It’s amazing how creative these editors get when they need to publicly exonerate Israel and its western allies of their crimes.
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
“Gaza’s Deadly Aid Deliveries,” the title blares.
If you were among the majority of people who only skim the headline without reading the rest of the article, you would have no idea that Israel has spent the last few days massacring starving civilians at aid sites and lying about it. You would also have no idea that it is Israel who’s been starving them in the first place.

The headline is written in such a passive, amorphous way that it sounds like the aid deliveries themselves are deadly. Like the bags of flour are picking up assault rifles and firing on desperate Palestinians queuing for food or something.
The sub-headline is no better: “Israel’s troops have repeatedly shot near food distribution sites.”
Oh? They’ve shot “near” food distribution sites, have they? Could their discharging their weapons in close proximity to the aid sites possibly have something to do with the aforementioned deadliness of the aid deliveries?
Are we the readers supposed to connect these two pieces of information for ourselves, or are we meant to view them as two separate data points which may or may not have anything to with one another?
The article itself makes it clear that Israel has admitted that IDF troops fired their weapons “near” people waiting for aid after they failed to respond to “warning shots”, so you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out what happened here.
But in mainstream publications the headlines are written by editors, not by the journalists who write the articles, so they get to frame the story in whatever way suits their propaganda agenda for the majority who never read past the headline.

We saw another amazingly manipulative New York Times headline last month, “Israeli Soldiers Fire in Air to Disperse Western Diplomats in West Bank,” about the IDF firing “warning shots” at a delegation of foreign officials attempting to visit Jenin.
This was a story which provoked outcry and condemnation throughout the western world, but look at the lengths The New York Times editor went to in order to frame the IDF’s actions in the most innocent way possible. They were firing into the air.
They were firing “to disperse western diplomats”— like that’s a thing. Like diplomats are crows on a cornfield or something. Oh yeah, ya know ya get too many diplomats flockin’ around and ya gotta fire a few rounds to disperse ’em. Just normal stuff.
It’s amazing how creative these freaks get when they need to publicly exonerate Israel and its western allies of their crimes.
The IDF commits a war crime and suddenly these stuffy mass media editors who’ve never created any art in their lives transform into poets, bending and twisting the English language to come up with lines that read more like Zen koans than reporting on an important news event.
It’s impossible to have too much disdain for these people.
Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes. For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.
This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com.au and re-published with permission.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
IMHO the NYT borders on being a subversive rag! Great job telling it such as reality finds it.
There are no excuses for Americans to support genocide by any country, organization or person.
It’s time for blue caps with the message Make American Respectable NOW!
Fussing over headlines, constrained by their limited space, and ignoring the content of articles is distortion. I get the print edition of The NY Times and I clip all articles on the Gaza war into a now overflowing file and have done so from the outset. The Times has hammered the Israeli atrocities just about daily, so your lightweight skimming is very wrong.
She is addressing the problem of those readers who only read the headlines and there are those, therefore the accuracy of a headline is of utmost importance and can easily be written to deflect blame.
Spot on!
Typically hysterical article by Caity.
She interprets headlines to suit her position — i.e. the NYT is complicit in genocide.
Has she ever worked in a newsroom and written headlines? I had 50 years and wrote thousands.
The NYT’s are far from the worst — and the two examples quoted were not unreasonable unless you have a possibly bitter bias against the masthead.
In other words, “I’ve been part of the narrative management business for decades. The Times is one of our most important instruments. What’s the issue?”
And yours? Typical testicular bluster.
With logical fallacies deployed for our edification. Like argument by authority. Asserting expertise is enough, so actually refuting anything specific is unnecessary. Plus the use of deflection and whataboutism. Finishing with a flourish, good old ad hominem. Someone not meeting with your approval defined away as “hysterical” and “bitter.” Especially effective when the target is female.
Nothing to do with gender.
Irrelevant whether Caity meets my “approval”.
I have often found her writing veers toward the hysterical.
This is an especially fantastic article, Caity … truly exceptional.
The witty Ig Nobels, which began in the Journal of Irreproducible Results, are given out for stupid science, whether real or done just for the, uh, “award.” See the full Wiki list.
Can’t something similar be done for the NYT? Let’s nominate real, pretzel logic headers or create more truthful ones of our own, albeit while keeping a darkly humorous twist.
I, the agnostic, dyslexic, insomniac, who lies awake at night wondering if Dog (ma) really exists, has to wonder.
Do the idiot miscreants of the NYT mentality actually believe their own bullshit or are they twisted failed comedians not worthy of O2?
Despite having stolen the name, 1948 “Israel” is NOT a contemporary version of Biblical Israel!
Does spelling matter? Then consider that Israelis are not Israelites! Accept that fact and the Mideast makes sense.
This is why I no longer subscribe to the NYT.
I refuse to try to untangle their duplicitous headlines,
only to be insulted by the cynical reporting.
I was once a big fan of the NYT. They had, and still do, have first rate reporters. But I lost faith during the lead up to the Iraq war when Judith Miller and others on the staff fanatically beat the war drums, shamelessly shilling for the Pentagon and Bush administration.
Since then, I’ve been keenly aware of, and disgusted over their fanatical and blatant support for Israel – which has actually harmed both the US and Israel, their intended benefactor.
I once felt the same way. In my Pollyanna naivete of the early 2000’s, I assumed Judith Miller was an anomaly. Then in 2016, during the same week, every NYT columnist wrote articles denigrating Bernie Sanders. Several using the same words to slight. Gail Collins was the least offensive, almost like she didn’t believe what she was writing. Charles Blow was the most venomous. Why, I couldn’t tell. The following week, NPR, forced to cover Sanders because of his mass rallies, did a dismissive segment on him using the exact same attack words. I canceled my subscription the NetanYahu Times that week, and never donated to NPR again.
Throughout its history, the NYT has been on the wrong side of every major event till the position became untenable. Then it trotted out its best vocabulary and grammar to explain why it wasn’t. Judith Miller WAS NOT AN ANOMALY.
Omer El Akkad writes in his sad and poetic book of the same name, “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.”
The NYT is not there yet, but soon they too “will always have been against this,” and they will use their most powerful words to tell you so. Spit on their lies.