Reporting on War and Conflict: Tips from Our Newsletter

February 24, 2022

Sanctions that the U.S. imposed on Russia in an attempt to avoid a full invasion of Ukraine made headlines in February 2022. The tweet accompanying the above headline from CBS News was critiqued for blaming ongoing economic issues on these relatively new sanctions — a specious argument that doesn’t even really reflect the story inside. But the headline does something else harmful: erasing Russia’s actions from the narrative.

 

March 3, 2022

Why does this CNN headline make Biden’s February 24, 2022 address sound like the climactic scene of an old Western movie? Adding dramatic flourish to reporting on a literal war is wholly unnecessary. But as researcher Hussein Kesvani points out below, it’s part of a larger pattern of platforms spreading news that triggers high emotions for engagement.

Whether they’d admit it or not, news and content producers respond to that engagement by creating more emotion-laden content. Editors should avoid framing all war-related stories as spectacle, like the Guardian did with their headline on the same speech below.

 

March 10, 2022

 

April 14, 2022

On April 12,2022, President Biden referred to Russia’s attacks on Ukraine as “genocide.” This is newsworthy because, as we’ve discussed in previous issues, “genocide” is a term with a legal definition via the International Criminal Court that prosecutes such crimes against humanity. Thus, world leaders and journalists alike are usually quite careful to use this term, since determining whether acts formally amount to genocide is a complex matter.

 

October 12, 2023

When a long-term developing story breaks out, major news outlets will sometimes launch a page on their website that aggregates all of their articles on the topic. The name of that page is often found at the top of these stories, above the headline, in a spot some call the “eyebrow.” (News jargon is weird, I know.)

While reading this week, I noticed the “eyebrow” on the Washington Post’s page for news about Israel and Hamas read as follows:

Most frequently, I have seen this phrased as “Israel-Hamas War,” as with The New York Times’ own topic page, below.

Now, in the wake of devastating violence, I can understand why someone might read this section and think, “Who cares? Why does this matter?”

For starters, this is about accuracy. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu specifically named Hamas in his public statement declaring Israel was at war.

But this also matters because the hyphen linking the two entities in either headline signals that each is a “side” of the war in question, and thus implicitly assigns blame for horrific acts of terror. The difference between these two phrases is the difference between separating the acts of Hamas from Gazans and lumping them together.

“Israel-Hamas War” acknowledges the nuance that, though Hamas controls Gaza, it is a polarizing force that does not necessarily represent Gazans; there have not been legislative elections in Gaza since 2006. “Israel-Gaza War” on the other hand might imply that these two entities are on equal footing and the civilians of Gaza are party to the assault they now face. And to be clear, the density of Gaza means attacks on it have and will likely continue to lead to civilian casualties.

Sure, news media necessitates shorthand and we often describe wars past and present by the land represented, not their governments. Considering that long, complicated history and the condition of Gaza, I’d argue this situation requires far more sensitivity. I’d also go as far as to argue that any non-representative government that commits an act of war should be named separately from its people in coverage of the violence that follows. Good journalism requires context, especially when it comes to histories of power.

 

November 2, 2023

As the saying goes, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Sadly, this rings true for journalists who haven’t learned the lessons of prior coverage and its criticisms.

Back in 2005, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, two wire service photos of the resulting crisis sparked a conversation on language and framing. The Los Angeles Times recounted the story in 2017:

“One from Associated Press photographer Dave Martin showed a young black man wading through water while holding a bag and a case of soda. The accompanying description stated that he was ‘looting.’ A second photo from Chris Graythen for Getty Images showed a similar scene, but this time it was a white couple clutching bags of food. Their actions were labeled as ‘finding.’”

The difference in these terms is the level of sympathy elicited for the subject. “Looting“ implies criminality while “finding” in this context implies innocently gathering goods for survival. Based on U.S. history, I think I can reasonably suggest systemic racism played a role in the labels given to each photo.

I use this example pretty frequently in my workshops on news and language. You may understand, then, why the headline from Politico below caused me dismay.

The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is well documented. More than 8,000 Palestinians have been killed in the past few weeks and innocent civilians are in dire need of aid. Using the word “loot,” traditionally defined as pillaging for the spoils of war, is an incredibly cynical and unsympathetic way to frame people stealing for survival.

I much prefer the simple rephrase used by CNN in the headline below. “Take” is a pretty neutral verb in this situation; it doesn’t imply criminality but does suggest the goods weren’t willingly given. The use of “basics” underlines the life-sustaining nature of the items people were searching for.

The final example below, from the BBC, I think does the best job of illustrating how dire the situation truly is. It uses the phrase “break into” to imply that the actions described may not have been lawful, but still manages to focus on the real story here: people are desperately searching for aid. This isn’t stealing for stealing’s sake — as we might think of with the word “looting.”

This headline doesn’t sensationalize the events it describes by centering crime. Its priorities are clear: audiences need to understand how bad things really are. It’s the difference between, “Look, these people committed a crime” and “Look, things are so bad these people had to commit a crime to survive.”

 

November 9, 2023

Framing is a somewhat nebulous concept, but it’s a critical one to understand as a  media maker or consumer, particularly during times of high conflict. That’s because it isn’t just about the facts, but about how the facts are presented.

I like scholar David Tewksbury’s definition of framing best: “the verbal and visual information in an article that directly or implicitly suggests what the problem is about, how it can be addressed, and who is responsible for creating and solving it.”

A key part of this definition is the “information in an article.” What is included and what is excluded from a story are often of equal import.

For example: the headline above, from the Guardian, is pretty straightforward on its face; it is a brief summary of the U.S. Secretary of State’s recent statements. But when contrasted with the headline below, from the Washington Post, it’s clear the Guardian’s writer made a distinct choice in what to leave out of this frame.

The Guardian’s choice to exclude that Blinken said Gaza should be run by Palestinians could be simply due to space constraints and prioritizing Blinken’s full name, and of course the full article does express this context. But we all know no one can read every article they see in a day, so headlines remain vital, precious real estate for telling stories. Israel is a key ally of the U.S., so Blinken’s full perspective on how this conflict should end is pertinent information.

The Post’s headline writer made their own interesting choice as well by leaving out the word “Israel.” Perhaps the audience is meant to assume that the “re” in “reoccupied” implies that Israel would be the occupier again. However, I believe it’s still worth noting since there’s a big difference between post-conflict sovereignty for Palestinians and occupation by another non-Israel state.

Both headlines exhibit how subtle choices of what information is included in limited space can alter the salience of a news event.

 

January 25, 2024

The three headlines above — from The New York Times, Politico, and Reuters, respectively — were all published within the same two days. The Times’ headline led its popular morning newsletter, referring to a segment on Israel’s attack strategy.

To be precise, “Decline of Deaths” is inaccurate — deaths are being recorded each day in Gaza. Obviously, no deaths are being reversed. What the headline refers to is the rate of deaths in Gaza; the daily toll has recently slowed.

The killing of Gazans by Israel continues nonetheless. As the other examples announce, this toll “soars” and has passed 25,000 by one count. These are clearly very different framings of the same facts, a kaleidoscopic interpretation of the same data.

The Times’ headline is misleading in the context of the facts. But what it signals is more malignant to me. A headline is supposed to mark what is most important about a story. This story’s premise is that this change in daily death toll reflects more precision by Israeli forces and it presents “both sides” of a debate — is this shift “enough” of a correction or “too much”? I find such distanced, “objective” discussion on whether the death rate is low “enough,” as if there is some ideal, justifiable number of innocents killed, repugnant. It is also extremely telling that, when ostensibly given the freedom to select its own topics of focus and given the same set of facts as other outlets, the Times’ newsletter writers and editors chose this framing of that data. They chose to focus, to make most salient to the reader, a misleading “decline” in deaths rather than the fact that these killings continue, that the toll grows each day.

It is hard for me to reconcile this editorial choice with the moral clarity I seek in modern journalism, where first and foremost human life and freedom are valued.

 

February 1, 2024

The Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, was the catalyst for Israel’s resulting attacks on Gaza — this much is clear. Israel has since decimated Gaza and killed upwards of 26,000 people. A new visual investigation from The Guardian illustrates as much.

But this was not the inevitable outcome. Whether you personally agree with any of them or not, choices were made by Israel from among innumerable options to get to this point.

And yet, I often find media framings of the devastation in Gaza leave out all reference to their ultimate cause. For example, the three headlines below from The Guardian, Agence France-Presse via NDTV, and CNN refer to the danger now facing many Gazans: hunger.

Two of these use the word “famine” to describe this emergency. That isn’t inaccurate, exactly, but it’s a word that itself assigns no cause or blame as if it could be the result of a natural phenomenon. But is this the right word for the intentional destruction of the means of feeding a population? Moreover, the NDTV headline asserts the World Health Organization says this is “due to aid constraints.” Who is creating the obstacles to delivering aid?

The Time headline below gets us closer to accountability by using the phrase “starvation is being utilized.” “Starvation” is a stronger word choice here because it implies intention, and “utilized” makes that explicit. But who is using starvation, and for what purpose?

NBC News answers both of these questions in their headline. It not only uses the stronger choice of “starvation,” but it assigns a reason for its use (“weapon of war”) and even assigns Israel as the actor. Without this level of constant accountability, it might be easier for audiences watching these tragedies from afar to forget that human choices are behind each of these actions — and thus, they are the solution as well.

 

February 29, 2024

“Dressed in his U.S. Air Force uniform, Aaron Bushnell walked up to the Israeli embassy in Washington one afternoon this week and calmly described his intention to ‘engage in an extreme act of protest’ against Israel’s military offensive in Gaza,” The New York Times reported Wednesday.

Bushnell then proceeded to light himself on fire while shouting “Free Palestine!” He soon collapsed and was rushed to a local hospital where he later died.

For their investigation into Bushnell’s past The Washington Post used the headline below.

The headline is factually accurate, but it might rub some readers the wrong way because it doesn’t feel “true” in the sense that it highlights certain pieces of Bushnell’s past over potentially equally significant ones. For instance, it highlights the conservative Christian community he was raised in, but not that friends said he rejected this upbringing.

The headline references the story’s first sentence, which mentions a recent call in which he and a friend discussed “their shared identities as anarchists.” The article never again mentions this “anarchist past,” but does mention Bushnell’s passion for activism, his time spent helping people experiencing homelessness, and his distaste for state-sanctioned violence.

I do not know the headline writer’s intentions here, but it is strange to me that, of all of the facts of a person’s life to choose from, they would choose two that will inevitably be alienating to the audience. Was the goal here to imply Bushnell was “other,” that he was strange and different from the reader? Or is that merely the result?

I did not know Aaron Bushnell personally and summarizing any one person’s life into a headline is a difficult task. That’s why, especially when it comes to private citizens whose pasts are not well-known, journalists should be careful not to make clear judgements about them by selectively highlighting some slices of life over others.

The New York Times chose a clearer headline, below, for their dive into Bushnell’s past. It mentions Bushnell’s identity as a service member because it is very relevant considering his political protest. Most significantly, it highlights why he chose to end his life — to protest Israel — arguably the most important part of this story.

 

March 28, 2024

Nearly two months ago, I wrote in this newsletter that the people of Gaza were starving, yet many news headlines refused to acknowledge why or how. Unfortunately, this crisis has only gotten worse, with many facing “catastrophic hunger” and famine just around the corner.

In the time since that early February newsletter, a U.N. expert has accused Israel of purposely destroying Gaza’s food systems as a war tactic. So did EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell. The New York Times has reported extensively on how aid to Gaza is being blocked and significantly slowed by Israel’s inspections of delivery trucks. A recent headline from The Guardian states, “‘Man-made famine’ charge against Israel is backed by mounting body of evidence.”

During a January interview with The New Yorker after a visit to the Rafah border crossing in Egypt, U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen said, “…it was clear that there was not sufficient will by Israeli authorities to address the scope and severity of the crisis … it shouldn’t have taken so long to open the Kerem Shalom crossing. And we know that it wasn’t open because of a political decision by the Netanyahu government, that they did not want to see humanitarian goods transiting through Israeli territory to get to Palestinians in Gaza.”

And yet, when I search for headlines about hunger in Gaza, I repeatedly see those like the one below, from Forbes, that simply say Gazans “are starving” instead of something more direct, like “being starved.”

This is a critical difference of which our audiences must be fully aware. We — as in, all people — can only solve problems that we can identify. If starvation is seen as an unintended consequence of a conflict already framed as impossibly complicated, then how are citizens of the world to effectively oppose it? If, instead, it is named as an intentional act, it becomes a different issue altogether and we are given the vocabulary needed to oppose it.

Of course, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has denied all claims that this is Israel’s intent. To do otherwise would be to admit to war crimes.

Is it a journalist’s job, then, to equally amplify each “he said, she said” between two very different sides of a conflict, just because they oppose each other? Or is it a journalist’s job to evaluate all of these statements and facts together — including eyewitness accounts, expert assessments, and the potential motives driving them all — and draw an informed conclusion for their audience, for whom they are transmitting otherwise unknowable world events?

If outlets are waiting for Israel to admit they are purposely starving Gaza before stating it plainly, like Al Jazeera does in the headline below, they will be waiting a long time.

 

April 4, 2024

This week, I want to call attention to the general public response to the recent Israeli airstrikes that killed seven World Central Kitchen workers in Gaza. WCK founder José Andrés has accused Israel of targeting the three cars carrying the aid workers. The killings have been called “a new low” by USA Today, caused a “global backlash” according to NBC News, and a Politico headline explains this killing “is different” — different than what is unclear, but presumably other killings during this war.

Of course, the deliberate killing of civilian aid workers is a war crime and the loss of any innocent life is tragic.

So is the deliberate killing of journalists, of which at least 95 have been killed during this war. So is the deliberate destruction of healthcare systems — yet, by the end of January, the World Health Organization reported there had been 342 health care-related attacks in Gaza.

And, lest we forget, the killing of over 30,000 Palestinians since October is another immense tragedy.

So why is the killing of seven aid workers considered a “different,” “new low”? Is it because six of them were British, Polish, Australian, or Canadian-American?

I, for one, would be happy to see anything become a turning point for Israel’s allies like the U.S. to use their leverage to end the killing. But the news industry must confront the fact that we are complicit in which narratives capture public attention and which don’t.

There has been a lot of incredible reporting on the many lives lost in Gaza. But we cannot allow audiences to become numb to sky-high death tolls and dehumanized statistics. And we should not set the example that some deaths are “worth” more words than others because they come from different places or have different jobs than the innocent Palestinians who have also been killed and injured.

 

April 25, 2024

Last week, Columbia University students began a protest encampment to demand that the institution divest from Israel in wake of the killings in Gaza. Since then, protests at several campuses across the U.S. have sprung up to both echo Columbia students’ demands and/or to stand in solidarity. Protesters have faced punishments (or threats thereof) from their institutions and physical violence from law enforcement.

Scholars have been studying media coverage of protests for decades. I used this scholarship to conduct my own research on Philadelphia outlets’ coverage of local protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. One core framework of this scholarship is the protest paradigm, a pattern identified by James Hertog and Douglas McLeod.

To (extremely annoyingly) quote my own report, “They found that coverage often delegitimizes protest movements via reporting that focuses on the most violent or dramatic aspects of a protest, features an over-reliance on official sources and definitions, fails to explain the context of the movement at hand, and exaggerates the negative consequences of those protests.”

In their work analyzing recent coverage under the protest paradigm, Danielle K. Brown and Summer Harlow categorized news reports into four categories:

• “Riot: Emphasizing disruptive behavior and the use or threat of violence.
• Confrontation: Describing protests as combative, focusing on arrests or “clashes” with police.
• Spectacle: Focusing on the apparel, signs, or dramatic and emotional behavior of protesters.
• Debate: Substantially mentioning protester’s demands, agendas, goals, and grievances.”

Within this framework the Riot, Confrontation, and Spectacle frames are considered delegitimizing of the protest movement at hand because they shift focus from the cause of the protest and its supporters’ proposed solutions (the Debate frame).

I couldn’t help but view headlines and stories about these protests through this framework. I haven’t done any formal assessment of this coverage under the protest paradigm, but I did pull headlines that I think exemplify each frame.

Riot: The headline above from CNN as published by WPSD uses words like “rocked” and “unrest” to emphasize the disruptive, threatening nature of the protests.

Confrontation: The Guardian headline above focuses on arrests and thus the conflict between students and police.

Spectacle: The Semafor headline above discusses the masks students are wearing while they protest.

Debate: And finally, above, the Associated Press manages to work what the students are actually protesting for into the headline!

Any protest is bound to draw out this range of coverage. As this story continues to unfold, consider the proportion of these frames that you encounter and ask yourself whether that ratio amplifies or obscures the story’s most important angles.

 

May 9, 2024

Despite ongoing negotiations for a ceasefire, Israel began aerial and tank strikes on the city of Rafah in Gaza this week, where over a million people have taken refuge. Civilians are being told to move toward Khan Younis, which was recently left in ruins by Israeli forces, to avoid danger.

A UNICEF spokesperson told The Intercept, “The area that they’re being directed to evacuate to is not safe. It’s not safe because there aren’t the services there to meet their basic needs, water, toilets, shelter. But it’s also not safe because we know that that area has been subject to strikes despite being a so-called safe zone.”

The Wall Street Journal, below, has described these events as “Israel Presses On in Rafah,” framing this as primarily a challenge for Israel to overcome.

NPR (below) and other outlets have continued to call this “Israel’s Rafah offensive.” This isn’t inaccurate, of course, but it’s tame language, in my opinion, for describing an attack on a densely populated city full of civilians with few options to flee. Using the jargon of war strategists creates a distancing effect for the reader, lest they confront the reality of what an “offensive” means.

I much prefer the plain language used by outlets below, which describe strikes (also NPR), an “attack” (Financial Times) and a “ground assault” (NBC News).

It is always mission-critical for journalists to use direct language. I’d argue this is especially important when our job is to describe war to audiences who cannot witness these events firsthand.

 

May 16, 2024

I didn’t catch this New York Times headline above before it was changed to its current form below, but several netizens who criticized this framing thankfully did.

The differences between “Are on the Move” and “Are Forced to Evacuate” are stark in their levels of accuracy and their tone. The first suggests voluntary movement, like traveling. By starting the sentence with, “As Israel Steps Up Attacks,” the headline is vague about the relationship between these attacks and the movement. Grammatically speaking, the events coincide but are not causational.

And, tonally, “on the move” just feels wrong here. It’s a phrase that, to me, is more at home as a lighthearted reference to a busy person. (For what it’s worth, while considering that feeling, I Googled “on the move Taylor Swift” and a recent Daily Mail headline with that phrase came right up.)

On the other hand, being “Forced to Evacuate” tells a much different story. Most obviously, it accurately describes the involuntary nature of the Gazans fleeing danger. It also more directly connects it to the “attacks” at the beginning of the sentence as the cause. This is the serious tone with which this drastic action affecting hundreds of thousands of lives deserves to be treated.

 

July 25, 2024

So much of the U.S. news media is currently focused on the presidential election that news about the ongoing attacks on Gaza and its people are flying under the radar. The visit of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has resurfaced some awareness, but the public discourse remains scattered. That’s why today I wanted to focus on headlines about recent attacks on Khan Younis.

The first headline, below, is from The Guardian. While I appreciate that it highlights the responsibility of Israel through the phrase “Israeli attacks,” it uses the vague term “scores” to describe the dead. It also attributes this knowledge to “medics say.” Of course, the source of any information should be present in any article, but its presence in a headline like this can be a way of hedging the validity of that information off the bat.

Here and there throughout the war, I’ve seen online criticism of the use of the word “evacuation” by Israel and its repetition by the media. Since Gazans have been displaced over and over, zones deemed “safe” by Israel have proven not safe at all, and there is really no where to evacuate to, the word feels disingenuous and euphemistic. Taking Israel’s word for it (literally) allows them to appear as if they are evacuating civilians in good faith so they can attack Hamas, when in reality it is a false promise that places blame on the dead for not following orders.

The headline from CNN below uses the word “flee” to describe this movement, instead, while highlighting that Israel has changed the boundaries of its “humanitarian zone” to make it smaller. This provides context that avoids providing cover for the “evacuation” orders.

I also appreciate this headline’s use of scare quotes (using quotation marks unnecessarily to call something into doubt) around “humanitarian zone.” As described above, there is really nothing humanitarian about what is happening in Gaza, and the borders of such zones change time and again.

 

August 22, 2024

Earlier this week, scholar Assal Rad tweeted a BBC headline about Israel’s war on Gaza alongside her own edits, below. In just a few words, she makes clear how erasing the actor from the story makes this headline complicit in obscuring Israel’s accountability.

Rad’s post did what some outlets couldn’t seem to do in coverage of the Democratic National Convention: keep priorities straight. There were protesters at the DNC calling for the party to be more aggressive in its policies on Israel and to call for a complete ceasefire. The New York Times chose to report out how this protest impacts the left’s cohesion and, presumably, its chances at winning elections. See the headline below.

The most salient part of any protest coverage should be why people are protesting, and what demands and solutions they present. That’s the story here. Focusing on how a protest will disrupt daily life — which is typically the point of a protest — via traffic or postponed events, for instance, delegitimizes the social action. Here, the Times headline turns a protest about a war in which tens of thousands of innocents have died into a chess piece on the game board of the U.S. elections.

I prefer The Nation’s headline, below, which resists getting distracted by the spectacle of protest. It allows the tension between activism and the DNC to serve as the background while underlining the point of the actions: bringing awareness to the devastation.

 

August 29, 2024

In addition to its continued deadly attacks on Gaza, Israel invaded the West Bank this week. At the same time, the U.S. sanctioned an Israeli government-funded group which, the Guardian reports, “provides security for illegal settler outposts” in the West Bank. As the Economist reports, the war on Gaza has been a boom time for Israeli settlers as they gain land and political influence.

To be clear, the work of “settlers” in this case often means violent attacks on Palestinians and the forceful taking of their land.

The Axios headline about this, below, uses the phrase “supports” to distance the group from what it calls “illegal…outposts” — which, again, represents the stealing of inhabited land. I question the use of “outposts” here, which typically denotes a military operation of some sort. The word gives these settlements an air of officialdom.

By contrast, the Guardian reports, the head of Israel’s Shin Bet security agency wrote to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu just last week to say that violence by settlers constitutes terrorism.

This is why I appreciated the Guardian’s headline, below. It uses the word “settlers” to address the security group under sanction because of who they serve. It also describes them as “extremist,” which aligns with the violence associated with the group and the government’s own assessment of their actions. This language telegraphs urgency and danger that is proportional to this news, rather than using hedging language to obscure it.