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You nailed one of my least favourite trends in the Israel/Palestine discourse. I've personally flirted with the Zionist conspiracy bandwagon myself but even in my Joo-poasting arc, I could not read any article from "Jewish" mainstream media and come off thinking the IDF are the good guys. The examples they usually cite of this supposed pro-Israeli bias are occasional word choice hedges (“clashes,” “alleged strikes,” contextualising rocket fire as “response to…”) or instructing reporters to avoid terms like “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing”. But to me, that feels less like propaganda and more like the cautious house style of an establishment outlet that doesn't swallow the full activist catechism. The tone is still predominantly grim Palestinian suffering, orphaned children, power imbalance and skepticism of Israeli explanations for strikes. So is the real charge that these papers are not maximally pro-Palestine and anti-Israel enough? On the other side of the spectrum, pro-Israelis believe that progressive media is inherently biased against "apartheid" Israel and won't take everything their government says at face value, while purchasing the "Hamas narrative" with far less scrutiny.
Tbf a good part of the this cause is also just illiteracy. People can read in the sense of "X does Y" but actually understanding anything beyond that can be difficult for many. Consider the reaction to the Economist's obituary for the Ayatollah.. Just a whole lot of idiots who if not explicitly told "The Ayatollah is bad, the Ayatollah is bad" over and over again are unable to comprehend that you're actually criticizing him because they're too stupid to look past the most literal of readings.
So with the "Jewish media" if you don't explicitly say "Israel bad is evil kill millions of children" then you're basically pro Israel to many of the complainers.
Yeah I don't miss leaving X at all. That title comes across as a withering backhanded slap at a tyrant's delusions of divine grandeur, I literally can't read any adulation there. Hot takes and one-note emotionally charged short-form communication have killed people's reading comprehension like tiktok has killed the youth's attention spans. This is why I abandoned my own joo-poasting, took me too long to realise I was insulting my own intelligence.
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The thing is that journalists and others in the media either know that illiteracy of this type is incredibly common among the audience of their articles and even moreso among the audience of their headlines, or they have the intelligence and knowledge required to know. So when there's significant misunderstanding by the audience of stuff like this, it speaks to either malice, malicious ignorance, or incompetence that's advanced enough to be indistinguishable from malice.
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