Suchitra, Bhakti and Madhuri analyze shocking, biased and racist headlines from mainstream newspapers from the past year with a focus on Palestine, Lebanon and Iran. They discuss the importance and impact of headlines historically but also in a world defined by ever-diminishing attention spans, and where news is mainly read on smartphones. The media appears to have an active investment in war,  the ongoing genocide in Palestine, and in American imperialism, broadly. The hosts tackle three broad trends how headlines were written in the last year: the use of passive voice, the fabrication of a both-sides perspective, and an unabashed racism towards Muslims. This invented grammar of the headlines obfuscates  the identity of the perpetrators, generates vagueness around mass killings, applauds technological prowess of attacks and invasions, and sanitizes and diminishes war crimes. Such headlines and unethical journalism enables the dehumanization of non-white lives and the consequent normalization of violence against them by the state. The episode highlights the urgent necessity for critical awareness and unlearning racist, dehumanizing narratives designed to legitimize and elicit popular consent for brutal state atrocities against non-white, colonized and marginalized people around the world. 

Key Takeaways 

• The media plays a significant role in shaping public perception of genocide.
• Headlines are crucial in framing narratives, they contain entire histories of language.
• Passive voice in reporting obscures accountability and responsibility.
• “Both-sidesism” in the media creates false equivalences in conflict reporting.
• The normalisation of racist language in the media and passivity as a tool in reporting contributes to dehumanisation of Arab, Muslim, Queer, and non-White lives.
• Journalism can act as a tool for genocide, actively participating and propagating, rather than maintaining a check on power.
• There is a concerted effort by the media to erase and invisibilise the realities of violence against marginalised and colonised communities, ignoring all historical contexts and accountability. Doing so, they continue to keep the harrowing reality of colonialism and imperialism alive.
• Unlearning harmful narratives is essential for fostering understanding and empathy in the light of a harmful gaslighting and propagandist force.  
• The complicity of the media in state violence must be critically examined.

Keywords: Journalism, media ethics, reporting, headlines, propaganda, narratives, war, genocide, racism, Islamophobia, public perception, both-sidesism, passive voice, Palestine, Lebanon, Iran. 

References:

U.S. Media's Complicity in Israel's Genocide with Sana Saeed (Jadaliyya) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50nEqjFTI-4

Assal Rad Twitter/X account: https://x.com/AssalRad

Journalism as Genocide/Suchitra Vijayan (The Wire, India) https://thewire.in/communalism/journalism-as-genocide

Suchitra Vijayan is a writer, photographer and activist. She is the founder and Executive Director of The Polis Project. For her first book, The Midnight's Border: A People's History of India, Suchitra traveled across the 9000-mile Indian border. A barrister by training, she previously worked for the United Nations war crimes tribunals in Yugoslavia and Rwanda before co-founding the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, which gives legal aid to Iraqi refugees. She is the co-author of How Long Can the Moon Be Caged? Voices of Indian Political Prisoners (2023) which offers a lens into today's India through the lived experiences of political prisoners.

Bhakti Shringarpure is a writer and editor. She is the co-founder of Warscapes magazine which transitioned into the Radical Books Collective, a community building project that creates an alternative approach to books and reading. Bhakti is the author of Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital (2019) and editor of Literary Sudans: An Anthology of Literature from Sudan and South Sudan (2017), Imagine Africa (2017) Mediterranean: Migrant Crossings (2018) and most recently, Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War (2023).

Madhuri Sastry is a former lawyer, specializing in international and human rights law. She was the publisher of Guernica Magazine. Her political writing, cultural criticism, interviews and essays have appeared in several publications including The Nation, Guernica, Slate, Bitch and New York Magazine. She is on the editorial board at The Polis Project.