchy. Well you won’t have it for long but you will at that point in time.
When power is invested in people and not institutions what you actually have is democracy - but yes… some of us also call that anarchy. And we don’t find that term scary at all.
Institutions do love their power, don’t they?
Generally it’s some asshole who cares more about power than helping people who ends anarchy. And a democracy still requires institutional power. Or else how are you going to vote?