• idiomaddict@feddit.de
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    5 months ago

    The article included baseless claims such as capturing soldiers in Jabaliya, which the IDF categorically denied.

    This is a sentence from the article. If they were neutral towards the subject, they might have written it like this:

    controversy surrounded the article, which described the IDF capturing soldiers in Jabaliya, something the Israeli government has denied.

    If they were active supporters, it might have sounded like this:

    his insightful journalistic work exposed the IDF’s capture of soldiers in Jabaliya, which they continue to deny.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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      5 months ago

      Sorry… you’re saying because they say IDF instead of Israeli Government, this article is ridiculously biased and can’t be trusted?

      Because I see people here using IDF and Israel interchangeably all the time when discussing this war.

      • idiomaddict@feddit.de
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        5 months ago

        No, it’s the word choice in the sentence as a whole. “Baseless claims” and “categorically denied” make it seem like the article was nonsense. “Controversy” acknowledges that there are different accounts of what happened, but doesn’t pick a side and “denied” feels like the most neutral choice to me, but I’m a layperson and there are entire classes in journalism programs dedicated to neutral phrasing. Calling the article “insightful journalism” is obviously biased and saying “continues to deny” sounds even more supportive of the journalist’s claims, because it implies that people are continuously asking Israel about it, which further implies that multiple people are unsatisfied with Israel’s account of the events.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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          5 months ago

          I don’t mean this in any sort of insulting way, but I think you’ve put far more analysis into this than the person who was writing on a deadline did into writing it.

          Did the author have a bias? Quite possibly. But I think your implication that these were conscious choices is going a bit too far.

          • idiomaddict@feddit.de
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            5 months ago

            I have no idea if they decided to write the article in a biased way, but I don’t know if that matters. The people reading it still associate the article with “baseless claims,” which colors their view.

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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              5 months ago

              Fair enough. I guess up to now, it seemed to me like people were implying that this was a conscious bias.