Who qualifies for life?: The news’ dismissal of truth for agenda

Content warning: This article contains discussions of war crimes, violence against children, racially motivated violence, sexual abuse and terrorism.

Language can be manipulated and exploited to skew the public’s opinion and impact their perception of world events. As we have seen throughout history, propaganda is not a foreign concept to our world, nor is it overt and straightforward in its impact on the public. Countless times, the media has been weaponized to justify and perpetuate violence in order to achieve a political agenda. The news is no stranger to being complicit in crime, death and destruction. 

On a CNN segment broadcasted in late April 2024, while speaking about Columbia University students protesting the University’s investments in companies profiting off of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, anchor Kasie Hunt refers to “a woman who was killed in Gaza.” The “woman” that Hunt refers to is a five-year-old Palestinian girl named Hind Rajab. Hind, who was trapped for hours in a car alongside the dead bodies of her six relatives — who were just killed in front of her — was injured by three bullets to her hand, back and foot. She called Palestinian authorities, begging to be saved. She waited and waited until paramedics were given the green light to rescue her, but was killed after 355 shells from an Israeli tank were fired at her and the paramedics enlisted to save her. She was afterward declared to be “found dead” by CNN, The New York Times and countless other American publications. “A woman who was killed in Gaza” —  to the point, incredibly dismissive, ambiguous, somewhat confusing and nonetheless, all that could be offered for Hind.

Adultification bias is a common form of discrimination used to treat and portray children as less naive and more mature than they are, and is often employed as a means of devaluing the violence that is done to these children. Adultification additionally perpetuates racial stereotypes by appealing to the bias that children of color are physically tougher, rougher, more aggressive and less innocent than other children. They are therefore portrayed to be more capable of withstanding pain, both physically and emotionally, making it seem like the violence that is done to them is in some way justified or insignificant. For instance, adultification commonly affects Black children in the United States, as it leads to increased contact with authority figures, such as police officers, and often results in violence being inflicted upon them. The adultification bias was notably used in 2014 against Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old Black child shot dead in a Cleveland park by a white police officer after a bystander called the police on him for holding a toy gun. Tamir succumbed to his wounds the day after he was shot.

The president of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association said of Tamir after his death, “Tamir Rice is in the wrong. He’s menacing. He’s 5 feet 7, 191 pounds. He wasn’t that little kid you’re seeing in pictures. He’s a 12-year-old in an adult body.” The prosecutor, who declined to indict the officers involved in Tamir’s death, commented that his size made him look older for his age. 

Tamir would have been 22 years old today.

Moreover, the use of passive voice in journalism to describe violent death and intentional murder is a deliberate practice used to obfuscate and avoid assigning blame to the responsible party. Passive voice is the restructuring of a sentence to make it so that the subject is being acted upon by the verb. For instance, if someone said “the pencil was moved” rather than “Josie moved the pencil,” the subject, Josie, holds less accountability for moving the pencil. The reader of a sentence in the passive voice processes the action differently than if it had been written in the active voice, as the passive voice downplays the activity in the sentence by obscuring who is performing the action, making its description less impactful and engaging. Readers miss out on the “who-did-what” of the sentence, rendering a consequential piece of information incomplete. In the context of violence and crime, passive voice dehumanizes victims by taking away their autonomy and making them the target of a blameless crime. When CNN chooses to use the description “found dead” in place of “shot at 355 times by an Israeli tank,” it absolves the Israel Defense Forces soldiers who shot at Hind’s car of blame and the viewers of unadulterated truth.

In 2004, former President George W. Bush famously used the passive voice in a speech while attempting to explain the human rights violations and war crimes committed by the U.S. Army and Central Intelligence Agency in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where U.S. officials tortured, sexually abused and executed detainees.

“Mistakes were made,” Bush said. 

Like CNN and The New York Times, Bush neglected to say who it was that made the mistakes or what the mistakes were. Instead, he opted to use the passive voice to downplay war crimes and obscure the extent of the horror that the victims of Abu Ghraib endured.

For the CNN anchor to refer to five-year-old Hind Rajab as a “woman” and to maintain that she was “found dead” while failing to address the entity that brought about her death and how her death occurred is either gross negligence or intentional deception. There is no other way to look at it. 

This passive and adultified rhetoric surrounding the Middle East has been the norm long before Oct. 7, when the Israel-Hamas war began. Writing about Lebanon in 2013, during a six-year period of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant aggression against predominantly Muslim neighborhoods, The New York Times refers to a car bombing in Beirut’s southern suburb with the headline “Car Bombing Injures Dozens in Hezbollah Section of Beirut.” Throughout the rest of this article, The New York Times offers minimal acknowledgment that the bombing occurred in a civilian area. Instead, it frames one of the most densely populated civilian neighborhoods in Lebanon as a military base. The southern suburb of Beirut, where the attack occurred, has an approximate population of 700,000 and is home to children, families, schools, mosques, grocery stores and shopping centers. But to The New York Times, this was simply “a bold attack on Lebanon’s most powerful political and military player.” The bomb, which injured 53 civilians, was detonated outside a grocery store where people were preparing to break their fast during the Islamic holiday of Ramadan.

More recently, the pager attacks in Lebanon last September — a series of explosions targeting electronic devices across the country that injured more than 2,391 people and killed 37, at least four of whom were civilians — were portrayed by American media outlets as a mere and legitimate military operation. Publications like The New York Times, Fox News and CNN failed to mention that such attacks, marked by an indiscriminate disregard for civilian life, are in fact international war crimes. Instead, these publications only marginally acknowledge that the explosions occurred in homes with children and family members present, in public spaces like grocery stores and residential streets and that civilians were injured and killed — including a 9-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy who lost their lives. 

These publications choose to cast doubt on and invalidate innocence and suffering, opting for euphemisms, inaccuracies and vague language to avoid uttering the more sinister truth. This is reminiscent of the journalistic practice of referring to the Gazan Health Ministry as the “Hamas Health Ministry” or the “Hamas-run Health Ministry” as an attempt to imply that the Gazan death toll is inaccurate and unreliable by implicitly equating all deaths in Gaza with those of combatants and attempting to discredit the ministry as belonging to a military group. Such practices led former President Joe Biden to question the validity of Gazan casualties publicly, leading the Ministry to release their death report and procedure for counting deaths in October 2023. Despite how these publications frame it, the Palestinian authority — Hamas’ political rivals — oversee, fund and manage the Gazan Health Ministry, and experts consider the Gazan death toll and the Health Ministry’s system for counting and reporting deaths to be reliable. A recent study from The Lancet actually found that the death toll in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023, has been underreported by at least 41%, as the ministry distinguishes between identified and unidentified bodies in its numbers, and some bodies have been unable to be located under the rubble. Independent journalists in Gaza have taken it upon themselves to document their own experiences and that of other Gazans living under Israeli siege and bombardment as an attempt to prove to the world that these deaths are in fact occurring.

Similarly, the practice of referring to Palestinians held under administrative detention in Israeli prisons as “prisoners” is misleading and inaccurate. Administrative detention is the indefinite detaining of a person without charge or legal representation, often without the person even knowing the reason for their detainment, under the assumption that they are a security risk or may commit an act of violence in some unforeseen future. Experts liken those held under administrative detention more to hostages than prisoners. Israel, notorious for its use of administrative detention on children as young as 14, often subjects its detainees to inhumane conditions including torture and sexual abuse. Currently, there are 3,340 Palestinians held without charge in Israeli prisons. This number excludes the thousands of detainees from Gaza held without charge that were captured since October 2023. Again, to refer to these detainees as “prisoners” is incredibly inaccurate.  

This is the haziness surrounding the Middle East. American news publications such as The New York Times and CNN fail to humanize, instead speaking of civilian casualties as collateral damage, or neglecting to acknowledge them at all, prescribing our entire livelihoods to military bases and establishing our deaths as blameless. The Middle East is an afterthought. Its people and their right to life are negligible. This is what the media has created: an incomprehensible and monolithic abstraction, devoid of life, abundant in complication and “complex issues;” a desert, both physically and literally. 

For decades, the language and framing of headlines and articles in American media regarding Gaza, Lebanon and the entirety of the Middle East have been used to justify indiscriminate bombing, international war crimes and outright murder. Attempting to paint an entire civilian population as combatants and a landscape as a battleground, casting doubt on people’s innocence and therefore their right to life, sways public opinion in order to consolidate the sub-human status that the people of the Middle East have been reduced to by the media. 

Humanity is now up for question, and we are made to understand that not all possess it.

This is where dehumanization begins. The media leads us to believe that personhood has requirements, and that when these requirements are not met, one can simply cease to be a person. You are disqualified from humanity, for being human is stringent. You are now allowed to die a slow and painful death, brought about intentionally and deliberately, calculated and contrived carefully for maximum horror and suffering. Now, an entire region, an entire population, an entire people, is sentenced eternally to some abstract, imperceptible state of suffering, funded and enabled by American tax dollars of course, and one can simply choose to look away. To believe that they deserve it, even. To believe that this is the normal state of being in the Middle East. 

But personhood is not, and should not be, something exclusive.  

Does the killing of children ever become justifiable? Does carpet bombing residential neighborhoods indiscriminately ever become defensible? Among activist circles and in protests, we have heard much talk of a “red line.” That is, if such a line exists, or if it has ever existed in regards to Arabs and Muslims. The question of a red line is the question of the number of bodies, if there is one, that will warrant a step back, a reconsideration, a tapping into our collective morality, demanding that the horrors stop. We ask this question expecting a reaction, some type of soul-crushing reckoning at what has been done and what we have allowed to be done. But no such reaction ever ensues. The media has made the murder of Arabs palatable. It may be ugly to look at; some of us may have to look away when the too-gruesome parts are broadcast on our televisions and across our phone screens, but ultimately, it is an acceptable state of being for Arabs. 

Truthful, factual and informative journalism is meant to be a force of change and betterment for our world as a whole. The state of our media does the opposite. The media and news are not meant to treat others as less than human, nor to justify and normalize violence and war crimes for the sake of a country’s political interests. Leading language – such as adultification, passive voice misuse and misrepresentation – that American publications use regularly when reporting on the Middle East, people of Color and other marginalized groups results in implicit biases and negative preconceptions. This sways public opinion against these groups to perpetuate an agenda. As regular listeners, watchers and readers of these publications, we must carefully ask ourselves, can humanity ever be revoked or forgotten?

Statement Correspondent Aya Fayad can be reached at ayafayad@umich.edu.

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