How Western Media Sanitises And Sells The Crimes of Empire

Yesterday The Associated Press said it was going to start using words which accurately reflect reality.

The news agency announced, after much deliberation and a newsroom vote, that it was going to start referring to Israel’s ground offensive into Lebanon as an invasion.

The announcement went into a long and convoluted explanation as to why this was the appropriate terminology, seemingly to head off any accusations that using words to mean what words mean is antisemitism.

Other media outlets have yet to follow suit, all still going with the less evocative “incursion,” “ground offensive” or simply saying that Israeli troops are “taking control” of southern Lebanon without contextualising it as an invasion.

How the western media provides rhetorical and linguistic cover for Israel, and how its defenestrated description of Israeli actions so wildly differs from the active language used to described Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for example, hardly needs an explanation at this point.

But it remains a valuable insight into how supposedly objective western journalists curate their language and select their words to serve empire.

Nearly a month after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, the Associated Press has broken ranks, I suspect, because it has simply became untenable to dance around manifest realities.

Others may or may not catch up, but for now, most western media consumers are reading and hearing about Israeli “incursions,” “offensives” and “campaigns,” language which remains firmly in the service of empire.

The Guardian prefers “ground campaign” to invasion

Sometimes they don’t even use these words. A recent BBC story written by its correspondent in Jerusalem, Seb Usher, was headlined “Israel says it will take control of large buffer zone in southern Lebanon” and avoided the mention of an incursion or offensive altogether, let alone an invasion.

Also worthy of note is that Israel’s incursion, offensive or invasion is always into “southern” Lebanon, as if this is somehow not part of the overall entity of Lebanon. Again, a tactical choice intended to convey limit. Contrast this with how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has always been described: as an invasion of Ukraine. And more often than not as “Russia’s full-scale illegal invasion of Ukraine.” It’s has never been “Russia’s incursion into eastern Ukraine.”

But it’s not just the way the media refers to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. How western media characterises why Israel is invading Lebanon is wildly inaccurate too. Which is to say it’s propaganda.

For example, take the same BBC story. It says “the latest escalation began after Iranian-backed Hezbollah fired rockets into northern Israel in retaliation for the killing of Iran's supreme leader and near-daily strikes on Hezbollah despite the November 2024 ceasefire.”

An average reader would come away from reading this paragraph assuming Hezbollah broke the ceasefire by firing rockets. The “near-daily strikes” is an attempt to balance the sentence with a kernel of truth but linguistically makes no sense. How can the “latest escalation” begin after “near-daily strikes?” The implication is those strikes undertaken by Israel (which isn’t mentioned by name) weren’t an escalation. No context is provided about those strikes. (Note also that they are not attacks, or bombings, which imply intent and damage, but “strikes,” a softer, more clinical term implying precision.)

Sorry to get deep in the weeds on this, but it’s important to break down how the propaganda works.

Many go further and attempt to generate a false equivalence between the two by saying “both sides have accused each other of violations of the truce,” a formulation seen here in this Reuters story and this BBC story.

The reality? The reality is that the IDF has taken credit for more than 250 attacks in Lebanon since the November 2024 ceasefire. They’ve boasted of bombings, commando raids and the demolition of villages. Israel bombed Beirut, the capital city, on numerous occasions during the supposed ceasefire. They haven’t hidden their ceasefire breaches. They’ve proudly declared them! You can literally count them up on the Israel-Hezbollah conflict Wikipedia page, with all these attacks fully sourced back to Israeli media or IDF press releases.

The deception is stunning.

Western journalists obviously know the truth, but they, or their editors, have taken a deliberate decision to contort context to present Hezbollah as either the aggressor or at least an equal party to the violations. Violations which, when they are committed by Israel, are hardly reported by western media. And when they are reported, they’re reported not as ceasefire breaches, but as legitimate attacks on “Hezbollah targets.” But the moment Hezbollah fought back was, of course, the moment the ceasefire was officially over.

Because in the empire-brained logic of western journalists, only one side is bound by a ceasefire.

And it’s not our side.

To empire and its proxies, ceasefires do not apply.

Imagine a ceasefire between Iran and Israel-US is agreed. Iran proceeds to launch missiles at Israel on an almost-daily basis. The first missile launched would be headline news the world over and declared a breach of the ceasefire. But Israel can breach a ceasefire almost every day for 18 months straight with zero western condemnation and with the fantasy presented to the western public that the ceasefire is holding.

The same is happening in Gaza, where Israeli attacks are said to only ever be "testing the fragile ceasefire,” not breaching it.

These are deliberate misrepresentations on behalf of Israel and of empire.

Another little linguistic trick is the use of the word “backed.” A favourite recently, as in the above BBC story, is “Iran-backed Hezbollah.”

How does this one work?

It’s primary value is its subtlety. It conceals a distortion within a truth. Hezbollah is backed by Iran. But the standards on this kind of descriptor are never universal. We never hear about the NATO-backed Ukrainian army. Or the US-backed IDF.

Why? Because “X-backed” implies a nefarious network, a control centre, and a proxy arm. It removes both context and agency from the proxy, in this case Hezbollah, and suggests dishonesty or treachery.

It is a much-employed and vital propaganda term for these reasons, and it fits perfectly with western security state propaganda and foreign policy talking points about Iran as the “primary sponsor of terror” in the world.

A similar dynamic was at work with the de-legitimising “Hamas-run.” The phrase built on a pre-established impression of the group created by two decades of propaganda and was intended to seed doubt in the western mind about the truthfulness of their statements, especially in relation to the number of dead. A number we now know was in fact not exaggerated, but conservative. It’s despicable, a form of genocide-denial.

Another gem I spotted this morning was in The Guardian.

Bombs are like rain now. They just start falling. Falling on “the regime.” A selectively applied, de-legitimising descriptor I’ve broken down before.

Despite its progressive affectations, The Guardian has been one of the worst offenders, manufacturing consent for war with soft regime change propaganda dressed up as pro-social concern.

There was a nonsense story three weeks before the US-Israeli attack about the dangers of Iran’s old oil tankers and their potential to leak oil and cause a disaster. There was no context about why these tankers are old, no explanation that US-western sanctions effectively prevent Iran from buying modern oil tankers. Two weeks before the attack began they wrote a story about the children of Iran’s leaders studying in the west, presenting it as a symbol of the leadership’s hypocrisy. The reality? More than 110,000 young Iranians are currently studying in the west! The story was blatant imperial propaganda and entirely premised on ignorance about the ideology of Iran’s leaders (some of whom have PhDs from western universities), the ability of young Iranians to study outside Iran and conditions in Iran itself.

These stories didn’t appear in the weeks before the attack by sheer coincidence. They were intended, as I’ve written before, to soften progressives up for an illegal war.

Then there’s the way western journalists abandon any pretence of objectivity when presented with competing narratives that their brains, sculpted by empire, can’t process.

This was on show earlier this week when Shelagh Fogarty of LBC Radio in the UK interviewed Mohammad Marandi, a Tehran University professor and former advisor to Iran’s nuclear negotiation team. She repeated, with smug arrogance, every imperial-Zionist talking point as if it was the unadulterated truth, and struggled to process some basic facts about the nature of the war. For example, she asked Marandi why Mojtaba Khamenei, the new leader of Iran, hasn’t been seen yet because “leaders need to be visible during war.” She contrasted it with “how I see the president of the United States on television every day, he goes to play golf, he socialises, he’s highly protected, so why haven’t we seen the new leader of Iran?” She really thought she’d hit upon a gotcha moment. It had to be pointed out to her that Mojtaba Khamenei’s father, wife and daughter were just assassinated and Mojtaba is being protected because the US-Israeli regimes want to assassinate him too.

Can you imagine Fogarty asking an incredulous question about JD Vance’s lack of visibility if Iranian jets were flying over Washington DC every hour and had just assassinated Trump, his family and numerous senior American politicians?

The absurdity of a mind on empire is utterly breathtaking.

The moral superiority of western journalists is grotesque.

And their complicitly in sanitising and selling the sins of empire is criminal.

(If you appreciate my work please consider buying me a coffee. You can also subscribe for free, upgrade or become a paying subscriber below)