CNN’s Clarissa Ward and her crew visit Gaza, shedding light on the devastating circumstances while avoiding attributing blame to Israel or the US-backed campaign. The segment grossly downplays Israel’s role and entirely misses the US’s assistance, leading to criticism about the network’s narrative distortion.
By Caitlin Johnstone
CNN’s Clarissa Ward and her crew became the first western journalists to enter Gaza independent from Israeli forces since October 7, briefly visiting a 150-bed hospital that was recently constructed in a soccer stadium by the United Arab Emirates in the southern part of the enclave before leaving to report on the footage from Abu Dhabi.
Overall the segment on Ward’s visit is beneficial, providing some much-needed visuals to a mainstream audience for whom the human butchery in Gaza has largely been more of an abstract idea. CNN shows maimed victims of Israeli airstrikes in all their suffering and distress, and Ward interviews them with compassion, noting correctly that “record numbers of civilian casualties” have been inflicted by “Israel’s frenzied bombardment”. Ward emphasizes the “heroic, extraordinary work” of Palestinian journalists who’ve been covering what’s been happening in Gaza over the last two months, accurately noting that these reporters have been getting killed at an unprecedented rate in this onslaught.
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So it’s an objectively good thing that this segment was made and that Ward and her crew did the work that they did. But because it’s CNN, there was also a lot of narrative distortion thrown on what people were shown which happens to benefit the information interests of the US empire.
Ward rightly stresses the fact that the hospital she and her crew visited is “not a microcosm” of the conditions of healthcare facilities in the rest of Gaza because it’s so new and has been supplied by the UAE, noting that other hospitals in Gaza are barely functioning at all. What Ward does not say is that this problem is largely due to the fact that Israel has been systematically attacking hospitals in Gaza since October 7, rendering dozens of them nonfunctional.
In fact, in a CNN segment about the death and suffering that’s being caused by an Israeli military operation, Israel itself plays a surprisingly small role. By my count the word “Israel” or “Israeli” was only mentioned six times in the entire 14-minute segment, with long stretches going by where the death and destruction is discussed more as a passive occurrence like the weather, rather than as a deliberate act of mass-scale violence.
For example, as CNN is arriving at the hospital an Israeli bomb goes off nearby, which a doctor says happens “at least twenty times a day”. But the word “Israel” never comes up, even when discussing it after the fact — when wounded are brought in from the bombing that happened ten minutes earlier, Ward refers to it as “the strike”, not “the Israeli strike”.
We’ve been seeing this bizarre divorcing of attacker and attack all the time in Gaza since October 7, with news outlets sometimes going entire articles speaking only of “blasts” and “bombings” without ever actually mentioning the state who is inflicting them. This failure to attribute the source of an attack is not something you see in places like Ukraine, where the words “Russian” and “Putin” always punctuate the reporting like freckles, and it’s certainly not something you ever see in discussions about October 7. At no time will you ever go minutes watching a news report about the Hamas attack without hearing any mention of who the attackers were.
While mentions of Israel are scant in CNN’s reporting, mentions of the United States are missing altogether. At no time in the 14-minute segment does Ward or anyone else make any mention of the fact that this relentless massacre can only happen because it is being backed by the US, and that the Biden administration could end it at any time by withdrawing that backing. It’s downright surreal watching an American outlet talking about the US-sponsored destruction of Gaza as though it’s some separate foreign conflict that Washington is just passively witnessing.
Contrast this type of missing attribution with the ubiquitous use of the phrase “Iran-backed” in the mainstream western press when talking about non-US-aligned forces in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. The fact that the US is backing Israel’s assault on Gaza is much, much more well-evidenced than any claims of Iranian backing ever are, but you never see phrases like “US-backed airstrike” or “US-backed bombing campaign” in western reporting on Gaza.
Another distortion in the CNN clip comes when Ward talks about civilian casualties in Gaza.
“The death toll in Gaza as a result of Israel’s frenzied bombardment currently hovers at roughly 18,000,” Ward says. “If you do the math, extrapolating as the UN says that two-thirds of the casualties are civilians, that is about 11,800 civilians who have been killed in just over two months.”
This of course incorrectly assumes that all the men being killed in Gaza are Hamas fighters. Ward’s segment is full of footage that shows her surrounded by men who are plainly noncombatants, and if they’re killing women and children in Gaza then they’re also necessarily killing a lot of civilian men. Pointing out the number of women and children being killed in this operation is useful because it shows the indiscriminate nature of the killing, but this number should never be interpreted as the sum total of civilian deaths.
Watching the sloppy propagandistic spin of the western press reminds me of how grateful I am for all the real journalists in Gaza who’ve been doing the heavy lifting, even while their lives are in serious danger. Still, every little bit helps, and if the CNN segment opens one more pair of western eyes to what’s going on, I’ll take it.
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Comments
7 responses to “CNN Goes To Gaza”
How about live real time coverage?and blame the murderers as they should be blamed.of course the zionist owned msm will never be honest.
CNN would be like Zelenski and Lindsey Graham giving the newscast. The genocide R US people prevail.
Now CNN can say that they’ve “washed their hands” of the blood they are partially responsible for in misrepresenting the truth to ALWAYS favor Israel these past several decades. Ditto for EVERY mainstream “news” outlet on this planet! They ALL have blood on their hands for covering up a truth that the world must know!
Never does CNN say that its ISRAEL that kept CNN from getting into Gaza to do their jobs in the first place.
CNN is owned and controlled by Nazi Jews. It is Israel major global propaganda organ way more criminal than anything the German Nazis could dream of.
Jews displayed truly chilling callousness and disregard for the sanctity of human life encouraged by Western unconditional support to kill Palestinian children and babies . The mass murder of Palestinian women and children by Israeli Jews continues because the U.S., Europe and Russia – all have big leverages on the Netanyahu regime – turned blind eye to the Genocide. The sign of cowardice to stop the ongoing Palestinian holocaust by Jews is visible to everyone.
According to EuroMed, a Geneva-based Human Rights monitor, 25,612 Palestinians have been killed, including 10,091 children. The group added previously that 92 percent of those killed in the Israeli air and artillery attacks were civilians. However, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, since October 07, more than 20,000 innocent and unarmed Palestinian civilians, about 70% of whom are reported to be women and children have been murdered, and over 54,000 have been injured.
The EuroMed report adds that 89 journalists have been killed, and over 50,000 Palestinians were injured. More than 1.85 million Palestinians who have been forcibly displaced and a combined 236,400 homes that have been either completely or partially destroyed.
This follows reports that have surfaced of Israel using so-called dumb bombs, which are typically less precise and kill larger numbers of civilians, especially in densely populated areas like Gaza.
A Palestinian child/baby is dying every ten minutes, slowly and agonizingly beneath the rubble of what used to be her home, hardly matters to Western politicians/US Congressmen and their Zionist media. The barbaric and annihilatory evil of the Nazis, that had existed allegedly only between in 1933 and 1945 pale in comparison to the Zionist-Israeli evil that exists today. The Nazis never bombed refugee camps, schools and hospitals full of Jewish children. Jews are enjoying it every day, murdering Palestinian children en masse. We all know, One million Jews are not worth a Palestinian baby fingernail. Jews pose the greatest danger to world peace and Humanity itself.
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“The Nazis never bombed refugee camps, schools and hospitals full of Jewish children. Jews are enjoying it every day, murdering Palestinian children en masse. We all know, One million Jews are not worth a Palestinian baby fingernail. Jews pose the greatest danger to world peace and Humanity itself.”
A sect of Jews incorporated into the WASP imperia£ megalomania do NOT constitute Jews.
That sect (under Rotschild, Weismann and crew) were inducted to provide a ‘Jewish’ front as a wedge into the Semitic peoples of the region to recreate the crusader states demolished by the unity of the Semitic Jews, Arabs and Christians who expelled these feudal war£ord global pi££age idiots under Saladin’s generalship nearly a millennium earlier.
Claiming the Zionist sect represents ‘the Jews’ sings in pefect pitch to the WA$P supremacist tune.
You mistake the $ta£KKKing horse for the hunters sponsoring the mercenary $£aught€r.
Prometheus, you sound like a philosopher with highly developed plagiarism skill. Try to be simple. It is good for you cognition.