If you have been following Western media to understand the heartbreaking images and stories from Gaza during the Israeli invasion, you will definitely be disappointed.

Since the start of Israel’s latest assault on the besieged Palestinian enclave – which is proving to be one of the fastest ethnic cleansing attempts in history – Western news organizations have repeatedly published unsubstantiated claims, telling one side of the story and selectively glossing over violence to justify Israel’s violations of international law and protect it from control.

In doing so, Western journalists have abandoned basic standards in their reporting on Israel’s behavior towards the Palestinians. None of this is new. The failures of Western journalism have helped Israel justify its occupation and violence against Palestinians for over 75 years.

On August 6, 2022, more than a year before Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, the New York Times, in a particularly blatant break with good journalism, buried the claim about the deaths of six Palestinian children in its report on a ” Outbreak”. “Fighting between Israel and Gaza”.

In the report, the journalists waited until the second paragraph to mention that six children were among those killed by Israeli attacks in Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp and, without even breaking the sentence, added: “Israel said , some civilian deaths were the result of militants stashing weapons in residential areas” and “in at least one case, a misfired Palestinian rocket killed civilians, including children, in northern Gaza.”

In journalism schools, this is called “breathless” reporting. And it also turned out to be false reporting. Ten days later, the Israeli military is finally there authorized that it was behind the attacks that killed these children in Jabalia.

The New York Times reported this not so breathlessly.

I could call it unprofessional – which is true, since the coverage of this conflict in the Western media is clearly driven by ideology rather than rigorous fact-checking. However, such an assessment would gloss over a deeper, more profound problem in Western journalism: coloniality.

Conflict reporting is one of the most colonized areas of the world’s largest newsrooms. Even in ethnically diverse newsrooms, reporting on conflict can be difficult. But the glaring errors that seem to slip through the editorial filters in newsrooms that pride themselves on the accuracy of their conflict reporting must be taken into account. It must also be put on record that with these constant errors, Western journalists are “mediating” the conflict in Palestine, not just reporting on it.

I would be remiss if I didn’t call it what it is: a prime example of colonial journalism. It is journalism by practitioners from colonizing countries who are proud of their imperial achievements and have a high self-confidence, nourished in every fiber by centuries of predatory accumulation of wealth, knowledge and privilege. These journalists seem convinced that throughout history their countries have fought and defeated particularly immoral and powerful enemies, stopped evil, protected civilization, and saved the day. This is the dominant story of the West and therefore the story of Western journalism.

However, the dominant story is often not the true story, but simply the story of the victors.

And today, Western media are once again telling the story of the victors in Gaza, as they have done countless times before in their coverage of conflicts, crises and human suffering in post-colonial countries.

I saw that in the cover of tropical diseases by reporters who know malaria, dengue fever or Ebola will never flow through their veins or impact their communities. I saw it after that Rohingya genocide when genocide survivors were asked if they had been “held by five or seven men” during the gang rape.

Western journalism is fundamentally a journalism of winners – it never tries to deconstruct stories, put them in the right order or add relevant context in order to speak truth to power and the ongoing excesses, aggression and violence of the “winners” to uncover. history.

And when it comes to Palestine, it is journalism about occupation by people who will never know what it feels like to live under occupation. It is voyeuristic Reporting without a moral compass or a basic sense of decency.

In colonist journalism, language is a weapon used to erase the humanity of the colonized. In The damned of this earthIn his book analyzing the dehumanizing effects of colonization, philosopher Frantz Fanon wrote that the suffering of Algeria (during the imperial conquest of France) was portrayed in media reports as “hordes of vital statistics” over “hysterical masses” with “children who belonged to it.” The book was written in 1961, but its conclusions fit perfectly with today’s Western media coverage of the suffering of the Palestinians.

This dehumanizing use of language was most evident in the death count. Early November, The Times of London written down“Israelis have celebrated a month since Hamas killed 1,400 people and kidnapped 240, starting a war in which 10,300 Palestinians are said to have died.” In Western news, Israelis are actively dying – Hamas has “killed” or “murdered” them ” – while Palestinians die passively. She “dehydrate to death if clean water runs out“, as the Guardian once put it, as if this were not a deliberate crime against humanity but an arbitrary act of God.

According to the West’s propaganda machine, Israel has the right to destroy Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Iran, Lebanon, Yemen and any other country in the region to ensure the security of Israelis. It can kill almost any Muslim, any Jew who calls for a ceasefire, A staff And Doctors at Doctors Without Borders (MSF), journalists, ambulance drivers and even babies who are in the process of targeting Hamas. Yet few news organizations ever discuss what it means for Israel and the world when the only way to feel safe is to rain death and misery on millions of people. None of them – for there is now an “us” and “them”, a divided world of the colonized and the colonizers – has ever seriously questioned whether a victory won at the cost of the lives of thousands of innocent children could ever be considered Victory can be considered victory at all.

With this sophisticated war propaganda, Western journalists obscure the real story we are confronted with here – that Israel, backed by the world’s most powerful military, is waging war against a stateless people living under its occupation, pulverizing innocent men, women and children thousands. The story that Western governments enabled this carnage while lecturing the world about their superior values, decency and love of democracy. Anyone who lives in the postcolonial world knows that their talk of decency and love of democracy, exceptional journalism and decent politicians is anything but a hoax.

At this late hour, when war rages, children starve and Israel is accused of “plausible genocide,” it is important to point out the blood in the hands of Western journalists. In perfect coordination with their powerful governments, they have vilified and disempowered multilateral institutions like the United Nations, given a semblance of respectability to Israeli narratives of “self-defense,” and pushed Palestinian stories and perspectives into insignificance.

The few Palestinians who were given a platform in the name of “balance” and good journalism were prevented from discussing decades of oppression, occupation and abuse by Israel. All they were allowed to do was cry for their dead relatives and beg for more help to feed their starving children – after condemning Hamas, of course.

Maybe this war is finally over for Western journalism. As they follow Israel’s war on Gaza on their social media feeds and see what is happening through reports and statements from Palestinians, more and more people around the world are recognizing the role of Western media in maintaining colonial power , their language and ideologies.

Today, criticism of the failures of Western leaders is growing, but not nearly enough is said about the fact that the Western intelligentsia, and particularly those who run the West’s most influential newsrooms, have also failed. Israel’s war on Gaza has left not only Western liberalism and the rules-based order in ruins, but also the legitimacy of Western journalism.

In their coverage of the Gaza war, Western news organizations have made it clear that they view mass death, starvation and limitless human misery as acceptable and even unavoidable when caused by their allies. They showed that conflict journalism, as practiced in Western newsrooms, is nothing more than another form of colonial violence – one carried out not with bombs and drones, but with words.

In this moment of overwhelming barbarism, journalists of color like me are shocked by the monumental amorality of the newsrooms we are supposed to look up to. The least Western journalists, with their considerable power, could do at this moment would be to call for a permanent ceasefire and spare us another episode of colonial journalism.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.