IT is highly unlikely that the global appeal of Western journalism can survive the genocidal conflict in Gaza. If anything is a casualty of Israeli destruction of Gaza it is Western journalism. The post-colonial world in all the continents were bombarded with the narrative from Western countries that Western journalism was the standard to follow.

One event became the apogee of the “superiority” of Western journalism and that was the Washington Post’s exposure of the Watergate scandal that eventually led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Before Watergate, former British colonies were indoctrinated with the “ingrained neutrality” of the BCC in the UK.

With the rise of American dominance in the world after World War 2, American journalism overtook the BBC in terms of world influence. The rise of television journalism in the US along with the influence of Time magazine, Newsweek magazine, the Washington Post and the New York Times (NYT) ensured that American journalism dominated the world.

When CNN introduced cable television, the US dominance was complete. Three invisible features of Western journalism became pronounced after the coming of age of the Third World, particularly with the Arab oil embargo in 1973, the rise of nationalist revolutions in the Third World – Grenada, Suriname, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, Iran, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, and the power of the Non-Aligned Movement.

Those three features were the use of journalism to spread the superiority of Western democracy, the use of journalism to paint the world as a division between the good guy (the West) and the bad guy (USSR and other communist countries), and a portrait of Third World nations as dictatorship and backward lands. We in Guyana are familiar with the contemptuous dismissal of Guyana by a NYT reporter who came after Guyana oil discovery.

The influence of Western journalism in the entire world continued even though the West had invaded Iraq and Afghanistan and was involved in the removal of Gaddafi in Libya. The Seymour Hersh exposure of the brutal torture of Iraqi prisoners after the American invasion became the second pinnacle of American journalism after Watergate. Despite the war crimes at the Abi Ghraib, the Hersh exposure which was picked by the global media cemented American journalism in the mind of the world.

Now Watergate and the exposure of the Abu Ghraib war crimes are now faint memories of Western crusading journalism after the Hamas attack inside Israel and Israel’s committal of genocide that finally removed the invincibility and superiority of Western journalism throughout the world. The Israeli genocide in Gaza has taken not only Western democratic credential into the gutter but also Western journalism with it.

Four features of Western journalism in the reporting and commentaries on Gaza took on ugly dimensions. First, the acceptance of reports from the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) without a corresponding usage of statements put out by Hamas that denied the fictions the IDF was giving them. For example, babies’ heads were chopped off by Hamas militants and stuck on bamboo sticks and Hamas militants engaged in widespread rapes

Secondly, the journalism of repeating what governments of the West had said in relation to denying indiscriminate savagery of the IDF. For example, all Western leaders prematurely concluded that the hospital that was bombed in which over 500 people died was caused by a misfired Hamas rocket rather than Israeli bombing. Western journalism then was parroting what Western leaders were saying. Much to its credit, the BBC and NYT to this day maintain that the cause of the bombing of the hospital is yet to be determined.

Thirdly, open bias towards Israel even after five months of Israeli savagery and fourthly, the refusal of all the Western media to accept that Gaza is a cauldron of genocide. Not one Western media house, including the two that the world thought was sacredly neutral – the BBC and the Guardian- will accept a report from its field operators and its columnist that genocide has occurred in Gaza.

This is the same Western press that report daily on atrocities committed by Russia in Ukraine. For the loss of credibility of CNN in its reporting in Gaza see my column of Wednesday, February 7, 2024. That article relied on news reporting on CNN from the Guardian (London).

Now a huge scandal has engulfed the NYT over its biased coverage. Space would not permit an elaboration but briefly, NTY accepted a report from an Israeli woman whose social media account showed her praising Israel’s genocide. She submitted an account of Hamas militant raping women they attacked in Israel. Her account seems questionable. The NYT editor, who is Jewish, has an office supply store in Israel and he and his father sit on the board of a Jewish organisation named CAMERA.