In other news: water is wet.
But water isn’t wet 😛
Potato potahto.
In other news, water makes me wet.
Shocker, never noticed /s
Can anyone explain to me why? Why Israel gets so much mainstream media attention? Israel is practically irrelevant to Australia’s future.
They get a lot of attention because they’re a majority (in terms of political power, if not numbers) white nation that Australia does quite a lot of trade with, who are currently committing genocide.
Australia could stop our arms trade with them, but that would make America mad. And it would also make the pro-Israel lobby in Australia mad. It’s not really clear to me why we care what the pro-Israel lobby says; they’re a vanishingly small number. But for whatever reason, politicians on both sides do listen to them.
I don’t like to reduce explainations to -isms but I cannot think of a better reason. They just think brown people/Muslims are inferior and doesn’t upset them at the injustice of killing them compared to the deaths of white/Christian/Jew.
It’s good to be hesitant about -isms and racism doesn’t explain the whole story (imperialism has economic and therefore political implications, the Zionist Regime has played an important imperial role for the US and its allies in the region) but it’s absolutely an aspect at play.
Growing up, I only really remember SBS talking about the Middle East bombings most years unless something truly exceptional happened. Not to trivialise it in any way, but when the Ukraine invasion happened, the reactions of a lot of Australians around me really showed that wars are far more important when White peoples are involved, despite being on the other side of the world, further away. Barely a peep about New Caledonia or West Papua. And to be fair, when I say “racism” I’m also talking about a casual environment of it, not any conscious discrimination. Most of Colonial Australia has a real and significant social link to Europe and the US, we see it as more relevant to our own situation than South East Asian countries, for example.
But, as you mentioned, there’s also the Islamophobia and overt racism. There’s absolutely an assumption or framing that this is a religious conflict and the evil Muslims want to kill those in the Zionist Regime simply because of “uncivilized” religious differences.
The most common religion in Australia is Christianity.
As a result there’s a prevailing assumption that Israel are the good guys because they live in the holy land.
That’s it, really.
Rightly or wrongly, it has become a culture war issue where support of Israel is associated with centre to right positions whilst opposition is associated with left positions (not saying it has to be either/or, that’s just how it’s commonly framed). A lot of Australia’s media ecosystem is either centre or right leaning, which means they will inevitably push the Israeli narrative harder. Additionally, the pro-Israel lobby is super active and well financed and rabidly goes after any journalist or publication that doesn’t adhere to this default framing of current events. In places like the ABC and the BBC, I think both factors influence the reporting which is why you see a subtle bias despite those organisations claiming a position of balance.
happy cake day
Meet the founder of NewsCord: The AI platform holding Western media bias to account
Shocked by the coverage of Gaza in the mainstream Western media, Nima set aside time from his full-time corporate job to create NewsCord, a generative AI platform that compares and contrasts said coverage.
https://www.newarab.com/features/newcord-ai-platform-holding-western-media-bias-account
Guy makes a company to find what he was looking for, and with AI too? Lemmy users upvoting AI? Never did I think it was possible! 🤣
This has been really obvious over the last few weeks since they started firing missiles at Iran.
It’s pretty gross honestly.
Doesn’t Australia have its own news networks?
ABC is the public broadcaster. Nothing to do with the Amercian one.
Ah, that makes sense. I forgot for a moment that y’all share an initial with us
No problem. We’re used to Americans not knowing anything about us.
Like the Australian Broadcasting Corporation?
Sorry boss. Just gonna tell you straight - this is one of the most head-up-ass comments I’ve read in a while.
