Propagating propaganda

By virtue of its position as the world's largest news agency, one that sells its print stories and video content to hundreds of other news and media outlets, Reuters has enormous power to propagate the ideology and political views of the company and its correspondents -- while camouflaging this partisanship as objective news.  Doing so expressly violates the Thomson Reuters Trust Principles, a corporate governance charter which forbids reporting-bias.  Yet with respect to the Israeli-Palestinian Arab conflict, pervasive and systematic bias supporting the Palestinian narrative and agenda is palpable in Reuters stories.

Take for example, this copy which appeared verbatim in at least three stories by different Reuters correspondents following the lethal bus bombing in Jerusalem yesterday:

Israel's three-week war in the impoverished coastal enclave in 2009 killed about 1,400 Palestinians, drawing heavy international censure. Hamas had mostly held fire since.

Having now been propagated in over one-hundred print and online publications, the first line in the paragraph is heavily biased and the second line, overtly false.  "Israel's war" was actually a war between Hamas and Israel, precipitated by the firing of thousands of rockets and mortars by Palestinian terrorists at Israeli civilian communities.  Both this fact and any reporting of the casualties, psychological trauma, and property damage suffered by these communities as a result of Palestinian attacks goes unmentioned by Reuters.

Further, the irrelevant reference to Gaza being "impoverished" and one-sided report of "international censure" of Israel (Hamas was also censured) reflect the use of the propaganda technique of appeal to pity in the former instance and a combination of card stacking and bandwagon propaganda devices in the latter.

As indicated above, the assertion that Hamas has "mostly held [its] fire since [the war ended]" is a fabrication.  Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip, has launched or permitted to be launched, over 500 rockets and mortars at Israeli civilian communities since the war ended in 2009.

Thus, Reuters has, with a single 25-word paragraph, successfully propagated a heavily biased and patently false narrative, in sympathy with the Palestinian Arabs and condemnatory of Israel, which will be read by a global audience of millions of consumers who believe they are being provided impartial facts consistent with the Reuters Trust Principles.