On June 1^st, 2025, The Washington Post reported that Israeli forces had opened fire on Palestinians gathering for humanitarian aid in southern Gaza, citing the Palestinian Health Ministry in the enclave and eyewitnesses. 

The original headline attributed the deaths of 31 Palestinians directly to Israeli fire, drew significant public attention, garnering over 2.4 million views on X.

Two days later, the daily issued a rare correction. It acknowledged that the article “did not meet Post fairness standards.” The post on X also stated that the newspaper did not give “proper weight to Israel’s denial”. 

The revised version emphasised the Israeli military’s claim that only “warning shots” were fired near the aid distribution site in Rafah, and reduced the death toll to 27, citing unnamed “health officials.” It concluded there was no clear consensus on who was ‘responsible for the shootings’ in reality. 

The updated post on X drew even more attention than the original, reaching 4.8 million views. The retraction sparked widespread backlash online, with users in the comments accusing the outlet of walking back accountability under pressure.

“The original headline (of The Post) stated very clearly that it was according to the Health Ministry in Gaza and what the correction is saying is that The Post did not verify this,” Professor Gretchen King of Multimedia Journalism and Communication at the Lebanese American University (LAU) tells TRT World. 

“The Post has no problem reporting facts according to the Israeli military… Palestinians must always, by Western media, be fact-checked, and that is an editorial decision,” she notes.

In that light, the correction reveals a broader editorial pattern in which narratives are carefully managed and accountability is selectively denied.

The semantics of Western coverage

Commenting on the editorial implications of the correction, Professor King brings up the “double standards” in sourcing.

“These kinds of corrections do not serve transparency at all,” Professor King says.. “If anything, they (corrections) serve to expose the biases operating in Western newsrooms. And it is not damage control concerning public backlash, it is damage control concerning Zionist backlash.”

The rectification, compared to reporting other global crises, reflects a reluctance on the part of Western media to directly attribute responsibility to Israel. 

It highlights a stark disparity in tone and attribution. Headlines covering Russian strikes on Ukraine or crisis in Sudan are direct. 

The recent ‘‘Baby among 5 dead as Putin unleashes strikes on Ukraine hours after revenge vow to ‘show middle finger to world’’ by The Sun, or ‘‘Paramilitary group attacks an open market in Sudan, killing 54 people and wounding at least 158’’ by CNN present only some of the recent examples of usual practice for the coverage of humanitarian crises. 

By contrast, coverage of Israeli military aggression is often passive and vague in terminology. 

Headlines such as “Hind Rajab, 6, found dead in Gaza days after phone calls for help” (BBC) or “Trump-backed Gaza aid sites temporarily close after dozens killed in shootings” (USA Today) obscure the agency, leaving it for the reader to infer who was responsible.

Professor King explains such editorial choice reflects a deliberate form of narrative control.

“Passive framing for Israeli military actions is meant to humanise their actions… There’s no doer, there’s no actor,” she says. “That humanises the Israeli military because they’re never accused of war crimes or barbaric violence against unarmed civilians.”

King further adds that this passive framing reflects institutional norms embedded deep within newsroom routines.

“These are the kind of editorial policies that we can see in the copy style guides that are used for copyediting… those practices that we documented… are worsened today by the kind of complicity in genocide that we see by Western media,” she says.

Omissions and euphemisms

Even journalists within mainstream outlets have pushed back against what they see as double standards as well. 

In 2023, the BBC faced internal criticism from its own journalists in a letter for what they describe as unbalanced coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict, prioritising the portrayal of Israeli victims over Palestinians. 

In a 2,300-word letter to Al Jazeera, eight UK-based BBC journalists accused the broadcaster of applying a “double standard” in its treatment of civilian casualties.

They pointed out that emotive terms such as “massacre” and “atrocity” were “reserved only for Hamas,” while Israel’s bombardments were consistently framed as “self-defence,” with coverage required to “begin with the Hamas-led attack”.

The pattern extends beyond online reporting to broadcast television. A 2024 report by the Centre for Media Monitoring analysed 176,627 one-minute clips from 13 major TV channels, revealing a stark imbalance in how Israeli and Palestinian casualties were portrayed.

According to the findings, two out of every three emotive terms were used to describe Israeli deaths, while only one in ten were applied to Palestinian casualties.

The cautious framing done by The Washington Post is not incidental, but rather shaped by a mix of institutional factors: political sensitivities around Israel in US media, fear of accusations of bias or antisemitism, the influence of lobbying groups, and long-standing editorial policies aligned with Israeli messaging. 

This extends to the repetition of unchallenged political talking points. 

“The phrase ‘Israel has the right to defend itself’… first came out after the massacre of refugees in Sabra and Shatila in 1982,” Professor King says. “Since then… the Western media has reported that Israel has a right to defend itself, which is absolutely not true. The International Court of Justice… declared in 2004… that Israel absolutely cannot claim a right to defend itself.”

Post’s corrigendum echoed a widely shared satirical headline published by The Onion two years earlier: “New York Times Issues Apology for Reporting Palestinian Deaths.” Two years later, the parody now appears strikingly prescient. 

In the end, what remains is not just an imbalance in language, but a distortion in public understanding through a war of words.