Consortium News: 13-11-2024,
For the small segment of U.S. citizens looking beyond the mainstream media, Lawrence Davidson says the discrepancy between popular perceptions and evidentiary reality is relatively easy to spot.
March from the White House to The Washington Post to mark a year of genocide, Oct. 5. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC)
By Lawrence Davidson
TothePointAnalysis.com
In early October 2024, Professor Joseph Massad of Columbia University gave an interview to the online news site Electronic Intifada.
In it he said that there is a “huge gap” between the academic (evidence-based) understanding of aspects of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict (such as the Jewish supremacist nature of Israeli society and its resulting apartheid policies) and the mainstream media assumptions about (a “democratic” and “progressive”) Israel.
The latter define the popular and official reporting about that country and its Zionist ideology. Massad’s observation describes a problem that distorts more than just views of Israel.
The United States has a popular and official perception, again promoted by mainstream media, of itself and the world encapsulated by catch words such as freedom, capitalism, progress, individualism, morality etc.
Other countries develop their own fanciful self-images. However, in the case of the U.S. and Israel, the two images have merged in the storyline delivered to U.S. citizens by the mass media for at least the last hundred years.